by David Jurk
Back at the tiller, I pushed it over hard, but nothing happened. We just sat there, dead into the wind – ‘in irons’ as the old-timers would say. I started to take the easy way out - the electric drives - but stopped myself, determined to sail my out. And I did – by ‘backing’ the jib the wrong way, the wind pushed the bow around, swinging us to a point where the main caught and we took off like a rabbit. Reefed, I felt the difference immediately; less leaping about, steadier. A bit slower, but still making ten knots. A bit proud of myself and greatly reassured, I put us back on autopilot.
I settled down into the cockpit and time passed. Slowly, day faded to dusk, and I was enveloped in the sublime gloaming of the ocean evening, a nomad alone on the broad sea. Darkness came on slowly; the night rose behind me and insinuated itself across sky and water, compressing the glowing band of light into the west until it faded into nothingness. I brought out the Irish whiskey and sat quietly, thinking of sailing and the ocean, thinking of Rachel. The glass balanced on my chest, I laid back on the cushions and contemplated the stars, the smokiness of the whiskey a comfort to me. I propped the bottle against the coaming, to be able to reach it without rousing myself.
I opened my eyes to find the morning sky filled with wind-blown mare’s tails, spray from the sea blowing over the deck in sheets. I was soaked, chilled to the bone and sat up with some difficulty, shivering uncontrollably. My head was throbbing, and I kicked a bare toe against the whiskey glass that rolled on the cockpit floor next to me. I peered at it painfully. Obviously, I’d slept through the night.
God damn it!
The sea was lumpy and angry. Even with the reef in, we were over-canvassed, Windswept flying and digging, flying and digging. I felt disoriented and dizzy, and lurched about like a madman, needing a constant hand on the boat to stay upright.
“Ray,” I yelled. My throat was dry and painful. “What’s our position?”
“G’day to ya! We are one hundred forty-seven kilometers west of San Clemente Island. And by the way, mate, there’s a weather warning.”
No shit.
Still half-paralyzed with sleep and the painful remnants of the night’s excess, I had no choice but to act. The sea would not patiently wait for me to have some coffee and recover myself. In the circumstances – the sea and my complete lack of balance – I put on my harness and clipped into the jack line. As much as drowning might seem attractive at the moment, I had things I needed to get done. I immediately reefed to #2, reducing the main to roughly sixty percent of normal. But we became unbalanced from that, too much of our driving force now forward of the mast. That fix was simple – winch in the roller furler, shrinking the sail area. Windswept settled down, steadied. I stopped, on hands and knees against the cockpit seats, and looked around me at a sea that had gone malicious.
“Ray, autopilot on. Maintain course, and uh, give me the weather report, would you?”
“Auto on. And too right, mate - we’ve got a bit of a blow. Westerly cold front, probably severe squalls and lightning. Bob’s your uncle!”
“When?” He didn’t answer right away. Were there network issues? In a moment, though, his slangy Australian.
“She’s thirty clicks west of us yet, and mate, far too bonkers to do the Harry.”
I rubbed my throbbing head. I really needed to change this goddamned AI voice.
“What’s that mean?”
“Sorry, mate. It means there’s no way to avoid it. The front is long; several hundred kilometers. Narrow though; won’t last too long, but she’ll be a roller coaster.”
Thirty kilometers. I had a couple of hours to get ready for it, then. And step one of that was coffee. I went below, slowly, and sat with my aching head in my hands until it brewed, had two large mugs of it, then set about securing the boat. Day three, I thought – now we’re really going to see what ocean sailing was about. I’d imagined a storm at sea a hundred times; all sail down, huge waves, surfing out of control, rain and the roaring sea malevolent and deadly. Somehow in all those imaginings, I never had a hangover.
I put on my foulies and went back on deck, closing and latching the hatch. Then I took all sail down, switched over to the motors, keeping speed at about five knots. Ray, without being asked, began to show a weather system map on the monitor, and I could clearly see the vivid red arc of an approaching front. It ran from the southwest, a hundred and fifty kilometers south of us, to the northeast, stretching upward at least another hundred clicks. Ray was right; there was no going around it. But he was also quite right in calling it narrow, the red center was no more than one or two kilometers wide. Just hang on and get through it, I thought; let it get past us.
