In Tonga we hunkered down on anchor while a cyclone blew
around us. In New Zealand we got sails down and anchored in another cyclone.
Off the coast of Northern California, eighty miles out to sea, our boom broke
in heavy winds and high seas, and Mark had to hammer it down and strap it to
the deck.
None of that was as bad as our night of hell in Avalon on
December 30-31, 2014.
We had gotten into our pajamas, finished watching a movie as
the winds picked up around 8 p.m. At 9 p.m. I went to bed and Mark had just
closed his eyes in the main cabin, when the first hit occurred. “Maria,” a
forty-two foot power vessel crashed down on our bow, once, then twice. We
scrambled up top to watch as it bobbed uncontrollably around in waves building
to six feet. The boat had lost the bowline to its mooring. Harbor patrol cut
the stern mooring line and the boat tried to power out. The last we heard was
that it was drifting toward the ferry docks. I dug out our foul weather jackets
and our suspender life jackets, put on a sweat shirt and shoes. Mark was
fending off “Yorkshire Rose,” another forty-two foot power boat that had lost
its stern line and was swinging wildly. He yelled to me to start the engine and
put it in forward. But that boat to our port side crashed into out port stern. Imagine
a huge vessel lifted high over your own boat, and there is no way to know if it
will hit you or not. Sometimes it does. All told over the next eight hours I
counted at least fifteen strikes, maybe more, port stern to starboard stern. Our solar stick
that survived the Baja Bash is bent to one side. The stern pulpit is crushed.
The bow pulpit is crushed, and all the lifelines sag. The anchor roller is
folded over the anchor. We lost our
stern anchor. The teak on the bow is splintered and fiberglass smashed. Our
Volvo engine ran for eight solid hours keeping us into the wind and away from
Yorkshire Rose or we would have been smashed to pieces. Mark fended off the
boat as much as he could without getting killed. He sat out in the freezing
cold while I “drove” our boat, a manner of speaking since it was only 3000 rpm
against winds that were clocked at 42 mph and waves washing over us.
At one point there was what sounded like a gunshot, and when
I looked around I saw “Susie Q,” a forty-six foot Hunter sailboat snap its
bowline. As it swung wildly, the Captain struggled to cut the stern line, but
that line fouled his prop and once free, he could not go anywhere. Again the
Harbor Patrol was there to get him tied to something. We couldn’t tell if it
was another boat or a mooring. In any case, it didn’t matter since it broke
free from that. In the morning it sank. Only its mast showed about ten feet
above the water. Its passengers had gotten off in the middle of the night.
Men screamed over the screeching wind. Women cried over the
VHF for help. Some people asked inane questions such as “When is it going to
stop blowing?” as if someone could just turn off a switch to calm the sea. Harbor
patrol boats mounted the rising waves throughout the harbor. One wave, probably
twelve or more feet completely swallowed our boat. The salt formed against our
windows and ports like Christmas snow. Three boats ended up on the shore.
Ambulance lights turned in the freezing darkness. There were ambulance lights
at the Casino and at the beach. There were Lifeguard boats out and Harbor
Patrol boats out. Everyone who could help were there. Yet for all that, it was
not enough.
There is no way to make sense of all of this. We can try to
understand and control the machinations of mankind, but there is no way to govern
the power of the wind and the ocean.
Mark hunkered near our enclosed cockpit, but he shivered
uncontrollably until the next moment came to fend off the other boat. I focused
only on that boat, that one enemy, trying to make sure we powered forward in
time to avoid another collision. If I looked around at the waves or other
heaving boats, I felt sick. I heard that people were vomiting all over; hands
broken; lives taken. Water shot up thirty or forty feet into the air as it hit
the rocks at the beach. We watched “King Neptune,” a sixty-five foot dive boat,
break loose. It was two or three rows in front of us, but it was directly in
front of us and coming our way. It was the boat Tim Mitchell, the Harbor
Patrolman who died, was trying to save. It was Mitchell who may have saved us when he helped us secure a second line to another mooring. News said Neptune crashed on Step Beach
which was behind us. Later the Harbor office told us it had disintegrated. Perhaps
we were concentrating too much on our own situation to see.
You don’t cry and whine through all of this; you struggle
on, you focus and concentrate on the simple tasks at hand. There will be time
to cry later when you survive it all, if you survive at all.
I can only thank Mark for all that he taught me about sailing
and for his own good judgment and wisdom. Everything he was trained to do as a
fireman, lifeguard came into play that night. And I can only thank my mother
for the strength I saw in her through many years of struggle that perhaps was
passed on to me.
Maybe it was around one or two a.m. that Patrol came by to
ask if we wanted off our boat. “No, we’re staying. We’re ok,” Mark shouted to
them. It must have been sometime after three a.m. that Patrol came by again and
Mark heard his name being called. Patrolman Orne Carstaphian, one we knew, and
others helped us tie another line to a mooring two away from us. One of our
lines had broken loose. Then they managed to get Yorkshire Rose to another
mooring where it was swinging free the rest of the night. All of this was
painfully slow against the wind and waves. But after watching another hour, we
finally felt that we could go below to get warm and perhaps sleep. To quote
Dylan Thomas, “I said some words to the
close and holy darkness, and then I slept.”
