scarcely flawed by the gale, and landed on a beach where the salt
sea of the last tide lay frozen in long curving lines. And this
was one gale of three in the course of those eight days in the
sampan. Would it have been beaten on a ship? I fear me the ship
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would have gone aground on the outlying reef and that its people
would have been incontinently and monotonously drowned.
There are enough surprises and mishaps in a three-days’ cruise in
a small boat to supply a great ship on the ocean for a full year.
I remember, once, taking out on her trial trip a little thirty-
footer I had just bought. In six days we had two stiff blows,
and, in addition, one proper southwester and one ripsnorting
southeaster. The slight intervals between these blows were dead
calms. Also, in the six days, we were aground three times. Then,
too, we tied up to the bank in the Sacramento River, and,
grounding by an accident on the steep slope on a falling tide,
nearly turned a side somersault down the bank. In a stark calm
and heavy tide in the Carquinez Straits, where anchors skate on
the channel-scoured bottom, we were sucked against a big dock and
smashed and bumped down a quarter of a mile of its length before
we could get clear. Two hours afterward, on San Pablo Bay, the
wind was piping up and we were reefing down. It is no fun to pick
up a skiff adrift in a heavy sea and gale. That was our next
task, for our skiff, swamping, parted both towing painters we had
bent on. Before we recovered it we had nearly killed ourselves
with exhaustion, and we certainly had strained the sloop in every
part from keelson to truck. And to cap it all, coming into our
home port, beating up the narrowest part of the San Antonio
Estuary, we had a shave of inches from collision with a big ship
in tow of a tug. I have sailed the ocean in far larger craft a
year at a time, in which period occurred no such chapter of moving
incident.
After all, the mishaps are almost the best part of small-boat
sailing. Looking back, they prove to be punctuations of joy. At
the time they try your mettle and your vocabulary, and may make
you so pessimistic as to believe that God has a grudge against
you–but afterward, ah, afterward, with what pleasure you remember
them and with what gusto do you relate them to your brother
skippers in the fellowhood of small-boat sailing!
A narrow, winding slough; a half tide, exposing mud surfaced with
gangrenous slime; the water itself filthy and discoloured by the
waste from the vats of a near-by tannery; the marsh grass on
either side mottled with all the shades of a decaying orchid; a
crazy, ramshackled, ancient wharf; and at the end of the wharf a
small, white-painted sloop. Nothing romantic about it. No hint
of adventure. A splendid pictorial argument against the alleged
joys of small-boat sailing. Possibly that is what Cloudesley and
I thought, that sombre, leaden morning as we turned out to cook
breakfast and wash decks. The latter was my stunt, but one look
at the dirty water overside and another at my fresh-painted deck,
deterred me. After breakfast, we started a game of chess. The
tide continued to fall, and we felt the sloop begin to list. We
played on until the chess men began to fall over. The list
increased, and we went on deck. Bow-line and stern-line were
drawn taut. As we looked the boat listed still farther with an
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abrupt jerk. The lines were now very taut.
“As soon as her belly touches the bottom she will stop,” I said.
Cloudesley sounded with a boat-hook along the outside.
“Seven feet of water,” he announced. “The bank is almost up and
down. The first thing that touches will be her mast when she
turns bottom up.”
An ominous, minute snapping noise came from the stern-line. Even
as we looked, we saw a strand fray and part. Then we jumped.
Scarcely had we bent another line between the stern and the wharf,
when the original line parted. As we bent another line for’ard,
the original one there crackled and parted. After that, it was an
inferno of work and excitement.
We ran more and more lines, and more and more lines continued to
part, and more and more the pretty boat went over on her side. We
bent all our spare lines; we unrove sheets and halyards; we used
our two-inch hawser; we fastened lines part way up the mast, half
way up, and everywhere else. We toiled and sweated and enounced
our mutual and sincere conviction that God’s grudge still held
against us. Country yokels came down on the wharf and sniggered
at us. When Cloudesley let a coil of rope slip down the inclined
deck into the vile slime and fished it out with seasick
countenance, the yokels sniggered louder and it was all I could do
to prevent him from climbing up on the wharf and committing
murder.
By the time the sloop’s deck was perpendicular, we had unbent the
boom-lift from below, made it fast to the wharf, and, with the
other end fast nearly to the mast-head, heaved it taut with block
and tackle. The lift was of steel wire. We were confident that
it could stand the strain, but we doubted the holding-power of the
stays that held the mast.
The tide had two more hours to ebb (and it was the big run-out),
which meant that five hours must elapse ere the returning tide
would give us a chance to learn whether or not the sloop would
rise to it and right herself.
The bank was almost up and down, and at the bottom, directly
beneath us, the fast-ebbing tide left a pit of the vilest, illest-
smelling, illest-appearing muck to be seen in many a day’s ride.
Said Cloudesley to me gazing down into it:
“I love you as a brother. I’d fight for you. I’d face roaring
lions, and sudden death by field and flood. But just the same,
don’t you fall into that.” He shuddered nauseously. “For if you
do, I haven’t the grit to pull you out. I simply couldn’t. You’d
be awful. The best I could do would be to take a boat-hook and
shove you down out of sight.”
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20
We sat on the upper side-wall of the cabin, dangled our legs down
the top of the cabin, leaned our backs against the deck, and
played chess until the rising tide and the block and tackle on the
boom-lift enabled us to get her on a respectable keel again.
Years afterward, down in the South Seas, on the island of Ysabel,
I was caught in a similar predicament. In order to clean her
copper, I had careened the Snark broadside on to the beach and
outward. When the tide rose, she refused to rise. The water
crept in through the scuppers, mounted over the rail, and the
level of the ocean slowly crawled up the slant of the deck. We
battened down the engine-room hatch, and the sea rose to it and
over it and climbed perilously near to the cabin companion-way and
skylight. We were all sick with fever, but we turned out in the
blazing tropic sun and toiled madly for several hours. We carried
our heaviest lines ashore from our mast-heads and heaved with our
heaviest purchase until everything crackled including ourselves.
We would spell off and lie down like dead men, then get up and
heave and crackle again. And in the end, our lower rail five feet
under water and the wavelets lapping the companion-way combing,
the sturdy little craft shivered and shook herself and pointed her
masts once more to the zenith.
There is never lack of exercise in small-boat sailing, and the
hard work is not only part of the fun of it, but it beats the
doctors. San Francisco Bay is no mill pond. It is a large and
draughty and variegated piece of water. I remember, one winter
evening, trying to enter the mouth of the Sacramento. There was a
freshet on the river, the flood tide from the bay had been beaten
back into a strong ebb, and the lusty west wind died down with the
sun. It was just sunset, and with a fair to middling breeze, dead
aft, we stood still in the rapid current. We were squarely in the
mouth of the river; but there was no anchorage and we drifted
backward, faster and faster, and dropped anchor outside as the
last breath of wind left us. The night came on, beautiful and
warm and starry. My one companion cooked supper, while on deck I