An email from a friend caused me to reread A SINGLE WAVE which I have not done for a long time. I remembered all the experiences, but I did not remember all the details. Following my own advice that if I say something now that differs from what I have written in the past, believe what I have written in the past, I find for example that CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE was in three 50+ knot gales, not just the one around Tahiti. I had also forgotten that the late Patience Wales, long time editor of SAIL, wrote a very kind forward to A SINGLE WAVE in which she said among other things, 'This chapter, Swimming, is perhaps the most moving in the book.'
There is a 'Swimming' on the articles page of my main website, but it is the shortened version I wrote to be published in SAIL soon after the sinking of RESURGAM. The full story is only in A SINGLE WAVE. You could do worse than read A SINGLE WAVE. Immodestly you could hardly do better. So here is the full 'Swimming'. It is long. So was twenty-six hours in the Atlantic Ocean.
16 Swimming
I pulled the plug at midnight.
Specifically I removed the transducer for the boat speed indictor which left a 1¼ inch hole through the hull just forward of the mast. A column of water shot through this hole two feet into the air and began to fill the cabin. I straightened up and watched the water for a moment before nodding my head once, a single dip of my chin, then turned and climbed into the cockpit.
Five miles to the west the lights of Fort Lauderdale reflected across low waves. It was a pleasant, starry August night; the wind light and warm. I sat quietly as the sloop continued to sail east, away from the land.
After an hour I leaned forward and looked through the companionway. Several inches of water covered the teak and holly cabin sole and splashed onto the lower berths when the boat rolled. The level was disappointing. I climbed down and opened the locker in the galley where Jill kept pans. Warm sea water swirled around my ankles as I pulled pans from shelves, exposing the engine’s water intake. From the tool locker above the galley I took a screwdriver and stooped to loosen the hose clamp around the seacock. Even without the clamp, the hose remained stuck to the seacock. I had to pry it off with the screwdriver. Another column of water, this one 1½ inch diameter, began to enter the cabin.
By habit I started to return the screwdriver to its proper place. Jill, when she first began to live and sail with me, had protested the I was too particular. In time she came to understand that it is necessary for everything on a boat to have its place where, even at night in bad weather, it can be found quickly. But no longer. I dropped the screwdriver, heard a splash, and climbed back up on deck.
With the increased flow, the sloop began to sink more quickly, but still another hour passed before I felt the change: a lurching out of synchronization with the waves, a heaviness, a slowing of motion, as though she were tiring.
There was no sound from the cabin now that the intakes were below the rising water, and I peered through the hatch again to be certain. The level was much higher, covering the lower berths. Cushions were floating, papers, the tea kettle we had bought a few months earlier in Uruguay. Out of curiosity, I turned the ignition key for the diesel. Nothing. The batteries and electrical system were below water. The engine was almost brand new. It had less than two hundred hours on it. I had thought when we re-powered in Australia that this engine should last the rest of my lifetime, and so it would. I gave a small smile.
Behind me shore lights had fallen below the horizon. Only the loom was visible, a glow stretching fifty miles from Miami to Palm Beach.
I sat calmly, a tall, lean figure, expressionless once the smile faded.
At 3:00 a.m. on Saturday morning, the sloop’s bow dipped beneath a wave as it had millions of times in the nine years I had owned her. But this wave was different. Although only a foot high, it was RESURGAM’s last. Her bow did not break through doggedly or triumphantly as it had in every latitude from beyond 50°N to beyond 50°S, in survival storms to gentle trade winds, from the English Channel to the great Southern capes. This wave ran up the deck to the mast, before hesitating for a moment, as if surprised by its temerity and success.
The bow sank lower beneath the water; the stern rose several feet into the air. In the steeply inclined cockpit, I pulled myself to my feet, stood, and glanced about the deck one last time. I had made voyages other people had thought were impossible, but which I had believed I could accomplish. Now as I stepped over the lifelines into the warm ocean to die, I was about to do something even I considered impossible.
RESURGAM’ stern loomed above me, echoing scenes from newsreels of ships sinking in World War II. No home port was shown. My home waters, I had written, were the world.
