He was talking slowly, but moving fast, throwing foodstuffs out of the hold to clear the area around the hole. He had completely lost his accent, so I knew that he must be in pretty bad shape.
“That’s Christian of you,” I said while making my way to the forward cabin where we had stored the bunk beds when the boat was converted.
“Hey! Watch it! Coming from an Atheist like you, those are swear words, and now would not be a good time to have God mad at us.”
With three mattresses, several dismembered bunk beds, ropes, bed sheets, and some hose clamps, we managed a lash-up that seemed to be holding. No mean feat considering the way we were waist deep in saltwater, with a few more feet of plastic garbage bags containing who knew what floating on top of it. The way everything was sloshing around, and slapping against the ceiling, didn’t help any, either.
“The water is getting deeper,” I said. “We’d better see about getting the engine started.”
“You see what you can do about the engine. I’m going to go do something about the rigging,” he said with a crescent wrench in one hand and a fire axe in the other.
“So much for the joys of a unified command. Okay. See you later.”
After blundering around a bit in the engine compartment, I found the reason the engine hadn’t started when Adam first tried it. The problem was that I had turned the fuel off at the stopcock a few weeks earlier. I hadn’t figured that we’d be needing it until we got to the islands, and the fumes had been annoying. Now, however, the engine couldn’t be started because the air intake was under water, as was most of the rest of the engine. The same was true with the genset, which was farther underwater than the big engine. I did manage to engage the manual clutch that started the prop-shaft generator turning. It couldn’t put out enough power by itself to keep the electric pumps going, but it would stretch the time before the batteries went dead.
There was little more that I could accomplish down on the lower deck, so I went on deck to see if Adam needed some help. The wind topside during that gale was actually refreshing after slopping around in the chest-deep mess below. The boat, which had been broadside to the waves, was coming around with her stern pointed to the wind. Adam was coming back with the axe, his wrench having apparently gone adrift.
“Need any help?” I shouted.
“Nah. The shrouds parted company right from the beginning, and the forestay yielded to a little gentle persuasion,” he shouted, gesturing to the axe. “Everything is now dangling from the backstay, and it’s acting like a sea anchor.”
“So we’ll leave it be. There’s no hope with the engine, at least not until the water level goes down a few feet.”
“And it’s likely to get worse without the engine pumps.”
“Lovely. Adam, maybe my timing’s bad, but we might not get a chance to talk about it later. Can you tell me what in the hell happened? Wasn’t this boat supposed to be unsinkable?”
“Yeah, and the hull was supposed to be indestructible, but that’s the way things go. Still, we got a lot of plastic foam between the ceiling and the upper deck, so we may go awash, but she’ll stay afloat. The stuff we got in the garbage bags should help out with flotation, too. Still and all, it might be a good idea to get the inflatable life raft out and ready, and maybe The Concrete Canoe, too.”
“You still haven’t said what happened. I mean, it was your watch and all,” I said.
“I’m not really sure. The wind was from astern, and we were holding our own, when suddenly a freak wind knocked us on our side. Then, at just that very instant, the tip of the mast hit something, hard. A whale, for all I know, or a submarine. Or maybe a submerged rock, or something that was barely floating.”
“It couldn’t have been a rock. We’re four hundred miles from the nearest land.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Except that a little while before all this happened, I fired up the radar just for something to do, and there was this island up ahead,” Adam said.
“That’s impossible. It must have been some kind of ghost, or reflection off the storm.”
“Yeah, only it showed up on sonar, too.”
“Our navigation can’t be that far off. Besides all the different electronic stuff all agreeing with each other, you took a noon sighting with your sextant yesterday, and it agreed with everything else.”
“I know. Look, we got other problems just now. You’re still bleeding, so maybe you ought to do the light work and get the lifeboat out. I’m going to go down and work the manual pump.”
The safety equipment was mostly stowed in and around the aft cockpit, where there was always supposed to be someone on duty, as things had been originally planned, at least. I got out the life raft, tied it securely to the boat with the rope provided, and popped the carbon dioxide cylinder. She inflated like a champ. The raft was covered with an inflatable roof, and had room and supplies for twenty.
The Concrete Canoe was big enough for thirty in a pinch, but it was an open boat. Furthermore, it took at least two men to launch it, so I left it in its compartment aft.
There was a combination Global Positioning System and satellite transceiver aboard the raft that was supposed to send a distress message to whatever ships were in the vicinity. I hesitated, and then decided not to turn it on for a while.
We weren’t sunk yet, after all, and I wasn’t ready to give up on The Brick Royal just yet.
Rescuers have been known to forcibly rescue people who really didn’t need it. The feeling seems to be that if they had to go through all the bother of being heroic, then you had damn well better appreciate it and act humble. I once heard about a couple of mountain climbers who ran into a bad snowstorm while halfway up a slope. They were experienced men, well trained and well equipped. When the weather got impossible, they had pitched their tent, gotten into it, and then into their sleeping bags. They were quite comfortable, even though their tent was soon almost buried in the snow. As far as they were concerned, the snow was just more insulation. Their intent was to wait out the storm and then to proceed to the top of the mountain as they had originally planned.
Their rescuers, being much less well trained and prepared than the supposed `victims,’ and having had three of their members injured in the storm, had forced the recipients of their unwanted favors to abandon their equipment and to accompany them down off the mountain. The net result of this supposedly heroic rescue was that everyone concerned, victims and rescuers alike, became severely frostbitten. I had heard the story directly from one of the two unfortunate mountain climbers. A quarter inch of his nose was missing, along with all of the toes on his right foot.
Better to wait until we had abandoned ship ourselves, I thought, and were in the lifeboat before we called for help. If the Coast Guard arrived before we had abandoned ship, they might force us aboard their vessel, and then we’d likely lose The Brick Royal.
Our radar dome was mounted on its own mast, just in back of the cockpit. Despite the drain on the batteries, I turned it on, and by God, there really was something big dead ahead. I tried the forward-looking sonar, and it said the same thing. Switching both off to conserve juice, I tried the Global Positioning System, and it said we were four hundred miles east of the Line Islands. I tried our depth gauge, another kind of sonar, and it gave a depth consistent with where the navigation stuff said we should be. I turned everything off except the Chrysler windshield wipers and looked ahead. The clouds and spray to the west of us parted for an instant, and I saw what looked like a huge, multitiered city dead ahead.
“Adam!” I shouted over the intercom, “You’d better come up and look at this.”
His head came up through the hatchway beside me.
“Sweet Jesus! You know, I read about something like that once. It was supposed to be an optical illusion. They called it the Fata Morgana, after the witch in the King Arthur legends. There was a big write-up in Scientific American, about how the different layers of calm air made it appear. It made a lot of sense at the time.”
“There’s nothing calm about the air out here. We’ve got gale winds going! This optical illusion is showing up on radar and sonar. I turned them on for a little while, and I saw the same thing you did earlier.”