Blue Water

by Lindsay Wright

  I’d joined the big, German-built wooden schooner in Wellington after meeting her crew earlier in Sydney, for the next leg of a return delivery trip to her chartering grounds in the Caribbean. Originally named Redonda, she’d been bought by an American owner after several years chartering in the Caribbean. He’d renamed the classic yacht Sereno and, with a variety of professional crew, sailed her to Sydney where his daughter lived. It hadn’t been a happy trip; the crew had allegedly changed at almost every port o’ call due to the owner’s irascible and demanding nature.

  Now Sereno, skippered by American Kirby Ingelse and crewed by myself (aged 20) and Australians David Turner (21), cook Greg Lewis (23) and Peter Berry (28), was heading home to the Caribbean, about 600 nautical miles (1100 kilometres) away. At midnight I handed the wheel to Lewis, and took one last walk around the deck to check for signs of chafe or wear in the sails or rigging and the lashings holding a dozen 200-litre fuel drums to the bulwarks aft. The warm tropical air, cooled slightly by contact with the Humboldt Current, soughed through the sail plan and a fullish moon glimmered on the big swells. Large puffs of cloud settled on the horizon to port, but otherwise all was clear and I swung down the companionway to my bunk in the forecastle.

  An hour or so later I was jerked awake by a horrible grinding, smashing, crashing pandemonium, and flicked on the bedside light to see the bowsprit wedged back in the standing space between the forecastle bunks. As my brain frantically scrabbled to digest this new layout, the noise was repeated and the old pitch-pine planking beside my bunk bulged threateningly inwards.

  Clad only in underpants, I skipped from my bunk to the bowsprit and out on deck. Sereno was hard against a huge slimy rock that blacked out the sky and towered over the hapless schooner. Each successive swell that swept into the little indentation in the cliff-bound coast she’d collided with ground her up against the rock wall, then smashed her back down on the rocks as it withdrew. The foredeck, where her proud, varnished bowsprit had once been, was a mangle of splintered planking and the forestays whipped viciously back and forth with the boat’s wild motion.

  Staggering aft to the wheelhouse, I reached inside the door, grabbed a lifejacket from a locker there, and shrugged into it. Dave Turner was babbling hysterically into the radio handpiece, so I grabbed it from him and enunciated ‘Mayday … Mayday … Mayday’ as I’d been taught while sitting my skipper’s ticket in New Zealand. The set’s small red light glowed dully for a few seconds and then slowly faded, along with all the other electrics, as water flooded the engine room and reached the batteries.

  Back on deck, I groped for the deck locker where miscellaneous ropes and lines were stowed, forward of the wheelhouse. Just as I prised it open, the inner forestay parted with a loud crack and the loose end began to lash backwards and forwards across the locker lid. I turned and picked my way aft from handhold to handhold. It was almost impossible to stand as Sereno’s hulk crashed and crumpled, gyrating wildly on the big, oily swell. Her big bulwarks, along with the solid wooden gunwale, crumpled into splinters as her starboard side ground against the rocks. Water flowed 30 to 40 centimetres deep across the deck. Evacuation was our only hope, but the liferaft had disappeared from its cradle on the aft deck — we’d have to jump for it.

  Immediately aft of the wheelhouse, a solid teak structure which had been our shelter from Southern Ocean storms and tropical sun for the 98 days since we’d left New Zealand, I had re-caulked a section of deck then roped it off to prevent people from walking through the wet tar and tracking it belowdecks. That length of line would now have to be our lifeline. Knots that I’d tied the day before frustrated my trembling fingers as I clung to the battered boat. Finally, with the rope coiled and ready to run, I yelled for the others to join me.

  The black rock wall gleamed as successive seas swept its face, and long brown tresses of kelp rose and fell in time to the same deadly certainty. Feeling sick in the stomach, I tied the rope around my waist and stood watching. As Sereno wallowed up one big swell, I took two swift steps towards the gunwale, jumped up and leapt as high as I could, scrabbling for a grip — any grip — on the slippery rock.

  I clung to a small crevice, then crabbed a metre or so higher and felt more of Sereno splinter to death against the rock beneath my feet. Slightly elated and a bit shaky, I scrambled higher. A wave landed on my back, smashing my face into the rock and forcing me to cling like a limpet on steroids while it receded. Looking down in the patchy moonlight, I could make out the others huddled beside the deckhouse and yelled for them to let out more rope.