The rudder and propeller were exposed. I noticed a gooseneck barnacle on the strut that I had missed when I snorkeled to clean the bottom a week earlier in Key West, after the completion of the passage from Puerto Rico in a year that had seen us cover fourteen thousand miles in seven months. I thought: I miss New Zealand. I miss the Southern Hemisphere. The North Atlantic has always been my least favorite ocean. That barnacle made a mistake. It will not survive the depths toward which RESURGAM is headed. A thousand feet of water beneath us. I made a mistake too. I never should have returned. All the decisions seemed reasonable when they were made. Yet they brought me here.
RESURGAM’s stern rose higher, then slid down and disappeared. A few ripples. A few bubbles. No suction. Some loose objects, which had been familiar possessions, but were now strange and foreign in black water, drifted around me. I swam a few strokes to get clear of them. Everything I owned, except for the t-shirt and shorts I was wearing, and the elephant skin billfold I had put in my pocket, thinking that the plastic credit cards might be the only way to identify the body in the unlikely event it was discovered, was gone. Everything I loved lost within a few hours.
I pulled the eyeglasses from my head and let them drop from my fingers. I could not see through the wet lenses, and I would not need them any more. Stars became diffuse fuzzy spheres. With small movements of my hands I turned and faced out to sea. I leaned back in shimmering water, stared up at the full moon, and let my mind wander.
I had sailed so much that I was always meeting myself, crossing tracks on charts from different years. Because I did not consider that I had spent much time in the Caribbean, I had been surprised when I pulled out the Caribbean chart on the passage a few months earlier from Rio de Janeiro to St. Thomas to see how many small penciled x’s marked noon positions from past voyages. One line entered from the east from Portugal to Antigua in 1984; another from Portugal to the British Virgin Islands a circumnavigation later in 1989; then a line from Antigua to the British Virgin Islands in 1984; and one from the British Virgin Islands north of Cuba to Key West in 1989. All these I had made alone.
There was the track from Roadtown in the British Virgin Islands south to Venezuela, where I had sailed with Jill when she joined me in 1984; and along the coast, then out to the offshore Venezuelan islands, to Bonaire and Curacao and Panama, where she had unexpectedly left for the first time; followed by my track alone disappearing off to the west to the Marquesas. A line ran south from Key West through the Yucatan Straits to Panama and west to Tahiti that Jill and I had made in 1990 when we were reconciled after a fourteen month separation.
With the increase in the price of charts, I kept them and marked RESURGAM’s position with ever lighter and smaller x’s. Several hundred charts were on board RESURGAM at the end. When Jill had returned and we decided to sail to Australia, we had to buy only one new chart, and that was the first one around the west end of Cuba.
There were so many places, so many images. I had been in almost constant motion for two decades. When I was falsely jailed as a spy in Saudi Arabia in 1982, the police required me to account for my past travels. I discovered that I had not been in one country for more than two months during the preceding four years. Memories clicked through my mind like slides on a projector: Portugal where Jill and I first met on Christmas Day in 1983 and spent our third wedding anniversary in 1988; South Africa; Sydney, Australia, the single place we had stayed the longest; Lord Howe Island; Bali; Europe; South America; Namibia; New Zealand. The images crowded in too fast, blurred, stopped. My mind became a blank screen.
I was calm. I was Socrates after drinking the hemlock, waiting for the numbness to move upward from my feet, asking, “Why should I fear death? For when I am, death is not. And when death is, I am not.”
Courage did not enter into this. I had lived a certain way, and it had brought me here. ‘Live passionately, even if it kills you, for something is going to kill you anyway.’ I had written; and now it would. ‘Intensity, not duration.’ I had written; but against all odds I had lasted fifty years.
A little wave, the first of many, too many, splashed into my face. Sputtering I let my legs drop and came upright in the water. I pictured RESURGAM sailing through the depths below me, her new mainsail still set. I wondered how long it would take her to reach the ocean floor. I had wanted her to be my last boat and Jill to be my last woman. Now both were. But I had not expected it so soon.
