We pointed our bow a few degrees further north each day. The weather deteriorated with increasing rapidity as we left the tropic of Cancer. Two weeks out from the Bay of the Dead we gritted out teeth, screwed our courage to the sticking-place, and tacked due north. Eventually the clouds came together into a solid scudding overcast; the water went from blue to green to charcoal gray, the temperature dropped, waves got bigger, and the wind stiffened relentlessly. Sailing had become hard and frustrating.
As nights got longer, the weather heavier and every movement more difficult, we’d started communicating less and less. Like denizens of a hell slowly freezing over, we were aware of each other as fellow inmates enduring our sentences with nothing left to say. Anna taped a list of latitudes to a bulkhead, crossing off cities as we passed them far out to sea: Cabo San Lucas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle.
Tom’s terse emails and weather forecasts were my milestones. He warned of vicious northwest winds along the west coast and then buoyed my spirits by telling me how lucky we were to be a thousand miles from shore.
Seventy ft catamaran with professional delivery crew from South Africa, wrecked on Oregon coast. Found inverted, missing both anchors. Crew lost. Aren’t you glad I told you to get all that SEA ROOM? Best, Tom.
I cursed Shadow’s lack of a heater in the bone chilling cold and damp, but who thinks of something like that in Turkey? Hell, who thinks of sailing at all in the conditions we were in? The waves had grown into a continuous barrage of marbled slate mountains as cold fronts, spawned by massive low-pressure storms in the Gulf of Alaska, spiraled down from the north, each one packing a gale worse than the last.
Going below after a long watch and seeing San Francisco crossed off Anna’s list of cities caught my attention. “Whoa, we’re north of San Fran?”
“Yes, but a lot west.” Anna zipped up her heavy offshore gear and climbed above deck.
I increased the brightness on the chart plotter to confirm our location — a thousand miles due west of the Golden Gate. As if we were playing some demented computer game, this latest milestone kicked us up into the next level of difficulty.
Leaving the nav-station, I spotted an open bag of ground coffee spilled on the galley counter. “You don’t drink coffee! What happened?” I yelled through cupped mitts.
Anna left the helm. The wind vane self-steering was somehow holding against the blast. “Sorry about that.”
“But you don’t drink coffee?”
“No, I smell it. I stick my nose in the bag and I inhale.”
“Smell it?” I clung to the counter for support with one hand while sweeping the precious coffee back into the bag. “Well, if you need something to smell, I smell! I stink, in fact! It’s been two weeks since I took off the foulies.” We’d been forced by the cold, and even the need for padding in our violently shifting environment, to live full time in our offshore gear, harnesses, toques, mitts and Kiev winter coats.
“Blyad! I smell nothing, Jess. Maybe there is salt in the air, or rotting fabric, or even my own body odor but I am numb to it. I smell your coffee to keep from going crazy. To smell something, anything that isn’t the ocean or what it is doing to us.”
“Wow, I didn’t know…” The yacht slammed into a wave forcing me to drop the coffee in favor of a handhold. “Damn it!”
“And color! Haven’t you seen? There is no color! The ocean is colorless here. The sky is colorless. When there is enough light to see, all I see is black and white and shades of grey. It’s like living in a black and white war film. Grey sky, black sea, white waves.” With a drenched mitt, Anna yanked at her scarf, a bright orange polyester thing an Orange Revolutionary gave her in Kiev. “I look at my scarf just to see a color that doesn’t come from the sea.” She turned away from me, grabbed the companionway rails and looked up toward the cockpit. “I know it’s hard for you. I know you are being strong but you must be hurt by this too. I don’t blame you. I don’t even blame myself, but goddamn it, I want to hear again, the sound of a dog or a child or a bird, just once even… here it’s only water, waves… pain. Nothing else.” She climbed into the cockpit and slammed the companionway cover.
Subdued, I swept at the coffee on the counter. I inhaled its aroma. Sensory deprivation coupled with the North Pacific gales wore us down, tore at us, and immersed us in a world of constant stress, gnawing cold, and despair.
We’d become bombs about to detonate at the slightest provocation. Anna was spending her time buried in her cabin, wrapped in the spinnaker sail for extra warmth. She’d been there since midnight the night before. It was now 4:00 pm and getting dark. I was exhausted and cold and getting more and more irritated about not being relieved. Sure, she was depressed, who wouldn’t be under that stress? Hell, I was depressed, but I was physically fighting it; telling myself over and over that someone had to hold on and I didn’t have the luxury of falling apart.
A wave hit the bow, shoving it away from the wind just enough to backwind the sails. I lunged for the wheel, skidded and slammed a knee into something a lot more solid than the bones in that complex joint. I swore in pain, hammering a fist into the cockpit floor. I’d had enough. It was Anna’s turn on watch. I barreled into her cabin, grabbed fist fulls of the nylon spinnaker and tugged it out.
“You crazy?” Anna shouted, crashing to the floor.
“Don’t I wish, but getting damn close! I need to sleep sometime! You take the god damned helm, for a change. Take some responsibility for Christ’s sake. It’s not like I HAD to sail this boat to Canada.”
“Where then?” Anna kicked mounds of sailcloth into her cabin. “I can only go to Canada. You can land anywhere, be a tourist, be safe on land. For me, there is no place. Only the sea. I’m scared too. I’m terrified all the time, but I don’t say this to you. I don’t tell you I hate this, but I do! I don’t say I think we are going to die in this sea but I do.” A breaking wave broadsided the yacht and Anna crashed to the floor, one foot tangled in the spinnaker.
“Well, I didn’t have to do this! I could have left you in Kiev, in jail! Your dear Mama and Uncle Vlad would be happy. How about you? Would you have been happy?”
The yacht’s lurching and twisting was becoming increasingly violent.
“You could have not started writing to me on the Internet!”
“Actually, that was Sandy.” I sneered.
“You knew what was at stake. You didn’t have to invite me to Kiev. None of this would be happening now!”
“Sure, you could be a gangster’s trophy wife in Dubai.”
“My life would be safe then! I wouldn’t be facing death in the sea! I trusted you. I followed you because you never fell apart. Never! Nothing could stop you. Now look at where we are, the North Pacific Ocean… in winter. If this can stop you, it can… it will… oh god, it really will kill us! I can not see you losing it!”
Anna was right. What I thought didn’t matter — how I acted did.
Another wave exploded against the side of the yacht and canted our world forty-five degrees. Above deck, the wind vane wasn’t doing well on its own and Shadow was turning away from the wind. Taut sails broadsided by a strengthening gale made the tilt worse. Anna and I avalanched to the lower wall along with books, dishes, bilge water and garbage.
“Well shit! Someone’s gotta steer this thing.”
The conditions were beyond the wind vane now. Scrambling back to the cockpit, I disengaged it and hand steered back into a close haul. Anna followed me topside. I was convinced her attack on my lack of character wasn’t over and I cut her off as she inhaled for another tirade. “And, may I remind you that it was YOU who betrayed us to the syndicate. You knew what was at stake but, oh no, you had to do it your way! Your Mama, your way! You wiped out an important operation, got me fired and caused me nearly limitless expense. You are the reason we’re stuck in this shit-shitty mess!”