by Gary Paulsen
That would come a year later, when I was sailing from Mexico to California.
I hit weather then that makes me shudder still. We look back on things and try to find sense in them by remembering exactly how they came about.
One morning in March I headed north from San Diego on Felicity, singlehanded, off to a late start because I’d waited to buy some oil for my engine. There was almost no wind but the barometer was dropping.
It was the first warning. The barometer almost never drops significantly in southern California. I ignored it, thinking it was a small front moving through.
It was seventy-five miles up to Catalina and then another seventy-five to Ventura, where I was going to work on my boat, getting it ready for a passage to Hawaii. I was actually looking forward to the overnight run north.
Usually on that particular run if you’re single-handing you stop in Catalina. But I had spent many nights alone running dogs and was used to not sleeping for a night or two. At night on the sea the sound of the waves comes alive and their whitecaps show in the dark. I enjoyed this kind of sailing. So I decided to keep going all night and get to Ventura just after dawn.
Since I was a little late getting started it was evening when I got to the southeast end of Catalina and came upon the second and third warnings.
For one thing, the sea was literally covered with birds. Gulls and others I didn’t recognize rafted up, great shoals of birds covering the water and moving away as I cut through them, heading north. I had never seen so many in one place and marveled at the sight, but I didn’t really see them, didn’t wonder why they should be there. The birds knew there was a storm coming. Because they do no better in bad winds than a boat does—in some cases, worse—they were rafting up in the lee of Catalina to avoid the storm.
And I sailed right through them and didn’t question it.
Then there were the cruise ships. Two of them, nestled in the middle of the sea of birds, were also snuggled in the lee of the island. I actually sailed between the two ships and waved at them and kept going.
In my defense, I didn’t have a weather fax on the boat. I’d been listening to the radio, which said there was a “. . . weak low moving into the area that would be dissipated by a strong high-pressure system just to the north.” The cruise ships had weather faxes and knew a whole lot more than I did.
My own prediction, based on the VHF radio forecast, was that the wind might go up to fifteen or twenty knots, out of the west, but since I was working north with only a little west it would mean a tack for me, and the boat I was on, the Hans Christian, didn’t really get to sailing until it had fifteen or twenty knots of wind to drive it.
But the birds knew. They always know. If they didn’t, there wouldn’t be any birds. And the cruise ships knew. Something big was coming, something big and very, very bad.
I sailed blissfully up alongside Catalina Island, into the coming darkness. I turned on my running lights, sheeted the sails in a bit tighter and motor sailed. The wind had picked up a bit but I was moving in the lee of the island and most of what I was feeling was the dregs of what bled around the north end of the island and trickled south. The wind was straight out of the west and the island, twenty-five or so miles long, is made up of high hills and bluffs that stopped the wind and forced it to go over the top. I was so close in, less than half a mile offshore, that the wind also went over the top of me, and it was so cloudy and deep dark that except for an occasional light gust I had no idea there was much wind at all.
My radio for communications and weather reporting was down at the navigation station, a table inside the boat, and with the engine running I couldn’t hear it. Under sail I could hear it well enough, and motoring under normal circumstances I would have gone down inside the boat to listen to the weather.
But this night there was a truly amazing number of boats going back and forth, and I was too afraid of a collision to leave the boat on autopilot long enough to listen to the radio.
So I worked my way north/northwest at five knots until I began to approach the north end of the island. It was extremely dark—even the whitecaps didn’t show very well—but at last I began to understand that something was amiss. I became aware of a constant roaring sound. At first I thought it was something wrong with the motor. But it was too loud.
Finally I acknowledged that it was the wind. By now the roar was loud enough to be heard over the sound of the engine. But the sea was not alarming; it was almost flat, with no waves and no real swell, because I was tucked well into the lee of Catalina, almost in the kelp line.
Still, I felt it was time to be cautious and I decided I would put the boat on autopilot, go up and throw a couple of reefs in the main, roll up the jib completely and deploy the much smaller staysail, and then see if I could turn the radio loud enough so that I could hear some of the weather channel over the sound of the wind and engine without leaving the cockpit.
It was very nearly the last time I ever sailed a boat.
All this time I had been working north at five knots and was approaching the end of the island. As I rolled up the jib with the lines from the cockpit I could see the north-end light ahead. I counted the flashes and timed them and knew from their position on the chart that I would soon be out of the lee. I had a harness and safety line on and I clipped the line into the jackstay that went forward and moved up to the mast to reef.
