Angela was still curled in a corner of the bunk. “I’ve just seen flares,” I said.
It took her a sleepy moment to understand. “Wildtrack? ”
“I don’t know.” I tried not to sound hopeful, but the look on Angela’s face told me I’d failed.
She struggled into her oilskins and came up to the cockpit. She closed the hatch to keep the seas from swamping the cabin, then hooked her lifeline to a jackstay and I saw her shudder at the height of the great green swell that was running down on us. Sycorax soared her way up the slopes and slalomed down again. At each crest I stared ahead, but saw no more flares.
I began to think I had hallucinated. I stood in the scuppers, holding on to the port mizzen shrouds, and searched the broken sea. Nothing.
The wind was slowing and veering. I was tempted to let go a reef in the mainsail, but, just as I was plucking up the energy to make the effort, Angela shouted.
“Nick!” Her voice was snatched by a wind gust. “Nick!” I looked where she was pointing. For a second I saw nothing but the jumbles of foam on the waves’ glassy flanks, then, a half-mile off, I saw the yacht.
A yacht. It had to be Wildtrack.
But not the Wildtrack we both remembered; not the great and gleaming rich man’s toy, so sleek and proud and towering. Instead we saw a dismasted yacht, half-swamped, with warps cascading from decks awash with water. She rolled to each sea like a waterlogged cask. We had arrived, and we had failed, for she was nothing but an abandoned hulk. For a second I dared to hope that this wreck was of some other dismasted yacht, but then a heave of swell mo-mentarily bared the hull’s flank and I saw the distinctive bold blue flash. It was Wildtrack. We had sailed over seventeen hundred nautical miles and by a miracle we had found her, and by a cruel fate we had found her too late.
I stepped down into Sycorax’s cockpit and unpegged the tiller.
“Nick! Nick!” Angela’s voice held a new urgency and I saw, in Wildtrack’s aft cockpit, a moving splash of orange. At first I thought it was a seat cushion, or some other flotsam, then I saw it was a man in oilskins. Alive. It had to be Bannister, and he was alive, unless the sea just stirred a corpse.
I scrambled down to the cabin sole. I threatened the engine with death if it did not start and cursed that I had no self-starter. I staggered as the boat pitched, swung the handle, and to my amazement the cold engine banged straight into life. I bolted the companionway steps back over the motor compartment and climbed to the cockpit. Wildtrack had vanished in a wave valley, but as I kicked the motor into gear I saw her bows sluggishly rise on a wind-fretted ridge.
I turned head to wind, arrowing into the seas, and let the engine push us. Our sails banged like guns. Angela was staring, her mouth open. I did not want to know what she was thinking, or what hopes, hers or mine, might be on the verge of tragedy.
The wind slewed viciously, heeling and thrusting us. We pitched on a crest and the motor raced like a banshee before the stern sank underwater again. But as we were on the wavecrest I saw that the orange figure in Wildtrack’s stern was alive, for he waved, then fell back. He was either hurt or so tired that he could hardly shift himself.
“It’s going to be bloody hard to fetch him off!” I shouted at Angela.
She hardly needed me to explain the difficulties. Going alongside a flooded boat in a high sea and in a shifting wind would be a piece of seamanship that needed a Jimmy Nicholls or a lifeboat’s coxswain.
Worse, if Anthony Bannister was injured, he would not be able to help himself which meant that one of us would have to board Wildtrack to give him aid. It would have to be me, and I did not want to do it, but it was one of those moments when it was really best not to think too deeply about the advantages of prudence over Goddamned bloody stupidity. “You’re going to have to steer the boat!” I called to Angela. “You’ll have to lay us alongside, then sheer off once I’m aboard Wildtrack, understand? I don’t want that hulk stoving us in!”
She nodded. She was staring at the figure in the hull-down Wildtrack. His hood was up and his collar buttoned across his mouth.
“When I’ve got him,” I went on, “you’re going to have to come alongside again!” Christ alone knew how. She’d become a good sailor, but this manoeuvre was like asking a passenger to land a jumbo.
I left her on the tiller while I tied all the fenders I’d taken from Bannister’s boathouse on to Sycorax’s guardrail stanchions. I hung the fenders more in hope than with any expectation that they would save my boat. Wildtrack and Sycorax would be pitching as they met and I feared I would crash my bows down on her deck or, worse, rip off my rudder and propellor with the force of the collision. I was scared of Wildtrack. She was a floating battering ram that could disable us or even crush in our bilges.
I let the mainsail fall and roughly lashed gaff and sail to the boom which I then secured to the gallows. I did not want Angela distracted by hammering sails as she tried to manoeuvre the boat. I stowed the staysail and mizzen, but left the storm jib sheeted taut to stiffen Sycorax and to give some leverage to the bows at the moment when Angela needed to sheer away. I took the tiller. “Are you hooked on?”
She showed me her lifeline. I accelerated. We were close enough to Wildtrack now to share the same valleys of sea. I wanted to circle the crippled boat and approach from the lee so that the wind would be pushing Sycorax away from that treacherous hull once I was aboard her. In choosing that course I risked Wildtrack’s trailing ropes tangling in Sycorax’s propellor, and I told a worried Angela that, once I was aboard, she was to put the motor in neutral and let the storm jib carry her clear of the warps. “Let the sheet run a bit, OK?” It was clearly not OK. “Should I go across to him?” Angela shouted.
I’d thought of that, but I knew she did not have the physical strength to lift a helpless man. And Bannister was helpless. He was hardly moving except to follow our progress with his orange-hooded face. There was also another reason for me to go; if anything went wrong then Angela would be left on the safer of the two boats. I explained that I would clear the trailing ropes once I was aboard Wildtrack so that she need not worry about fouling the propellor on her second approach. “But if you can’t get us off,” I shouted, “then stay close if you can! If you can’t, good luck! Go west! You’ll find trawlers on the Grand Banks. And don’t forget to feed Vicky!”
She gave me a frightened look. I grinned, trying to reassure her, then gunned the engine to spin Sycorax up into Wildtrack’s lee. I noticed that Wildtrack’s flooded hull gave us some small shelter. “Take the tiller! Remember, tiller hard over and motor into neutral as soon as I’m on her!”
Angela took the tiller and I staggered forward to Sycorax’s starboard shrouds. I unclipped my lifeline from the jackstay and coiled it into a pocket. I put my good left foot over the guardrail and held on for grim life as we rolled our gunwale under. We were six feet from the swamped boat, five feet, closing to three, two, and I put my right foot over the rail and was about to leap across the churning gap into Wildtrack’s flooded central cockpit when the sea heaved between the boats and Sycorax slewed away. I clung to the shroud with my left hand as the green water churned up my boots. “Closer!” I shouted, though I doubt if Angela heard me. She turned the tiller too far and we came surging back towards the other boat. The lurching movement had driven us far up Wildtrack’s hull; almost to her bows. In another second it would be too late to jump.