Read Online Caught by the Sea by Gary Paulsen - Free Book Online Page B

didn’t really
see
them, didn’t wonder why they should be there. The birds knew there was a storm coming. Because they do no better in bad winds than a boat does—in some cases, worse—they were rafting up in the lee of Catalina to avoid the storm.
    And I sailed right through them and didn’t question it.
    Then there were the cruise ships. Two of them, nestled in the middle of the sea of birds, were also snuggled in the lee of the island. I actually sailed between the two ships and waved at them and kept going.
    In my defense, I didn’t have a weather fax on the boat. I’d been listening to the radio, which said there was a “. . . weak low moving into the area that would be dissipated by a strong high-pressure system just to the north.” The cruise ships had weather faxes and knew a whole lot more than I did.
    My own prediction, based on the VHF radio forecast, was that the wind might go up to fifteen or twenty knots, out of the west, but since I was working north with only a little west it would mean a tack for me, and the boat I was on, the Hans Christian, didn’t really get to sailing until it had fifteen or twenty knots of wind to drive it.
    But the birds knew. They always know. If they didn’t, there wouldn’t be any birds. And the cruise ships knew. Something big was coming, something big and very, very bad.
    I sailed blissfully up alongside Catalina Island, into the coming darkness. I turned on my running lights, sheeted the sails in a bit tighter and motor sailed. The wind had picked up a bit but I was moving in the lee of the island and most of what I was feeling was the dregs of what bled around the north end of the island and trickled south. The wind was straight out of the west and the island, twenty-five or so miles long, is made up of high hills and bluffs that stopped the wind and forced it to go over the top. I was so close in, less than half a mile offshore, that the wind also went over the top of me, and it was so cloudy and deep dark that except for an occasional light gust I had no idea there was much wind at all.
    My radio for communications and weather reporting was down at the navigation station, a table inside the boat, and with the engine running I couldn’t hear it. Under sail I could hear it well enough, and motoring under normal circumstances I would have gone down inside the boat to listen to the weather.
    But this night there was a truly amazing number of boats going back and forth, and I was too afraid of a collision to leave the boat on autopilot long enough to listen to the radio.
    So I worked my way north/northwest at five knots until I began to approach the north end of the island. It was extremely dark—even the whitecaps didn’t show very well—but at last I began to understand that something was amiss. I became aware of a constant roaring sound. At first I thought it was something wrong with the motor. But it was too loud.
    Finally I acknowledged that it was the wind. By now the roar was loud enough to be heard over the sound of the engine. But the sea was not alarming; it was almost flat, with no waves and no real swell, because I was tucked well into the lee of Catalina, almost in the kelp line.
    Still, I felt it was time to be cautious and I decided I would put the boat on autopilot, go up and throw a couple of reefs in the main, roll up the jib completely and deploy the much smaller staysail, and then see if I could turn the radio loud enough so that I could hear some of the weather channel over the sound of the wind and engine without leaving the cockpit.
    It was very nearly the last time I ever sailed a boat.
    All this time I had been working north at five knots and was approaching the end of the island. As I rolled up the jib with the lines from the cockpit I could see the north-end light ahead. I counted the flashes and timed them and knew from their position on the chart that I would soon be out of the lee. I had a harness and safety line on and I clipped the