by David Jurk
What was the truth? The passage of time taught me to rely on facts, not faith – and the facts that I could reasonably assume to be true pointed to one vision; human society was in the throes of death. The world as I’d known it was ended.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
ON THE THIRD morning after the loss of the kite, I woke after a restless sleep to air thick with humidity and the sound of Windswept’s sails limply slatting, impotent in the dead air. We had reached the ITCZ.
In all the cruising research that Rachel and I had done, crossing the ITCZ was always a topic of intense argument; where to cross, what angle to cross, what time of year to cross. Well, none of that mattered much to me now; I was there, and I had no alternatives available to me for getting through it.
The sparkling skies I’d been so enjoying now gave way to a heavy, scudding overcast with dark, towering cumulus to the east, so completely motionless on the horizon they appeared to be grey mountains rising out of the sea. We were wallowing aimlessly, moving in slow, nauseating swings broadside to sullen waves. I bore it until noon, then finally had Ray drive with the motors on quarter throttle, which helped greatly to eliminate the god-awful motion. But with this overcast, the motors now became a short-term option; I’d have to shut them down within eight hours if the clouds didn’t dissipate. The dreary skies, the humidity, the worry over the batteries, the poor rest I’d had; all of it combined to leave me depressed and listless.
After struggling to generate any sort of energy at all, I finally gave up and went below. Dropping onto the settee, I fell at once into a deep, dreamless sleep from which I awoke two hours later clammy and uncomfortable. All of the bedding felt damp and heavy. I had little appetite, and even the cat – normally voracious – seemed lethargic and uninterested in her food.
By early afternoon, the cumulus had built into a roiling anvil-shaped blackness spreading across the sky. Still, there was no wind and with the last of our remaining electrical capacity we motored slowly through a suppressed ocean hardly more riled than a pond. Yet, something about the still air seemed foreboding, as if it we had come to some brief moment of pregnant equivocation before an explosion. I quickly began to prepare for what I thought must be coming, familiar now with the drill; go below and secure dishes, books, and instruments, check the portholes, furl and lower sails, check that anything that could move was tied down.
Abruptly, I could see it – a color and texture change on the ocean to the west, going from flat green to a corduroy sea of blue-black, the unnatural torpidity of the water transformed in an instant into a saw-toothed beast streaming foam. In the instant it took me to register the change, the wind hit and even braced for it, holding hard to the after stay, I was nearly knocked down. Windswept heeled, her leeward ama thrust deep, connectives and rigging groaning at the sudden stress. The mast shrouds hummed as though electrified. The day became, in an instant, as black as the sea and the rain came in sheets before I could even think to duck below. I had never seen rain come down so hard, so quickly, and I was instantly soaked - as wet as if I’d just jumped into the sea. I made my way to the hatchway, slipped below and slammed the hatch shut against the pull of the wind.
The cat met me there, complaining loudly, and I couldn’t blame her; she was as wet as I was, furiously licking herself dry between cries of protest at the suddenness of this disagreeable situation. Outside, the wind sounded like a blast furnace as it ripped through the rigging and screamed over the hulls. Windswept settled into a position just off the wind and seemed to hunker down, taking wind and seas just off her bow. I wondered briefly if I should raise the dagger board so that she didn’t trip over herself, but though the sea was ragged with whitecaps, the waves hadn’t had the time or sweep to build up into anything threatening, so I just left her to her own devices and settled onto the port settee with the cat. In time, we both relaxed despite the sound of the tempest raging about us.
In two hours, it was over. The mountains of cumulus went back to their painted position on the eastern horizon and the scudding clouds went back to forming their depressing shapeless ceiling over a surly, suppressed ocean. And the wind disappeared completely.
For three full days and nights, this pattern repeated itself, adding at times the most unrelenting downpours of rain imaginable. Along with the squalls I’d occasionally see vast arcs of lightning, their eye-searing brightness illuminating clouds and sea as if hell itself had come calling. The arrival of the squalls was always sudden and entirely unpredictable – there seemed no rhyme nor reason in their abrupt appearance. Sometimes, they came and left only hours apart; sometimes we’d sit under the sodden grey nothingness for an entire day or more, still as death, before I’d spot the telltale blackness sweeping across the sea toward us.
With so little sunshine, I was eventually forced to shut down the system entirely, surviving with only the house batteries to provide a little light to read by, and as the hours wore on, even those had to be shut down. And with that, we returned to the technology of a century before and read by a kerosene lamp, carried on board only because Rachel had insisted that the day might come when we’d need it. Of course, I’d laughed at her caution.
The last look I’d had at the GPS chart plotter had showed us with almost no progress southward at all since we’d entered the ITCZ, our only movement being the incessant westward drift that the north equatorial current imposed on us. It was frustrating and worrying; we had been making swift passage until the zone – coming within two days of the equator – and now, after four days of this, we were no closer.
