The Vagabond. Frank Rautenbach

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СКАЧАТЬ of wind caught it. The boom jibed straight in their direction. They instinctively tried to stop it, but they were lifted right off their feet instead. They grabbed onto the sail, the various tangled ropes attached to the boom, and hung on for dear life. The boat rolled. The boom jibed … and cleared the gunwale. It rolled so far that their legs dipped into the ocean. Rolling back, the boom swung across the deck. They let go and fell onto the deck, shaking with fear. Knowing that, had they slipped off the boom, it would’ve been the last we’d see either of them.

      They still had a job to do, securing down the mythical preventer and tying down the sail.

      Miles and Eyeball found me hanging onto the helm where I cluelessly tried to figure out how to steer the yacht. Eyeball’s face was the picture of fear. He started crying. My head was spinning from the never-ending rolling and pitching. I never felt sick, but I was beyond exhausted.

      What should we do, they asked. I said, ‘Nothing. There’s nothing we can do.’

      I was an old hand at coping with traumatic events by learning to shut down my fear.

      Miles was furious. ‘You don’t care about anyone! You selfish Dutchman!’

      I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say.

      I couldn’t provide them with any assurance that things would be okay. I didn’t know how else to deal with the stress of our predicament and the trauma they were experiencing.

      I had what could be called ‘stupid peace’. The kind of peace that comes from naiveté. I was too young to die. Surely we just needed to wait out the storm and everything would work out. I had no idea of the grave danger we were in.

      The east coast of South Africa is a notorious coastline. For hundreds of years, it has been a graveyard for ships of all sizes. Violent storms, massive waves, deep water, treacherous currents and rocky reefs can suddenly create conditions that have seen the end of many a sailor.

      Miles started to calm down when he figured out that there was some logic to my thinking. He said he was hungry and made his way to the galley. He found some pork sausages and decided to fry them up. They smelled really bad, getting worse as he cooked them. The pungent smell of the oily pork sausages and the constant smell of diesel and fish didn’t help his cause. The exercise was near-impossible in the constant rolling and pitching. He took one bite of those semi-cooked porkies and that was the end of it.

      He came flying up onto the deck and doubled over the rail, feeding the fish, as he heaved away.

      It was way past midnight. The wind was relentless, driving the yacht further into the open ocean and down the coast. Waves kept battering us from all sides, sending shuddering shocks through our bodies every time a big one hit. I couldn’t take it any more. My head kept spinning and my body ached from the beating. I had not eaten anything since lunchtime the day before.

      I was exhausted, so I stumbled my way to the cabin in the bow of the boat, looking for a place to sleep. I lay down on a green tarpaulin that lay on the cabin deck. I was desperate for my head to stop spinning. It didn’t help matters that, every time the boat rolled, I could see clouds through the porthole. When it rolled back, I would see the water. I feared that the boat would turn turtle. I eventually passed out.

      When I woke in the morning, hours later, there was no movement, like the yacht was stranded on dry land. Feeling disorientated, I made way to the deck to see where the others were.

      It was overcast. There was not a breath of wind. I couldn’t see land anywhere. There was just water all around us. The ocean was a weird, green colour, glassy like a mirror and completely flat. I couldn’t make out the horizon; it had blended into the clouds.

      I felt claustrophobic, right in the middle of an open ocean. The eeriness of it all made it feel like we were in some kind of alternate universe. There was no sound. No bashing waves or rushing wind. No traffic sounds or dogs barking; all familiar sounds were absent.

      I found Eyeball and Miles sitting on the deck towards the bow of the boat. It seemed like they had forgiven me for ‘not caring’. I asked them if they knew where we were. They told me the captain said we were near Madagascar Reef.

      ‘What?’ I said it was impossible that we had blown all the way to Madagascar!

      They laughed and said the captain told them there was a reef called the Madagascar Reef near a little fishing village we all knew called Hamburg. It is roughly the halfway point between Port Alfred and East London. We had been blown about 80 kilometres down the coast overnight. We had no idea how deep into the open ocean we were.

      In the meantime, the captain was still trying to fix the motor.

      He had made several futile attempts to contact the port authorities in Port Elizabeth.

      That afternoon, the wind started picking up again. It was a southwesterly. The captain told us to brace ourselves. He suspected the calm we had experienced was probably just the result of being caught between two storms.

      How right he was.

      By early evening, the southwester was howling at gale-force strength. We were now being blown back up the coast. The only difference was that the waves were much bigger.

      A massive storm swell from Cape Town had reached us. The yacht felt like a toy boat as it slid down the monstrous faces of the giant swell. By now we had all found our sea legs and no one was getting sick.

      At about 11 pm, we heard Eyeball shouting excitedly from the deck that he could see land.

      Miles and I went up to the deck to join him. The captain popped his head out of the engine room. Eyeball pointed in the direction of what looked like city lights.

      We kept looking and realised it wasn’t land or a city.

      It was a massive freighter.

      We had been blown into the international shipping lane. The freighter? Heading straight for us. The old man panicked and asked me to get the signal light from a storage box in the galley. I plugged it in. Passing it to the captain, I went down again to turn on the switch.

      ‘Plug it in! Turn it on!’ the captain shouted. By now, I knew that it was probably not working.

      ‘It is plugged in and turned on!’

      The captain dropped his head.

      Yip, it didn’t work.

      We all stood on the deck watching this massive ship coming closer and closer. There was nothing we could do. We had no way of steering the yacht out of its way. We were at the mercy of the wind. I didn’t know what to think. What would it be like if this ship hit us? Would they even know? The captain tried the radio, once again, with no luck.

      With panicked looks, we kept staring at the foreboding hulk of metal.

      Then, suddenly, it dawned on us that it was busy turning and making its way into the open ocean.

      We all shouted, ‘It’s turning, it’s turning!’

      We never knew whether it changed course because the bridge had seen us or whether it simply followed the course it had been set. It came so close, however, that we could clearly see the roiling wake, as the freighter’s giant propellers churned up the ocean.

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