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Overboard

Hank Searls

Dedication

To my first and last mate.

Part I - Day

PART I

Day

Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

She had vanished while he slept, sometime before dawn, one infinitesimal speck detaching itself from another under unseeing stars. And now as the sun rose astern, the southeast trades began to die so that his speed slackened and his search slowed.

He sagged nude at the helm, shivering in panic, alone with a cat 40 miles from the nearest island. In early apricot light, he was still backtracking. He forced himself to look at his watch. It was 5:15 A.M. Papeete time.

The ketch had been pounding southeast, steered by a wind-vane, bound from Bora Bora to Tahiti, now seventy miles away. In darkness at 3:12 A.M., he had discovered that she was gone. At that time he had been, roughly, fifty miles from Moorea upwind, with Raiatea forty miles to leeward.

When the first instant of paralysis had passed and he found that he could function, he had dropped the man-overboard flag, tied to a lifebuoy and a floating strobe light. He had acted instinctively, but perhaps prematurely. There was no reason to think that she was anywhere near. The strobe had begun to wink in his wake.

He had found himself whimpering in fear but capable of elementary calculations. He had reversed course instantly and set the wind-vane to steer the new heading. He avoided chaos, by force of will, long enough to plot a dead-reckoning position. And he searched for their logbook, hoping to find her last entry because it would help to pinpoint the time when she had gone. He could not find the book.

Uselessly, he had tried to call Papeete Radio, in halting French, and then English. There was no reply. He climbed to the spreader halfway up the mast.

First he had searched from aloft, letting the wind-vane steer. He had clung to ratlines under the yardarm for two hours, scanning by starlight the path they had sailed, straining against the dark and listening. The gibbous, lopsided moon sinking to the west was useless. It was not darkness, anyway, that would hide her when he drew near; it was the unceasing swells rolling in from the east. Even from twenty-five feet up the mast, the blinking strobe had been lost within minutes, astern among mountainous seas.