Days of the Python (Python Trilogy Book 1)

by David Jurk

  I settled back into the cockpit and resumed manual steering after another little conversation with my new best buddy Ray.

  “Ray, cancel autopilot.”

  “Just when she’s getting’ fun, you ol’ cobber. Right then, you’ve got er’.”

  “Display map, please.”

  “Right-o.”

  I watched our progress on the map, asking Ray to add more and more data to the display; speed over ground, projected course line, water temperature and depth, wind speed and direction, and any navigation hazards that fell within our course line. It was all fascinating, though seeing the course line extending off the edge of a five-hundred kilometer scale display was sobering.

  The frenetic boat traffic that had been around me in the outer region of the harbor had subsided almost completely. Still, even after two hours, because of the northwesterly set to the coastline, looking north it seemed we’d hardly gotten offshore. Looking back to the southeast however, it was much more dramatic. Land was little more than a distant smudge, disappearing almost completely into the haze of the horizon. Boats appeared as dots in the distance, trailing silver wakes in the dark blue water. Only rarely did another boat come anywhere near us; traffic, I supposed, for Catalina Island.

  We’d covered a scant ten kilometers over the ground, maybe eleven, heading due west. I realized we must be motoring into a slight easterly current and just for the hell of it did a quick calculation. We’d managed about one quarter of one percent of the more than four thousand kilometers between us and Kauai. It was more than a little disconcerting; it was everything I could do not to turn around and head back. I tried to settle in, tried to tell myself to do just what I was doing – take it an hour at a time, a kilometer at a time. More than anything, I needed to accept the journey itself as my new life; this was going to be a very long haul.

  Growing tired of staring at the monitor, I decided to have lunch and again asked Ray to take over. Though the weather was still beautiful and the seas mild, a long swell had begun to build and Windswept rose to it, coasting on top, then sliding back down as it passed beneath us. They built quickly, growing within an hour to a height of three meters or more, flowing in a regular sequence of evenly spaced rows like a giant washboard on the face of the sea. Waves and troughs come together in pairs, so a three-meter wave meant a six-meter rise followed by a six-meter slide back down. Over and over.

  Having eaten a sandwich and some greasy chips, I noticed the first protest from my stomach. The tiniest of sensations, no more than a momentary lurch, a hiccup; I passed it off as nothing. A few minutes later, a second flip of my stomach, and soon after, a third. I began to fear the truth then, and tried to fight the growing nausea, reject it through sheer force of will. But the swells rolled on, one after another without pause, and with each successive drop my stomach felt more tenuous, more vulnerable until I knew, with certainty, what was in front of me. Once seasickness gets a toehold, there’s not a damn thing that will stop it. I climbed up onto the deck, hoping that the open air would help. It did seem to for a moment, and my hopes rose.

  But abruptly, it all went south. In seconds, I was stomach-down on the gunwale and retching into the ocean. And still the swells continued, making the seasickness worse and worse, and though within a few minutes I had nothing left inside, I continued to gag and retch every half hour or so, until my throat was raw, and I had to squeeze my eyes shut at the pain in each heaving, gagging episode over the side.

  By late afternoon as I lay head-down staring into the water, I dimly noticed that we were no longer making headway. Completely a slave to the nausea, I’d not scanned the instruments for hours. Now, forcing myself to focus my eyes, I saw that our speed was a negative point two knots; we were essentially moving backwards. The batteries were at forty-five percent and charging. And the drive system had turned itself off.

  Running the motors at two-thirds power since seven that morning, without pause for eight hours, we’d managed to make eighty kilometers of progress to sea. The technology onboard, in terms of the drive system and the batteries used to power it, was the most modern available. The batteries were all copper foam – able to charge so quickly that at low speeds, they could maintain power to the motor drive even as they were being charged. And to provide for that charging, I had installed a large bank of graphene matrix solar cells, a new technology of unprecedented efficiency. Taken together, the batteries and solar cells formed a nearly perfect powerplant - assuming I observed certain rules. And of those, the most critical was not to let the batteries fall below a certain charge level. No system on board was more power hungry than the drive motors and even with this sunny day, the solar cells hadn’t been able to pump enough voltage into the batteries to keep them above that critical level, so the controller, programmed to do so, had shut the system down.