That mainsail was less than a year old. It would easily have carried me though another circumnavigation. The engine, less than two years old. The dodger and GPS and windlass were new in New Zealand the preceding December. The bilge pump had been purchased only a few weeks earlier in Puerto Rico.
I let myself turn slowly until I faced the loom of distant shore lights. I am a good swimmer, but I had never tried to swim so far. It was at least ten miles, and I had never swum a mile at a time. There is nothing for me there, I thought. I deliberately turned and swam a few stokes further out to sea, but then I stopped and leaned back and floated. I thought of RESURGAM again. What will it be like down there? I speculated idly about how far my body would sink, and how long it would be before I weakened and drowned. Staying afloat was so easy.
Another little wave lapped over my face. I came upright. Treading water was more comfortable than floating. I looked at my watch and was surprised to discover that it was already 4:00 a.m. I had been in the water for an hour, which seemed only a few minutes. Less than a week earlier Jill and I were snorkeling near Key West and I had gotten out of the water, slightly chilled, after only forty-five minutes. I undid the watch strap and let the Casio I wore at sea fall away. I was beyond time. In the moonlight the water was clear and the watch remained visible as it sank. My hands, moving slowly near my waist, were pale.
I didn’t know what I expected, perhaps weakening, loss of consciousness, oblivion; but nothing was happening. I was in England in 1983 when Rob James drowned off Salcombe Harbor. But that was February. Hypothermia. You would not last long there. Or off the Horn. I thought of the modern Greek novelist and poet, Nikos Kazantzakis, who imagined Ulysses leaping into the Southern Ocean after walking the length of Africa, striking out for the South Pole. I had long expected that I would die in the Southern Ocean. ‘The ocean waits to measure or to slay me. The ocean waits. And I will sail.’ I had written. And I had sailed and was still here.
This was taking too long. I had possessed everything I wanted materially: the boat; the books; the music; and a few luxuries: in port we ate off Wedgwood and drank wine from crystal. I had the boat exactly the way I wanted it. I had the woman I wanted. “It is the end of an era,” I had said to Jill as we approached the entrance to Fort Lauderdale only an unbelievable three days earlier. I had meant that the epic phase of my life was over. I was fifty. I had done enough. Loved enough women. Sailed enough. Set world records. Done things no one had ever done before. Written words that deserved to be remembered, but wouldn’t be. Returned to Cape Horn and found it unchallenging. Without taking a breath, I lowered my head beneath the sea and swam down.
Only ten or fifteen feet beneath the surface I ran out of air. Instinct, what I call the animal, took over. The mind can say, ‘You are in a hopeless situation. I do not fear death, only the suffering along the way.’ But the animal always wants to live, and my animal is strong. It had kept me alive for five months in a damaged boat in the Southern Ocean. It had kept me alive for twenty-five thousand miles in an open boat. It had kept me alive while drifting three hundred miles in an inflatable in the South Pacific. Some people said my open boat voyage expressed a death wish. They did not consider that my first circumnavigation was for me a baseline. I sailed the open boat because I wanted to do something even more difficult. The panicked animal struggled back to the surface.
Gasping, sputtering, I slowed my legs and arms. A wave curled over my head. I coughed water. I was getting tired of these waves. They were higher now, though still only one to two feet. The sky was lightening to the east. I turned. Either because it was lost in the oncoming dawn or because I was drifting farther offshore, the loom of shore lights was no longer visible. I let myself rotate slowly. In every direction was only the ocean. I stopped myself facing east, and calm again, quietly, dispassionately, observed what I expected to be my last dawn.
I treaded water and floated. An hour or two passed. Perhaps more. I continued to be amazed at how easy it was to keep afloat. I had been swimming for at least five or six hours, but felt completely relaxed.
I thought of the pioneer French aviator, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, writing about his attempt to walk away from a crash in the Sahara. Dying is simple, a natural act, said Saint-Exupéry, as he struggled not to die. He survived the crash, only to die flying in World War II. I wondered what Saint-Exupéry thought in his last seconds, if he had time to think at all. Dying might be simple. Drowning might be the sailor’s death. But the animal wasn’t having any.