The seas continued to increase, the waves becoming steeper as the wind rose in velocity to Force Six, then in minutes to Force Seven. There was no clear pattern to them, or rhythm; they came from everywhere, setting us dancing as waves hit us from opposing directions. I slowed to three knots, just to keep some headway. It was nearly impossible to stand up, so I crouched on my knees in the cockpit watching the monitor; there was little more I could do than wait.
Within an hour, the horizon in front of us darkened and I began to perceive a distinct roll in the clouds before me, a tight horizontal buttress of coiled blackness that formed a line parallel to the horizon so straight it might have been drawn on the sky. Beneath and behind it the world was a place of violence incarnate; day turned to night, a night made up of dark green and grey, with sheets of rain descending to the sea like a curtain dropped across the ocean. This smoky tenebrosity spread to the south and north beyond view, lightening playing along its leading edge. We were still a kilometer from it, still in a world of partial sunshine. Light streamed from between broken clouds above, illuminating the face of the storm before me. The diffused and broken rays provided a frightening demarcation between light and darkness, illuminating our path forward toward the darkness ahead. It was the single most malevolent thing I’d ever seen in my life and I sat in utter fear, feeling no more consequential than a bit of straw. Truly, I felt as if my fate was now entirely a matter of luck.
Rationally, I knew Windswept could withstand a squall - and more. I knew that countless small boats had faced exactly what I now faced and after a brief tempest of wind and waves came through just fine. But that was all in my head; what was in my heart was pure terror driven by the sheer immensity of this thing; the black, animus of it – alive with lightning and nearly opaque sheets of rain. It looked like death come calling.
I was acutely aware that I was alone on the immense ocean and there was no place to run to, no safe harbor to seek shelter in. There was only the strength and sea-kindliness of this boat I’d built, and whatever skill and determination I could now muster as a sailor. That’s all; there was nothing else. If we – if the boat and I - couldn’t manage a journey through this squall, as frightening as it looked, we didn’t deserve to be on the sea. And abruptly a feeling of resentment rose in me, anger at this goddamn squall; anger that spread to include the plague, Rachel’s death and the stupid promise I’d made.
“Fuck you,” I screamed at the wind and clouds. “Fuck you twice.”
As the roiling front closed on us, I could see the wind before I felt it – the sea transformed before me into variegated arteries of foam, flattened as though by an enormous hand onto the surface of the sea. The waves had turned steel grey, their tops blown off into streaming tendrils. The air we sailed through became abruptly green-black, as though a switch were thrown, and the first sheets of wind-blown rain and ocean spray pelted against me.
Then with a shriek the wind hit, and I was knocked to the cockpit floor as Windswept shuddered, yawed, shuddered again. The feeling was like striking something impenetrable, something thickly viscous and willfully resisting, something with malign purpose. I laid on the floor where I’d landed, not only unable to get up but unwilling to even try. The jackline I was clipped into suddenly seemed puny, no stronger than string, and I believed with all my heart that if I st
ood up I would be blown into the sea.
For twenty minutes the world was a whirling maelstrom of water and wind, and the boat and I were flung like leaves in a storm drain. I considered trying to get to the rudder several times, but each time I rose to my knees, I was knocked down again by wind or the concussion of waves. The rain came down in such quantity, with such force, that at times I struggled to keep it free enough of my nose and mouth to breathe.
And then, as abruptly as it had come, it was past. Within the space of two or three minutes the wind dropped, the torrent of rain became a shower, then a mist. The waves stayed pronounced and steep, but the chaos of their movements subsided into a regular rhythm. I stood up, shaking and unsteady, and looked around.
Behind us now, the line of darkness spread eastward, light fleeing before it, a remnant of sunrise along the horizon, resisting the advance of darkness. For an instant, I thought I saw a distinct ruby corpus glowing in contrast to the molten sunlight, and I knew it was the damned nova, and for a moment I felt like Ahab, standing on the deck of the Pequod, watching the white whale.