  The house batteries were a completely independent system, and they’d had very little draw; the monitor showed them at ninety-nine percent. There was a way to temporarily switch the house batteries to the drive system, but if I let those get low and we got cloud cover and no charging, well, everything from the water maker to Ray would be compromised. Without sailing, we were going no further until the batteries were recharged, and I sure as hell wasn’t about to raise the sails for the first time in the midst of puking my guts out.

  Moaning, I crawled through the hatchway on hands and knees, down into the cabin, found a wash cloth and wet it. I dragged myself back on deck – the nausea was far worse below – and collapse onto a cockpit seat. I spread the wet cloth over my eyes and lay in an uncaring stupor. Fuck the solar cells. Fuck the sails and fuck the sea, too, for that matter. Throughout the late afternoon hours, I tried sipping water, tried saltine crackers, tried electrolytes – nothing stayed down.

  The drive batteries would be recharged up to sixty percent, I’d feel the system come back on line and the surge of the props, then in an hour, they’d drop below the threshold and we’d return to drifting. By eight that evening, with the sun beginning its descent into the sea, I knew the motors were done for the day. I went below and brought out a sleeping bag and lay on it in the cockpit. I meant to keep watch but fell instead into a fitful sleep of awful dreams, waking occasionally to bend over the side of the boat, the waves black beneath me.

  And so, I passed my first night at sea, retching into the Pacific as we wallowed like deadwood. We had come far enough that the coast behind us had long since disappeared, and the sea around me was opaque and mysterious. I had never felt so miserable or so alone.

  CHAPTER TEN

  WHETHER IT WAS the light that woke me or the rawness in my throat, I knew only that I opened my eyes to bright sunshine, sensed instinctively that the drive system was still shut down, and decided against any immediate movement. Closing my eyes against the light, I deliberately explored the state of my body. Avaricious thirst, pain along my rib cage, but… no nausea. I waited for the arrival of a swell, but none came. Squinting against the sunlight, I opened my eyes again and sat up, tangled like a child in the damp sleeping bag.

  My first thought, other than profound relief at the absence of nausea, was worry at the state of the batteries, and I called out with a raspy voice to Ray. He reported forty percent, with a charging rate approaching maximum in the early morning sun. We were at dead stop, eighty-two kilometers out of San Diego harbor, having drifted off-course to the north by roughly five kilometers. At least we hadn’t gone too terribly far backwards.

  My second thought was that my mouth had never tasted this bad in my entire life. More than the need I felt for coffee and aspirin – in that order - was the desperate desire to brush my teeth, to cleanse the remnants of hours and hours of vomiting. Head throbbing, body aching and eyes still watering from the sunlight reflecting up at me from the water, I dragged myself and the sleeping bag down the hatchway steps and stumbled to the head. The face that stared back at me from the little mirror was a pale, unshaven, red-eyed wild man that I hardly recognized.

 
; Sweet god, I thought, and for the next five minutes did what I could to help myself. With fresh mouth, scrubbed face and finger-combed hair, if I didn’t exactly feel on top of the world, I was at the least prepared to have a go at the day. A fresh shirt grabbed from the duffel as I made my way past the settee, and a pair of shorts that weren’t covered in dried puke felt like another step toward civilization.

  And twenty minutes later, as the first of the caffeine found its way into my system, my appetite awoke, and I pulled smoked salmon, cheese, juice and granola from the stores locker and went back out into the sunshine and did my utmost to make up for the calories I’d spewed into the sea the day before.

