Reboot

In the middle of one very nice dream, after a couple of weeks on the water, I got hit in the head by a flying grapefruit. It woke me up. Everything that hadn’t been properly tied down was flying and crashing all over my cabin. It felt like driving a jeep over rough terrain or flying through very heavy turbulence. The shocks from the waves hitting the ship were pummeling. I realized that we were in the middle of a violent storm and I got dressed as quickly as I could and ran up. Not easy to do when you’re being tossed around like popcorn.

It was the darkest of nights, waves like mountains, heavy horizontal blinding rain that hurt your face. The wind made such a loud noise that I cupped my ears. The ship was heaving side to side. The Belgians were screaming and running around, Jacques stood still, looking up.

I had to hang on tight to a couple of ropes, but Jacques’ feet were nailed to the deck. I slowly made my way to him.

“What’s the problem, Jack?” I shouted, trying to be heard over the angry wind.

He explained, holding his cupped hands around his mouth so I could hear. “We need to fix that rigging.” He pointed up, I followed the finger. “The triatic stay is cut.”

“What? The rope?”

“It’s very dangerous,” he yelled, “we could sink, I’ll need your help.”

“OK, just tell me what you want,” I gasped over the noise. Every once in a while a large wave crashed over the deck. The wind whistled and screamed. There were lights on the boat and they lit up the deck and the sails, but beyond that we couldn’t see much of anything, which was probably a good thing because from the way we were rolling, I could tell the waves were gigantic and it would’ve scared the crap out of me. I had to focus on just one thing.

The triatic is the line that holds the foremast and the main mast together from mast top to mast top. In normal weather, it’s no big deal to fix, but during a storm, we have a weakened rig, something could break. Someone had to go up there, now, while the ship was being tossed around.

“I have to sit on a chair and you winch me up,” he shouted, eyes almost closed to protect them from the salt water thrown up by the heavy lashing wind. Jacques went to get the chair. During that time, I just tried to stay standing. When he came back out of the hold, he worked with the chair around the mast for a while and when he was done, he waved me over. “Just keep turning the winch until I’m all the way up ok?” he bellowed. I could hardly make out what he was saying. I looked up. The problem was that the top moved. A lot.

The wind slapped the ship with tremendous force and the waves slapped it back the other way.

I winched him up bit by bit. At the bottom of a wave, I’d put more energy into it. Jacques had told the twins to concentrate on pointing the ship into the waves. If we turned sideways, parallel to the waves, we would turn over.

The boat was going from forty-five degrees on one end to forty-five degrees on the other. The whiplash up there must’ve been ridiculous. But he worked through it.

His legs were wrapped around the mast as he worked on the stay. He had to tie both masts together. That meant fastening a steel line between them and twisting it tight using a turnbuckle. The turnbuckle is turned to adjust the tension in the stay. It took two hours to do a job that would take only fifteen minutes on a good day, and it actually seemed much longer than that. He only had a few seconds at each swing of the ship when he could let go of the mast and concentrate. The light from the swinging lamps touched him on the downbeat. The rest of the time he was invisible; hidden in the black sky.

He secured the line. I winched him back down very slowly and then we had to repeat the same process on the other mast. I was worried about his strength, but he said he was OK. I looked away for a second to see what the brothers were up to. They were both busy making sure we headed into the wind. The slightest deviation could make the boat susceptible to getting slapped sideways by the gusting winds. They were handling it. Focused for once.

When I looked back up, Jacques was dangling upside down, his leg stuck between the mast and a line. He was looking straight at me, wild eyed. I grabbed the longest line I could find and I started running around both masts with it. Each turn around the masts was one added piece of a net that hopefully would slow down Jacques’ inevitable fall.

I managed three turns.

When he fell, I hung on to the rope as tightly as I could. He bounced on and then grabbed at my ropes on his way down and it did slow his descent, but he still ended up cracking his head on the hard wood. He lay there in an unconscious heap.

I let go of my rope and ran to his side; blood poured from his left ear. He was breathing, but he was out cold. I figured a concussion, but everything I knew about first aid I’d learned from watching General Hospital with my mother when I was seven years old. I dragged him to a pile of sails that was nearby, protected him from the rain and made him as comfortable as I could. I had more pressing concerns to get to, namely, the triatic that was still unattached to the second mast and whipping in the wind. I had to get up there and finish the job, but there was no one to winch me up. I put my hand on the large beam and looked up and shook my head in disgust. I was alone. I had to catch the stay and tie a line to it so that I could bring it with me up the mast.

I had seen a documentary once about mountain climbers using a string to make a makeshift ladder, but I had no idea how to make those knots. But it gave me another idea. I made two “stepping ropes”, one for each foot. One loop around the mast and the other loop around my foot. One string for each foot. I pulled the large loop up as high as possible with my hands and stepped up to it, then I reached down and brought the other large loop up as close to the higher one as possible and then repeated the process until I reached the top.

It worked. I made it all the way up. I was holding on tight and I saw no way of freeing one hand to be able to tie the stay to the mast. I figured that must be how Jacques fell down. He must’ve let go. I was being thrown around at dizzying speeds. The chair was still up there and I could use it now, so I secured myself around the mast. Then I freed one hand to work the stay. I managed to tie it around the mast. Then I had to winch it tight. That took another half hour. In all, I was up there for a good ninety minutes before I could head back down. I had no idea how to go about doing that. I just figured it would come to me when I was ready.

Well I was ready and nothing was coming to me.

But when I looked down, there was Jacques, smiling, holding on to the winch. All I had to do was sit tight in the chair and he winched me carefully down. When I finally made it to the bottom, he was completely exhausted and just dropped to the deck again. Then he looked up at me.

“So Robert…”

“Oh Christ.”

“The captain says to his first mate: I sent my wife to the Caribbean for a vacation. The first mate says: Jamaica? The captain says: No, she wanted to.”

And he passed out, a thin smile on his lips. I motioned to the brothers that all was well and dragged my friend below where I wrapped him up tightly in his bed and made sure he was warm. Then I crawled into my bed and immediately fell asleep. I trusted the brothers to keep us afloat.

The next day, we all huddled in the saloon where Jacques was lying down to wait out the last of the storm. The twins took out a bottle of cheap brandy and we all celebrated with a shot. Jacques stayed in bed for a few days, but he got better quickly. They say battle makes true friends. This had been our battle.