  About 6 metres above the tide line, I crawled onto a small ledge, untied the rope from my waist and took a couple of turns around a craggy boulder, then bellowed for the others to follow me off the wreck. Greg scrambled up the rope and squeezed onto the ledge beside me, his body heat welcome. A gap in the scudding clouds allowed moonlight through onto the upturned faces of the other three on the deck of the fast-disintegrating schooner.

  Peter Berry, a Sydney mechanic who had signed on to Sereno as engineer, grabbed the rope from Dave as he stood, reluctant to commit himself to the slippery climb. A metre or so up the rock face, a big wave burst over Sereno, Peter and the rock. As it foamed back out to sea, Peter disappeared along with it. Dave began his climb in the following lull and was beside us within minutes, gasping and shivering violently.

  We called out to Kirby, the skipper and last person left aboard, to tie himself to the end of the rope and we’d help pull him up. A retired American airline executive, Kirby was almost three times my age and, despite our long passage, was still flaccid from a career spent at the controls of various office desks. Pulling together, we felt his weight and heaved on the rope. Another huge wave reared out of the dark night and, as it receded, the rope was torn from our hands. We reached for it as one and pulled with all our might, but even our combined efforts couldn’t budge the dead weight at the other end of it.

  Gutted, we slumped back in silence on the narrow rock ledge. Every few minutes we’d call into the maelstrom of white water crashing onto the cliff face below us, or peer over the edge for signs of life. Sereno’s tall Baltic pine mainmast did a last few drunken pirouettes before crashing into the sea. Within 30 minutes, our big, solid oak and pitch-pine Sereno had been ground to matchwood on the rocks below.

  By about 4.30 a.m., the first fingers of light began to flood over the cliff at our backs and we could stand and take stock of our situation. As each wave swept into the small cove at the base of the cliffs, we recovered slack on the rope and anchored it while the wave withdrew. When about 10 metres was coiled on the rock ledge, the rope went bar-tight and parted. Parts of mast and hull planking, torn sails and the wheelhouse roof surged backwards and forth in a slick of fuel oil and minor debris.

  Sereno’s crew had had a few Australasian/American communication problems during the trip, and it had become something of a standing joke. We now assumed that, in the heat of the moment, when we’d urged Kirby to tie himself to the rope, he had misheard and tied the rope to the boat instead. He must have been swept off and drowned. I thought of the family photos he’d shared with me during long watches in the wheelhouse, and his stories about sailing in the Great Lakes and his career in the airline industry.

  Sereno had left Sydney, and Wellington, under the command of Captain Paul B Hyatt, a seventy-something retired Maryland master mariner. He had been one of the best educators I’d had, a professional old-school mariner who could walk on deck at night and name every star or planet visible in the night sky, then fix a position from them as soon as the rising or setting sun gave him a visible horizon. From Wellington we’d branched far south on the classical Great Circle route to Panama, but a fierce Southern Ocean storm had seized the generator and, with a freezer full of three months’ worth of victuals, we’d headed north to Tahiti for repairs.

  ‘Gone chasing grass skirts have you, Hyatt?’ was the owner’s response to this unforeseen development, and Captain Hyatt took umbrage, hand
ed over command to Kirby, and flew home. Kirby, a Great Lakes social sailor, had risen to the occasion. He kept Sereno’s unruly young and relatively inexperienced crew under a firm and friendly grip during the six-week lay-up waiting for parts in Papeete, carried out much long-overdue maintenance on the venerable old schooner, and set out for the 56-day passage to where she’d met her fate.

  I thought again of the photos, his wife and daughters at home in the US who wouldn’t see Kirby again, and tears prickled my eyes; for Kirby, his family, Sereno and us. Dave was much less emotionally reserved than me, and his shoulders shook uncontrollably as he wept. Greg looked out to sea and chewed his bottom lip.

  We looked at the steep cliff slicing skywards at our backs and picked out the best route to the top. I eye-spliced the end of our remaining rope and we cautiously set out on the 100-metre climb to the rest of the island. ‘Hey, Dave,’ I called, ‘first one to the top order me a cheeseburger and cold beer.’