  I suppose there’s a place your mind arrives at, no matter what situation you find yourself in, where you realize you’re in it, you’re not getting out of it, and you’d damned well better start making the best of it. And sitting there as I ate, this first morning of my new life at sea, I felt very much that I had reached that place. I was drained of fear, wearied to death of feeling sick, and by god, I’d just spent a night on the open ocean. I’d good and truly done what I’d promised Rachel, and I felt determined in that moment to see it through as best I could.

  All right then - the first real step would be to get Windswept sailing. No matter how sophisticated her motors, she was a sailboat and I was determined to get us underway. We weren’t going to make it across the Pacific Ocean on battery power, and she was far faster under sail.

  The breeze was light, out of the southwest, and steady, the sea flat. Do it now, by god; do it now while it’s easy.

  I took the dishes to the galley and quickly washed them and left them drying, then made my way forward, past the head. The design decision had been made long ago to use this space – normally taken up with a V-berth - for light storage and a little work area. To port, I had built a set of lockers that stored sails, bedding, clothing, and some of the lighter food items like pasta, rice, flour and coffee. And to starboard, there was a small workbench against the hull where I could make repairs.

  The sails themselves were secured in the lower lockers, stashed inside labelled bags so they could be grabbed in a hurry without a mistake. Now, I rummaged through and pulled out two of them – ‘main’ and ‘standard jib’. These were a bit minimal, I knew - in the benign conditions that existed this morning, I should’ve gone with the larger jib, or even the genoa. Never mind, I told myself. Start with the basics.

  On a boat – on any boat, but especially on a sailboat - everything that occurs involving the boat has to become a routine, patterned movement that becomes so ingrained it can be done in the dark, with the wind shrieking and the deck heaving, in bitter cold or in driving rain. You’ve got to be able to do it when you’re hurting, or seasick, or sleepy. It must be a routine as autonomous, as unthinking, as drawing a breath.

  I had no such routine; I hardly knew where to begin. And over the next two hours, everything that could go wrong, did. Lines snarled, halyards caught, sail slides jammed, cleats wouldn’t hold, and battens stuck. At one point, sitting on the foredeck with a pile of sails heaped around me, halyards and lines in a hopeless tangle, I was ready to throw it all – and myself – overboard. But as I sat there, furious and frustrated, I suddenly heard a light music; the sound of Rachel’s laughter. It was so clear and vivid, I turned my head one way then another, trying to locate the source. I sat there on the foredeck in the confusion of line and sails, sitting very still, and listened to it for perhaps ten seconds; it was her, beyond doubt. I suppose I questioned, at some level, that I was hearing it at all, but that just didn’t seem important. After a moment, I began to laugh too; it was just that contagious. And with that, the burden of getting the sails and rigging just right, perfectly right, the pressure I was putting on myself, fell away. Really, there was all the time in the world. Just set this stuff on one hank at a time, buddy.

  I stood up, untangled myself and left everything in a heap; fuck this, let’s have some breakfast. I went below and cooked a Swedish pancake, took it to the cockpit and sat eating, enjoying the sunshine. Music, I thought.

  “Ray, do you have access to my Spotify account?”

  “Too right, mate. What’s for you, then?”

  “Uh, classical. Random.”

  “Corker of a tune on its way.”

  And after I’d eaten, like magic, the tangled lines unwound themselves to the sounds of Debussy and the stubborn heaps of sail cloth were tamed in the soaring glory of Carmina Burana. And finally, as Wagner thundered out across the sea, the jib went on and then the mainsail. It was as if I’d done it a thousand times.

  Time to sail.

  “Ray,” I called, “cancel music.”

  The music stopped at once; silence descended except for the light slapping of the lines against the mast and the soft whisper of the wind.

  “Cancel autopilot, stop the drives.”

  “Right, mate.”

  “Oh, and Ray, when we start moving, just keep the rudder amidships.”

  “Aye, ‘cap – as you say.”

  I took a deep breath.

  Reaching for the main halyard, I put two wraps of it around the big winch on the starboard cockpit coaming and began winding. It rose a third of the way up before the breeze, light but persistent, caught it and set it to flogging. Nothing to be done for it, and I kept winding; half way, then two thirds, then I was pulling the halyard tight and cleating it off.