Stuck below in a gloomy cabin, listening to rain drumming on the boat, I tried to pass the hours reading and, in some desperation, picked up Joshua Slocum’s account of his solo circumnavigation on board his sloop, the Spray. Reaching a point in his journey where he had his own encounter with the doldrums, my eyes fell on the following passage:
“On the following day heavy rain-clouds rose in the south, obscuring the sun; this was ominous of doldrums. On the 16th the Spray entered this gloomy region, to battle with squalls and to be harassed by fitful calms; for this is the state of the elements between the northeast and the southeast trades, where each wind, struggling in turn for mastery, expends its force whirling about in all directions. Making this still more trying to one’s nerve and patience, the sea was tossed into confused cross-lumps and fretted by eddying currents. As if something more were needed to complete a sailor’s discomfort in this state, the rain poured down in torrents day and night. The Spray struggled and tossed for ten days…”
Ten days - if I were to be stuck in this hellish purgatory for ten days, I thought I’d go mad.
So, when late that night, as I woke to do a watch, and emerged into the cockpit to the sight of stars along the western horizon, I hoped it augured a change. There had been no sun, no moon and no stars for five days; was this break in the endless overcast a sign that we’d found our way out of it at last?
And by morning, that small crack in the damnable overcast had widened into a broad, blue sky peppered with high, wispy cirrus and enough sunshine to begin reviving the batteries. And at last, at last – it brought wind, weak and fretful at first, then gaining in strength, still from the northeast, still the trades of the northern hemisphere.
Though I cared only that we had wind and not one whit from which direction it came, I knew that had it been south-easterlies, I could well and truly say we’d found the southern hemisphere – whether we’d made it past the equator or not. Still, I felt reborn with the sun warm on my skin and Windswept driving forward once more, sails full, spray heaving from her bows. The grey, sullen seas gave way to a bright boisterousness of blue and white and the sheer joy of being alive rose in me like a song.
For some time as we romped along, I steered manually at the tiller, feeling the lightness of the balanced boat and the competing tug of hulls. It was immensely satisfying with no electrical systems active to use the magnetic compass, to feel again that I was twenty, guiding my s
mall sloop across Lake Michigan; set my heading on the compass, pick out some cloud or other landmark and steer for it, every few minutes verifying that our heading stayed true. It was the old dance of the helmsman, lost in the world of electronic charts, autopilots and GPS systems. And now, soon, to come again. And while there were many wonderful things about moving about an ocean guided by satellites, I felt – at least at the moment – that it wouldn’t be an entirely bad thing to sail as we used to, with our hands and eyes and instincts.
Yes, but an hour passed and the soft beep I heard from Ray informed me that the batteries had been refreshed to their threshold and the system was alive again. The monitor flashed back on and there it was, the dotted line of the equator appearing not ahead of us to the south, but behind us to the north. We’d somehow crawled our way into the southern hemisphere after all; it was the wind that stubbornly refused to acknowledge it. No matter, soon enough they would and in any case, north or south, we were sailing again.
But there was something I needed to attend to; you don’t cross the equator at sea if you know what’s good for you without a nod to King Neptune. And after the last few days, I’d seen quite enough of his ire. So, I went below and brought up a wee dram of Scotch. I first dipped a finger in it, holding it out to the cat to tentatively lick; she sneezed, then turn her back to me, insulted that I’d treat her so cruelly. Then toasting my deliverance, bowing with a nod of my head at Neptune’s forbearance, I held the little glass to my lips and knocked back the Scotch. We were twenty-five hundred kilometers from Kauai and had crossed the equator. Bless us, oh King Neptune; guide us in safety across thy grand domain.
Perhaps it was the meagerness of the dram, or perhaps Neptune was busy, but the trades didn’t hold. I guessed that we were simply too close to the equator yet to have reached a point of consistency, because over the next two days they started and stopped with maddening capriciousness. But critically, the majority of the overcast and the squalls stayed north of us, and we soon replenished a full charge on both sets of batteries, enabling us to maintain progress when the lulls hit.
Mid-morning of the third day past the equator, the sky and sea brilliant and all tasks attended to, I finally pulled out the fishing gear, fully intent on adding fresh fish to my diet. Aside from simply dragging a lure behind us, blindly hoping we cross paths with some edible creature who finds the thing of interest, I knew to scan the sea for signs of bait fish, for the larger ones – the ones I wanted – would be there feeding. I had the glasses out, scanning the sea, when I was quite amazed to see a low, darkly green line on the horizon, faint in the distance. At first, I assumed it was an outlier of the Southern Gyre Garbage Patch – probably just some large plastic objects broken away from the main cluster; an arm of junk floating together a few kilometers long. I kept expecting to see the line of green dissolve into a spectrum of rainbow colors as we neared, but it stayed stubbornly intact, growing into the unmistakable background wall of foliage and forcing me to accept the truth of what I was seeing. It was exactly what it could not possibly be – an island.