I was halfway there when we got hit.
With me halfway to the mast, the whole world went mad.
The wind hit the boat with a demonic shriek, screaming, roaring, driving spray into my eyes and blinding me. I felt the boat go over on her beam and slide sideways. I was thrown off the boat, hanging in my lifeline and harness on the down side, dangling across the deck and in the water, disoriented, upside down, then right side up, the wind a wild howling filling my ears, my mind, my soul, and with the sudden onslaught of wind came the waves.
They were true monsters, steepsided, galloping, twenty, thirty feet high, almost vertical walls with breaking tops that caught the boat and held her down on her side with me in the water, clawing to get back on, ripping my nails, cutting my hands, now fighting to live, not sail, not obey the call of the sea, nothing noble or high-flown now but just to live, get on the boat and live. Even while I fought I remembered the tales of boats found sailing on their own with their owners, singlehanders, hanging off the stern dead in their harnesses because they couldn’t get back on the boat before hypothermia stopped their ability to function and they drowned.
What saved me was the mainsail. I’d bought a new one, but frugality had reared its penny-pinching head and I had decided to use the old mainsail until it was completely shot before putting the new one on. The sail was twenty years old and the sun and wind had done their work on the threads and with a stunning whaaaack! the stitching let go and the sail exploded downwind. With the sail in tatters the boat’s ten-thousand-pound lead keel could work and it pulled her momentarily upright between the slamming waves. I was unceremoniously jerked back over the side and lay sprawled on the cabin top, dripping and cold, my clothing soaked under the foul-weather gear. But I was up and out of the water. I was clutching at anything and everything like a crab, slithering back toward the cockpit, still half blinded by spray—and it’s difficult to believe what salt water driven into your eyes at high velocity can feel like until it happens to you; the pain is immediate, excruciating and constant—I was little more than an animal, but I was up, and out of the water.
The boat slammed down again, but by this time I had reached the temporary protection of the cockpit—temporary because the next wave broke quartering over the stern and filled the cockpit with seawater, perhaps a thousand pounds of it, which almost dragged her back under by the stern. I thought I actually felt her sinking but the next wave rolled her again and dumped the water out.
She seemed to be foundering, staggering, and I grabbed the wheel. Maybe I could somehow help her by steering. I’d read of boats in storms running d
ownwind and kept from being knocked over and down by being cautiously steered between the peaks, in the “valleys” of the waves, but there is a world of difference between sitting of a quiet evening reading about storm tactics and trying to do them when the wind is tearing you apart, the seas are slamming you and the spray has you virtually blind. I couldn’t even see the waves, let alone find a peak or a valley, and the concept of steering becomes meaningless when you are spending more time hanging off the side of the wheel than standing up to it.
There was never a time when it abated. Not a moment when I could shrug and shake and take a breather or catch up or even react sanely to what was happening. The boat slammed and pounded and rolled and shuddered and the cockpit filled and she would seem to be foundering and then she would roll and empty—the three little inch-and-a-half cockpit drains were a joke; the boat would take on two or three hundred gallons and turn the large cockpit into a full-size Jacuzzi. I was under water more than I was out of it. I had closed the companionway, but hundreds of gallons went down into the boat and I could hear the twelve-volt bilge pump working to get rid of the water, putting out a little half-inch stream while gallons poured in through the louvered doors of the companionway. Thank God the motor kept running; it could do nothing to move the boat in such waves but it kept the electrical system from running down, so the bilge pump kept working.
And then it was over.
Just that fast. I was suddenly standing on a boat that made sense; the rolling and pitching had stopped and while I could still hear the wind roaring and tearing, it was back past the stern, and the boat was once again in the lee of the island in quiet water.
Later I figured what had happened. We had just barely nosed past the island, only just come out into the wind-shear line, where we got hit. The wind tore at the bow, smashed it around as it pounded the boat over, completely turning it end over end, and though it was moved sideways the keel caught the water and the wind propelled it forward as well, except that we were now moving in the opposite direction, the boat hull itself acting as a sail to drive her back into the lee. I had nothing to do with it. She went out and came back herself, sail hanging in tatters from the mast and boom.