Low mist turned into fog. For the first time I shivered. Perhaps this was the beginning of hypothermia. I knew that heat is lost by movement. I was not moving very much. Slow strokes with my hands; an occasional kick with my legs. I was seeking neither life nor death. I was simply waiting.
Something, a darkness in the fog, caught my eye. As I watched it became a small fishing boat. Instinctively my spirits soared. I heard the low throbbing diesel. It would pass close. Nor more than twenty yards away. The engine became louder. I was wearing a yellow t-shirt. I pulled it over my head and tried to wave it in the air, but the shirt was sodden and heavy and stuck to my hand.
When the boat was close, I yelled, “Help!” once. The boat puttered steadily on. I watched it fade into the fog and disappear. “All right, don’t help,” I said aloud in a normal conversational tone, struggled back into the t-shirt, and turned back toward where a bright spot in the fog indicated the sun and east.
My instinctive reaction to the fishing boat came as a surprise. But there was nothing for me ashore. Everything really was gone. And death is not optional. If not now in the next few hours, then sometime in the next ten or twenty years, probably from heart disease or cancer, more painfully and with less dignity. ‘That is the trick: to give up a few good years to death before it is too late.’ I had written in a poem about the death by cancer almost twenty years earlier of the man I thought of as my grandfather. Recalling the words calmed me. I was glad the fishing boat was gone, glad to be alone again. Of the six or seven years I had spent at sea, four or five of them had been alone.
While I slowly treaded water, my movements mechanical, my mind wandering, the fog dispersed. I became aware of the sun hitting my face. The sky was blue and clear. I turned toward the west. No land was visible; but even without my glasses I could make out the fuzzy outline of a ship heading north several miles inshore of me. The Gulf Stream would have carried me a few miles north and perhaps east. Land must now be more than fifteen miles away.
An isolated image flicked though my mind of us having lunch in Rio de Janeiro on the terrace of the restaurant at the top of Corcovado, just below the statue of Christ, while the city appeared and disappeared through clouds below and humming birds sipped from wild flowers beside our table. I could feel the sun burning my face. No need to worry about skin cancer any more, I thought; but I pulled the back of my t-shirt over my head as a kind of cowl. Evaporation from the damp cloth was soothing.
The sun was almost directly overhead. I had been in the water for nine hours and was only a little tired. The wind had increased to ten knots. The seas were still low, but dotted now with scattered white-caps. More and more of them splashed into my face. I was not hungry, but thirst was becoming a torment, as it had been when I drifted in the inflatable for two weeks in the Pacific. I felt something brush my leg, then a tentative nip. My leg kicked out automatically. I looked down and saw several small fish scurrying away. “Not yet,” I told them. And then, having started, I continued aloud, “How the hell long is this going to take?” The words provided an impetus, and the animal ran with it. Before I knew what I was doing, I had turned and started swimming west.
I stopped. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked myself. ‘There really is nothing for you there. RESURGAM, Jill, everything, really is gone.’ That truth was undeniable. The response came not from reason, but from instinct, from thirst, from the saltwater rawness in my face and mouth. I did not think I could reach shore, but I could no longer endure waiting for the sea to take me.
I swam the crawl for few minutes, before turning to side-stroke, then backstroke, then crawl again. It felt good to swim. After that first instinctive burst, I swam smoothly. My muscles enjoyed the movement. The last time I had swum much had been almost two years earlier in the fifty meter pool in Suva, Fiji, where I usually did sixteen laps. And now survival was at least thirty times farther away, plus a current carrying me north or northeast while the coast of Florida fell away to the west. It did not matter. ‘I might not need to reach land,’ I thought. ‘I might be seen by a ship. Besides I need goals, and now I again have one.’
Swimming helped divert my mind from my thirst, but my body remembered. It was as though that earlier thirst when I was adrift in the Pacific was indelibly imprinted in each dying cell.