  I’d let the boom swing out fully to starboard, to keep the leading edge of the sail – the luff - into the wind, and now with the main fully up, it whipped about frantically; the noise was awful but brought little fury, and I began to haul in the boom steadily, deliberately, gradually bringing the sail into tension. And the miracle began – Windswept awoke, shook herself like a dog too long asleep, and surged forward. She sailed! A perfect wake rose benignly at our stern, three parallel streams in the blue-green water. I winched the main sheet in further, flattening the sail, and she bit her lee ama a little deeper into the sea and began to run.

  If you’ve never sailed, it’s a difficult thing to explain. Taken in the abstract, ten knots or even twenty knots aren’t numbers high on the speed charts. But if you’re standing on the deck of a sailing ship as the immense power of the wind is harnessed and made to work for you; as that power becomes movement and the human-conceived creature you ride over the surface of the sea comes alive with it – when you’ve stood and felt that, then tell me you didn’t do what I did, which was to scream aloud with joy. To scream and scream again, my tears whipping away in the wind.

  The monitor showed true windspeed at eight knots from the south, off our port side; the boat speed six knots and climbing. I winched in tighter until I saw the telltales along the trailing edge of the sail start to flutter, then eased the sheet out again until they were smooth along the surface of the sail and secured it.

  With this done, I turned to the jib and began unfurling it as well, needing to watch for fouling as starboard jib line tightened and the port-side line unwound. The jib, snapping furiously, was gradually brought to heel by the tightening sheet, and again, I used its telltales as a guide. Then I stood, feeling Windswept balance herself, at long last driving over the sea as she’d been created to do.

  All the hours, the days and nights and weekends. The time spent in the barn, my life suspended for the boat - all for this moment. I thought of the countless times, as the hulls took shape, as they became recognizable as a boat, when I would put down my tools to sit where I now sat, looking forward over an imagined sea, wondering, always asking the same question; how will it feel?

  And now I knew. But how to describe it? The title of Kundera’s masterpiece rose to me; The Unbearable Lightness of Being. That was it exactly, wasn’t it? Unbearable lightness, as though my soul could take no more, was filled with all it could ever be filled with in this life, in this world. I was crying one moment and laughing the next as we leapt from wave to wave, as sounds of the boat moving through the ocean at sp
eed crashed like sweet cymbals about me. I thought of Rachel; she should have been here, she should have been here with me. She deserved it, so much more than I did.

  But I am here, love.

  I swung around, nearly letting go the tiller, looking behind me, all around me. What did I think I’d see? There was, of course, nothing there.

  Then her soft laugher.

  “Rachel?” I called. Then again, “Rachel?”

  I waited, but there was nothing more.

  I felt the tiller alive in my hand and looked down at it, examined it as if I’d never seen it before. I’d made it painstakingly from Birdseye Maple, spent far too many hours on it, really. But Rachel had encouraged me – what other single thing on the boat are you going to touch as much as the tiller? Make it so beautiful you love it every time you put your hand on it. And it seemed organic to me, warm, almost sentient. I thought of her every time I saw it, every time I touched it.

  I looked up at the full sails and the grandness of blue skies and ocean beyond.

  “Anytime, Raich,” I shouted. “I’ll be right here.” I laughed and turned back to driving the boat.

  Windswept had veered to starboard a bit, wind starting to build. Still, the tiller was light and effortless, and I let go of it for a moment just to see, and she stayed on course beautifully. The wind was up to ten knots, low teens in the gusts and I saw we were making eight knots, up to ten in the stronger gusts, and again, I shouted aloud with the joy of it.

  The design sacrifices I had made, the difficult construction methods and materials; all done with a nod to the god of speed. But still it was all theoretical – until now. To be able to sail nearly at wind speed had been the dream, and though this was only the first trial, she was doing it, and doing it easily. In voyaging terms, she had ‘long legs’ – the innate ability to make distance. She was a passage maker.