The motor propelled us peacefully at five-and-a-half knots. The boat moved smoothly, flat in the quiet water along the kelp beds, and I stood, soaked, blasted into a kind of shock, my hand on the wheel in a counterfeit control. I could hear the hum and squirt of the bilge pump and I looked back into the darkness, tried to see what was there, but there was only blackness and the roaring of the wind and the loud smashing hiss of the breaking waves.
I knew that I had been close to death and that only luck had kept me alive and that I would go back down to the other end of the island and take a mooring in the little harbor of Avalon and make a hot breakfast and spend a day and a night sleeping and resting and thanking whatever higher power it was that kept me alive, and I shivered and the motion pulled up the sleeve of my foul-weather jacket and I saw my watch and thought, no, it’s broken, this can’t be.
The total elapsed time was twenty-two minutes, start to finish. My life was completely changed and I would never look at the sea the same way again.
And only twenty-two minutes had passed.
Later I learned: It was truly a killer storm. Boats were lost, lives were lost. One of the large ferries that went back and forth to the mainland had been hit by a wave so high and strong that it took out the second-floor windows on one side and then went on through the boat and tore the windows out the other side as well, from the inside out.
The storm went on through California and Arizona and destroyed buildings and killed people all the way to El Paso, Texas, before it finally broke apart and ended.
I don’t know how strong the wind was that hit me because I had no anemometer on my boat. But when I got to Avalon the wind coming over the back and blowing out through the sheltered harbor itself had sporadic gusts up to fifty knots and a man there said there’d been measured gusts north of Catalina Island that went over a hundred knots.
All that day I lay listening to the wind screaming overhead, dozing safely in my bunk, and all I could think was: There are people who have been in storms that lasted many hours, sometimes days, in the open sea.
I was nearly killed in twenty-two minutes.
But I was still there, and that very night I began making plans. That night I decided: Someday I would try the one great passage of the sailor’s world. Someday I would try to sail around Cape Horn.
About the Author
Gary Paulsen is the distinguished author of many critically acclaimed books for young people, including three Newbery Honor books: The Winter Room, Hatchet and Dogsong. His novel The Haymeadow received the Western Writers of America Golden Spur Award. Among his newest Delacorte Press books are Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books, The Beet Fields: Memories of a Sixteenth Summer, Alida’s Song (a companion to The Cookcamp), Soldier’s Heart, The Transall Saga, My Life in Dog Years, Sarny: A Life Remembered (a companion to Nightjohn), Brian’s Return and Brian’s Winter (companions to Hatchet), Father Water, Mother Woods: Essays on Fishing and Hunting in the North Woods and five books about Francis Tucket’s adventures in the Old West. Gary Paulsen has also published fiction and nonfiction for adults, as well as picture books illustrated by his wife, the painter Ruth Wright Paulsen. Their most recent book is Canoe Days. The Paulsens live in New Mexico and on the Pacific Ocean.
Also by Gary Paulsen
Alida’s Song
The Beet Fields: Memories of a Sixteenth Summer
The Boy Who Owned the School
The Brian Books: The River, Brian’s Winter and Brian’s Return
Canyons
The Car
The Cookcamp
The Crossing
Dogsong
Father Water, Mother Woods:
Essays on Fishing and Hunting in the North Woods
Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books
Harris and Me
Hatchet
The Haymeadow
The Island
The Monument
My Life in Dog Years
Nightjohn
The Night the White Deer Died
Puppies, Dogs, and Blue Northers
Sarny: A Life Remembered
The Scherno f Discoveries
Soldier’s Heart
The Transall Saga
The Tucket Adventures, Books One through Five
The Voyage of the Frog
The Winter Room
Picture books, illustrated by Ruth Wright Paulsen:
Canoe Days and Dogteam
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Copyright © 2001 by Gary Paulsen
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Paulsen, Gary.
Caught by the sea : a life in boats / Gary Paulsen.
p. cm.
1. Paulsen, Gary—Journeys—Juvenile literature. 2. Authors, American— 20th century—Biography—Juvenile literature.
3. Boats and boating— Juvenile literature. 4. Ocean travel—Juvenile literature.
<
br /> [1. Paulsen, Gary. 2. Authors, American. 3. Sailing. 4. Boats and boating.]
I. Title. PS3566.A834 Z’.5403—dc21 [B]
2001017336
Maps by James Sinclair
October 2001
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