Completely addled, I crouched before the monitor and stared at the chart, increased the zoom and scrolled the view throughout an area of two hundred square kilometers. Nothing, absolutely nothing, but ocean. This was a region of the south Pacific that had no land at all; no islands, no rocks, no nothing. I looked up again at the green island growing before us; impossible but true.
I went back to the bow with the glasses and examined it carefully as we closed at a steady ten knots. It was substantial; clearly surrounded by a low reef, I saw the white sand of a narrow beach and beyond that the heavy foliage of mature trees and a confused wall of bushes and saplings. I finally walked slowly back to the cockpit.
“Ray,” I said slowly, uncertain what to ask, “Uh… do a system check.”
“Aye, aye,” and in seconds the response. “All systems are nominal.”
“How many satellites is the GPS system receiving?”
“Five satellites being received consistently, one intermittently.”
All right, then. We somehow either weren’t where the GPS said we were, or there was an island here – and a reasonably large one – that had never been discovered before. Both alternatives seemed equally ridiculous. The GPS had four or five satellites, enough for a position calculation, and how likely was it that in all the years of ocean travel I was the first to come across this island in the middle of a route from Hawaii to New Zealand? Something else had to be happening. I sat down in the cockpit and stared at my toes.
Think, goddamn it.
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
I agreed entirely with Sir Conan Doyle. So, what was the impossible here, and what the improbable? It seemed to me after a moment’s reflection that it was entirely impossible that I’d discovered an island of this size. So, however improbable, we weren’t where I thought we were. We weren’t where the GPS said we were. I looked at the monitor.
“Ray, can you get a confidence factor for the GPS position being reported?” I seemed to remember that each satellite sent a probability along with its position signal; based on a variety of variables, it would be something along the lines of ninety-nine point something. What else was there to check?
“Aye, captain.” A brief pause, and then, “The position confidence varies for all five satellites currently being received, though they are within a standard deviation of each other. The average is sixty-two point three percent.”
I went numb. What Ray was telling me was that the system called itself nominal because it still had adequate satellite reception. That didn’t take into account that the satellites themselves were very confident in what they were reporting. It meant that there was roughly a one-in-three likelihood that they reported our position somewhere we weren’t. In terms of our current situation, it meant that knowing where we were – other than generally in the Pacific Ocean south of Hawaii – was, in fact, largely a guess. I sat heavily down in the cockpit, too astonished to have a lucid thought in my head.
But one fact impressed itself on me almost at once; we could not continue to sail when we only had a sixty-two percent likelihood of knowing where we were at any given moment. I also had to begin considering the impact of unreliable satellite data in general; it wasn’t merely a matter of our position on the GPS map. I’d been using the GPS to give me both the time and our speed – for a sailor, these are critical data; if I couldn’t depend on the GPS, I’d need to find alternatives.
I decided to drop and stow all sails and approach the island using the motors only, being very mindful of the depth meter. Without knowing where we actually were, I had no way of knowing which close-scale chart to use – assuming Ray even had the right one in memory. We were on a heading of two hundred and fifty-five degrees, magnetic, approaching the island from the northeast, the wind directly aft.
As we closed, I began to fill in details; the beach was of a particularly lovely white sand, behind which the wall of dark green trees and brush proved too thick to see more than a meter or two into. The island seemed as flat as the proverbial pancake, with no elevation showing anywhere. The reef surrounding the island was so low as to be beneath the surface of the water in most places, obvious only by the change in the tenor of the waves as they encountered it. This represented real danger to Windswept; even with her shallow draft she’d easily ground herself if we put ourselves in the wrong position, so I was very careful to stay well outside it.
As we came within fifty meters of the outer edge of the reef, I swung us to a southerly heading, increased speed to eight knots, and made for the southern tip, far off in the distance. As we progressed, I watched carefully, but little in the terrain changed, and I saw no signs whatsoever of any habitation, or evidence at all of people. Nor, regretfully, did I find any break in the reef that would have allowed us ingress to the island itself, to a safe anchorage inside the protecting reef.
Out of long habit, I glanced at the monitor to check our position and the time before reminding myself that both were a lie. What could I depend on? The knotmeter was mechanical, which gave us our speed through the water, and of course, the magnetic compass. Those weren’t enough.
Staring at the passing line of white sand I knew with sudden clarity that it was time to return to the past. I had Ray put on the autopilot and went below, rummaging around in the forepeak tool lockers for several minutes before I found the four small cedar boxes I was looking for and brought them back on deck; all held ancient brass instruments that I’d assumed would never see the light of day. All were on board because of Rachel’s insistence.
I sat in the cockpit and unpacked them. The most important, the sextant, I repacked and set aside for later. The others – a chronometer, a hand bearing compass and a taffrail log – I found places to store close to hand in the cockpit; from this moment forward, they were indispensable.