It’s not a whale, I told myself. It’s nothing more than an astronomical event. Period. And I turned my back on it, looking out over the bow at the seas ahead of us. Enough to worry about in front of us, on the sea. Leave the heavens to the whatever force controlled them.
Suddenly aware of the low whine from the controller, I looked up at the monitor. Three knots, course two-seventy. Ray was still driving. Ah, I thought, the unflappability of software, and I had to laugh.
It was heavily overcast yet, with low scudding clouds, and had grown much cooler. Despite the foulie, beneath it I was soaked to the skin; the water had penetrated down my neck and been blown upward under the coat. I spent a few minutes, shivering badly, and walked the deck as we rose and fell in the waves, making sure nothing was broken. All seemed in good repair.
We’d survived our first test at sea, Windswept and I. There was little comfort in it – I’d spent the entire time like a child, curled into a fetal position, helpless and frightened. We’d stayed our course – with an AI system steering the boat. I’d just been along for the ride.
Perhaps so, I told myself, but surviving was surviving, wasn’t it? And the next time we were hit by a squall, it wouldn’t seem so terrifying; the time after that, even less so. This was still a new world to me, a world I would learn and – eventually – grow familiar with, more comfortable and confident in.
But never less wary.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE PHONE WAS ancient, made of heavy black Bakelite and attached to the wall socket with a fabric covered cord. Its ringing was jarring and insistent and I struggled to reach it, to answer it so that the god-awful clanging would stop. Yet even as I picked it up and put the heavy receiver to my ear, the ringing continued, on and on.
As I swam up out of sleep in the darkness, my fingers found the alarm icon on my phone and the noise mercifully stopped.
Groaning as the sleeping bag fell off me, I rolled to my feet and fumbled the galley light on. Arms outstretched to either side, fingers trailing along the overhead grab rails, I managed not to smack my shin as I passed through the bulkhead, making my way into the head. Once safely there, I did what I’d learned to do the hard way; sit down when I pee. No matter how calm it appeared to be, it was an inevitable truth that we would hit a wave, catch a gust of wind or sharply alter heading – always, always at the wrong time. And mopping up urine from the floor was a hateful job, so now I sat; manliness be damned.
Four days had passed since the squall; we’d covered more than 1000 kilometers in that time, averaging six point two knots, which sounds mediocre until you took into account two full days and nights of becalmed, during which we motored only during daylight, and then only at half-throttle. But even at that, we had come more than thirteen hundred kilometers from San Diego and when I zoomed out the GPS, the dotted green line that represented our track was more than a third of the way to Kauai.
The daily routine had already begun to feel like a way of life, ingrained in me so completely that I couldn’t remember what it was like to sleep more than two hours at a time. Six hours awake, sleep for two. Repeat. Then repeat again and again.
Rachel and I, during our days of planning and imagining life at sea had always returned to The Question – one we never tired of discussing; what on earth would we do all day on a voyage? Sit and read? Fish a little? Watch the sea? And now, I’d learned that the answer was quite simple; there wasn’t enough time most days to get everything done that needed doing, much less worrying about idle time. A line showed signs of chafe; it might be a thirty-minute fix or a four-hour fix, depending on which line and where it’s been rubbed. The rudder began to pick up vibration; we’ve sailed through kelp and I had to stop the boat, put mask and flippers on, tie a line around myself and dive down and untangle it; this took three hours. The roller furler jammed; I lost nearly an entire day dismantling it, searching through my store of parts for replacement bearings to get it working again - nearly an hour of which was spent searching on hands and knees beneath the workbench for an escaped screw. And on and on, always something, always, always. I’d lazed about the cockpit, relaxing and reading, exactly once since the squall.
And that was the routine maintenance. Along with the list of regular daily checks that kept creating work for me every day, there was another list of work – special projects that had less to do with maintenance than with long-term enhancements to my well-being.