  The Galapagos were pretty much an unknown quantity to us at that stage. Our only knowledge of them had come from the stark official prose of the British Admiralty South Pacific Pilot book which warned of powerful ocean currents running through them and the thick ‘garua’ fog which develops when the cold waters of the Humboldt Current, fresh from Antarctica, encounter the warm equatorial waters of the islands.

  Geographically these 18 small, volcanic islands occupy a small portion of the east Pacific Ocean about 600 nautical miles (1100 kilometres) west of Ecuador, but they also have huge significance in the development of Western philosophy. It was the Galapagos, an isolated archipelago with flora and fauna that had adapted to the harsh conditions there and were found nowhere else on the planet, that inspired Charles Darwin to write his controversial On the Origin of Species. Published in 1859, 26 years after he’d visited the islands as a naturalist in HMS Beagle, Darwin’s book was the first work to seriously challenge the Divine Creation credo vigorously promoted by religious authorities at the time.

  The Equator bisects the main island, Isabela, but the cool Antarctic waters of the Humboldt Current (sometimes called the Peru Current) flowing northwards bring a diversity of life forms to the 200-square-mile (370.4-square-kilometre) territorial area of the archipelago. Seals, sea lions, sea turtles and giant marine iguanas up to 1.5 metres long share the craggy coastline with albatross, boobies and many unique, endemic bird species. A few goats had been introduced by the whalers and buccaneers who victualled at the Galapagos before venturing forth to plunder Spanish treasure ships or Pacific whale fisheries, but these have been eradicated by park wardens.

  Spanish sailors called them ‘Islas Encantadas’ — the Enchanted Islands — because they would drift in sight of them at nightfall but by daybreak would have been carried far from eyesight range by the strong current, giving the impression that the islands had disappeared. Much more prosaic American tuna-fishers who traverse the area regularly call them the ‘Rock Pile’. At the time of our grounding, in 1977, about 6000 Ecuadorian residents and a few ex-pat wildlife guides lived there, mostly on the main islands of Isabela and Santa Cruz, eking a living from tourism or by working as bureaucrats for the Ecuadorian government which administered the islands.

  Garua weather coated us with a dense clammy mist as we clambered over the top of the cliff, at about 8 a.m. We didn’t know it then, but we’d been castaway on Hood (Española) Island, the southernmost Galapagos island — about 24 square kilometres of jagged volcanic rock sloping gently from its cliff-girt southern coast to a beach-lined peninsula in the north. There were no hamburger bars, no cold beer, no people even. Just low, thorny vegetation … and no fresh water.

  As the fog burned off, we could make out what looked like a flagpole protruding from a small, ragged rock promontory, and set out towards it. Still dressed in my underpants, I was soon a mass of scratches from the spikes we had to force ourselves through. Greg and Dave were slightly better off in shorts, but the rocks soon cut the soles of our feet to shreds. Near midday, we minced up to the flagpole on smarting soles to find that it marked the ruins of what had been a ranger station but was now just a rubble of weathered timber and rusty iron sheets. From its slight elevation we could spot the white sand of a beach away to the north, and began trudging towards it.

  The equatorial sun baked our backs as we hopped from burning-hot sand patch to burning-hot sand patch down the island. Iguanas, snakes, birds and lizards eyed us with interest — the same sort of interest shown by hungry diners ogling a menu, I thought — from unblinking black eyes. Most of the island’s bird and reptile species are endemic to the island and found nowhere else in the world, so landing is forbidden by the Ecuadorian government, except under very strictly controlled conditions. Tourist vessels are restricted to designated anchorages and, once the ranger station had been disbanded, only a handful of scientists got to land on the island. The Ecuadorian navy automatically confiscated any vessel observed landing people on Española, so the entire ecology, from snakes to hawks, are unused to and fearless of humans.

  Anticipating cool seawater on our slashed feet, we fought our way through the vegetation to a small point (called Punta Suarez, we later learned) which stood out to sea from the frazzled landscape like a pointing finger. After six hours of battling through the brush, we collapsed in the shallows and let the wavelets which lapped the beach bathe our battered feet. An hour later, the sunlight darkened to dusk and we hobbled off to scrape hollows in the sand beneath a small thicket beside the beach where we could curl up to sleep.