The hydro generator, for instance, which provided charging of the batteries when the sun wasn’t shining. I’d been lucky, really, with the weather – there’d been the one squall and a few days of windless, rainy weather, but other than that, brilliant sunshine. I knew that wouldn’t last, and when I did get sustained clouds, really sustained, even the house batteries would be at risk of going dead. The hydro generator provided an alternative; a device that looked like a toy submarine, it was deployed aft, tethered with a cable. The speed of the boat through the water caused a prop on the generator to rotate, quite fast, which generated electricity that flowed through the cable into the charging system. Because the prop caused resistance in the water, we were robbed of a bit of speed, but if we needed juice, it was a worthwhile exchange. Especially since cloudy conditions tended to coincide with stronger wind – producing more boat speed in the first place.
Deploying it was simple; figuring out how far to play out the cable so it didn’t foul and then configuring the controller wasn’t – so it meant another afternoon spent with Ray looking up configuration advice on the global web.
And equally important - the radar proximity system. No effort at all to install – just turn it on; but again, it was a matter of tactical awareness of how the system operated that made the difference in its effectiveness. Get it right, it would pretty much let me sleep free of fear. Get it wrong, and I’d either be awakened repeatedly with false alarms or never get a warning at all.
With all this, though, it was still too easy to get caught up staring at the monitor as Ray displayed news pages off the web, sitting immobilized for far too long as images of the havoc taking place around the world flashed across it. The large cities where the early deaths occurred had followed exactly the pattern in China. Disease and death had radiated outward from the larger metropolitan areas and were now appearing in the next tier of cities; Boston, Syracuse, Cincinnati, Grand Rapids, Indianapolis, Iowa City, Flagstaff, Sacramento. School systems had shut down virtually across the country, and they weren’t alone; people had stopped going to work, fearful of a death sentence from an inadvertent contact with someone already infected. There were severe shortages of food and medicine occurring; starting in rural communities where drone delivery was not prevalent and truck carriers stopped operating. Ultimately this was spreading everywhere as even the drone operators stopped going to work. Amazon, Google, SpaceX, FedEx, Tesla and UPS – all the major infrastructure companies - attempted to shift their drone
fleets to the hardest-hit areas, but as more and more people tried to avoid any human contact at all, critical mass was soon reached. All the automation in the world wouldn’t work if there was no one to push the buttons, no one to manage the systems. And in an ironic twist, the scare over AI systems ‘taking over’ meant that fail-safes had built into machines; machines that could have kept on delivering even without people. But the law had caused software-imposed rules; no interaction with a human in twelve hours meant a self-imposed shutdown, and the humans had stopped coming to work.
Six days, I said to myself, six days. Our civilization is crumbling from within after six days. At this rate, what will ten days bring? A month? I was still two or three weeks from Hawaii – what would I find when I got there? I’d heard nothing of the islands.
But web pages and VidStreams were one thing and listening to live news on the radio another. I’d gotten into the habit lately of having Ray broadcast the radios through the monitor, so I could listen to global radio nets as I sat in the cockpit. They were eerie interludes, sailing on the empty sea, hearing anguished voices from around the world.
This morning, I’d brought my breakfast out on deck and caught a broadcast from the People’s Province, in the manmade archipelago of the South China Sea, surprisingly, in English.
“Broadcast of PRC, nineteen hundred Zulu, 27 February 2025. Greetings to all listeners from the enduring Meiji Jiao, South China Sea Province. Reports received today from Altay Prefecture, Xinjiang, confirm survival of several thousand residents in mountains outside the city. They are reporting scarce food and harsh weather, so deaths are continuing from sources secondary to Python virus.
There is debate among epidemiologists here regarding the likely survival rate within the PRC; some argue that the Xinjiang situation suggests overall survival may approach at least one percent of the population, leaving two million alive as foundation for the eventual re-emergence of our great nation. There is dissent, however, with other scientists insisting Xinjiang is a geographical anomaly. They assert a nominal genetic resistance, purely random within the population, of five thousandths of a percent, which would leave PRC with, theoretically, ten thousand people.