  Next day we rose with the sun and began to search our peninsula for signs of fresh water. Punta Suarez had been used as a landing spot for park rangers hunting goats, and as we scoured the rock and sand for signs of moisture we came across a pair of battered gumboots, neatly abandoned side by side under a thicket. The wardens had also left some broken glass and rusting tin cans, which we pounced on as potential cutting and containing tools. Any rainfall the gumboots might have held had long since evaporated; but, newly shod, we took turns at ranging further afield for signs of water. But Española was dry. Arid, yet teeming with life.

  On the rocks which clustered at the head of Punta Suarez, small, bright-red Sally Lightfoot crabs sunned themselves or scuttled to and fro with morsels of food in their claws. They were used to attacks from airborne predators, but fell easy prey to hungry landsmen like ourselves and were easily plucked off the rocks. We crunched their shells in our teeth and chewed the raw but succulent flesh.

  Faced with the prospect of death by dehydration from the merciless equatorial sun, we began digging a well in the scrub-covered middle ground of Punta Suarez. Scrabbling with our hands and an empty tin can at the hard sand, we took turns at digging the hole deeper and deeper, or squatting beside it and offering encouragement. After a few hours, Greg, taking his turn on the digging tin, whooped ecstatically and held a handful of muddy sand aloft. It dribbled through his fingers and onto his head and he dived back, out of sight in the 2-metre deep well, to scoop out another handful.

  Dave and I squatted patiently beside the hole as he dug deeper, the can scraping through the soggy sand until water began to well into the pit. When a small pool had gathered, Greg scooped some up in his hands. He stood up in the hole, water welling over his feet, and lifted his cupped hands to his mouth. Dave and I watched anxiously as Greg gulped thirstily at the life-giving liquid; but then he grimaced and violently sprayed the mouthful of water — salt water — onto the sand in front of him.

  ‘Fuck … FUCK!’ he yelled at the sky, scrambled out of the hole and stormed off down the beach. Dave and I stood, blinking disbelievingly into the hole, as more salt water welled in to cover its sandy bottom. We both tasted the salty water, willing it to be fresh, but the bitter salt just taunted our dry palates even more and we wandered dispiritedly back to the beach.

  Peering to seaward for something, anything, to break the straight line of horizon which demarcated sea from sky had become habitual. We had no formal watchkeeping syst
em, but there weren’t many minutes in the day when one of us wasn’t looking out to sea. Now we stood in file on the beach and silently scanned the thin line where the planet curved out of sight.

  We clustered back under a small thicket out of the midday sun. Brightly coloured little lava lizards scrambled onto our supine bodies and picked flies off the cuts and scratches in our skin. Tiny Galapagos finches, the very species which so inspired Charles Darwin, hopped up to take exploratory pecks at other insects which clustered on the lacerated soles of our feet.

  Several fierce-looking Galapagos hawks inhabited the peninsula and stood, their eyes fixed unblinkingly on us, while we walked past, centimetres away. Dave, driven to desperation by hunger, hefted a driftwood cudgel and smashed it down on one hawk’s head. We plucked it in the shallows by the beach, cut it into portions with the broken glass, and squatted on the beach gnawing the tough and fishy-tasting flesh. Afterwards we wasted the saliva this had produced by licking our cracked and swollen lips. Greg, ever the chef, fantasized: ‘We need a fire — imagine this baked with crab stuffing. It’d be delicious, eh?’

  As the sinking sun drew a pall of dusk over Española’s inhospitable backdrop, we began gathering rocks from the hinterland and, after another restless night spent in a sand hollow under the bushes, we lugged them onto the beach and built a 1.8-metre-high SOS on the white sand. During the heat of the midday sun we buried ourselves neck-deep in the relatively cool water, ducking our heads every now and again, while we discussed what our probable fates were. I recalled reading somewhere that eight days was the longest a human could survive without water at the Equator — but kept the knowledge to myself.

  While sitting in the water we’d noticed schools of small fish flitting through the shallows, and early next morning we began collecting twigs and sticks to build a fish trap. We’d noted about a 30-centimetre rise-and-fall tide range on the beach, and the idea was that at high tide we could herd the fish behind the landward side of a stick palisade running parallel to the sand, then fence them in and pick them up at low tide.