Pausing every once in a while to float and rest for a few minutes, I swam, chasing the sun west through the afternoon. The wind increased a few more knots, but remained moderate. Waves pushed me toward land; but more of them crested and filled my mouth, which was becoming a raw wound. Breathing was easier on my side, so gradually I found myself swimming sidestroke more than the other strokes combined.
Sometime in mid-afternoon I saw a sail to the south. I stopped and treaded water, hope rising. At first the sail seemed to be heading for me, but as it came closer I saw that it would pass a half mile to the east. I watched silently as the small ketch sailed north. I thought I saw someone in the cockpit, but without my glasses and with my eyes raw, I was not certain. I felt a sense of loss when the sail disappeared.
This was the longest rest I had taken since noon, and for the first time I realized that I was tiring. I had been in the water about twelve hours. I had not eaten for almost twenty, or had a drink since before midnight. I was surprised that I still had to pause to urinate occasionally. I did not have much fat to convert into energy. A cramp seized my stomach. I reached down and pressed my hands against my abdomen until the pain eased. It was more hunger than a muscle spasm. A growl from the animal: “Feed me!”
My hands felt strange. I raised them above the water. They looked like something from a horror movie. The skin was not just puckered, but seemed to have come loose from the muscles. As tentative as the fish, I touched the back of my left hand with the fingers of my right, half afraid the skin would peel away. For the first time I thought of blood and sharks. The skin moved peculiarly, but remained in place. Fear gave the impetus I needed to resume swimming.
Gratefully I observed a line of clouds move in from the ocean and block the sun. Heavy rain began to fall behind me. I stopped and waited, hoping for a drink of fresh water; but the shower passed to the south. When I resumed swimming I discovered that the sun was completely obscured and I was confused. The wind had increased to eighteen or twenty knots and the waves were higher and steeper. In quick succession three waves broke over me, leaving me coughing and gasping for breath. The waves dictated my course. Despite a probable wind shift with the clouds, I had no choice but to swim before them.
The waves seemed to be helping me. I thought of body surfing off San Diego and Bali. A few years earlier I had been caught by a riptide off Bali. People ashore, including Jill, had watched helplessly as I was carried toward Java, but eventually I reached the beach. Now I did not swim hard. I knew I wasn’t getting anywhere. More and more waves crashed over my face. Each was a knife cutting my eyes and mouth. I tried to keep my eyes closed; but found that I changed direction almost immediately. And I had to keep my mouth open to breathe. Gargle twenty thousand times with salt water.
‘Ninety-eight. Ninety-nine. One hundred.’ I counted strokes just as earlier after EGREGIOUS capsized in a cyclone in the Tasman Sea I had counted buckets full of water. Without thought, without any attempt to reason why, without considering hope or hopelessness, I continued swimming.
The clouds and wind lasted until nightfall. I was swimming only twenty strokes sidestroke, ten back, then five crawl. My right elbow hurt, and I did not have much power in any stroke. The moon would not be up for an hour or two. I stopped and waited for some stars to appear so I could determine west. In the increasing darkness I noticed the lights of two ships, one heading south, one north. It took a while before my tired mind realized that they were both a mile outside of me. Outside. During the limited visibility in the rain, which never quite fell on me, I had crossed the shipping lane, Momentary elation collapsed when I turned and saw the loom of lights from the shore. Only the loom. Experience said that I was still at least ten miles offshore. The goal for the night could only be to try to turn the loom of lights into specific lights. And to last until dawn.
The night blurred and my mind wandered, pausing at my first night in New Zealand. When was it? I was irritated the I could not subtract two numbers. Fifteen years ago? No. Sixteen.
The water in the bilge was preternaturally still. It was still coming in, but now that EGREGIOUS was tied to King’s Wharf in Auckland, it was not leaping and splashing about and it was not coming in very quickly.
I had made the initial transition to land after five months alone at sea with ease that afternoon, swarming up the pilings, standing on land with no sensation that it was moving beneath me, talking to people easily. I had bathed in salt water before entering the harbor and must not have looked too bad. People expressed surprise that I had been out so long. They assumed that I had just come overnight from the Bay of Islands.
But now, when I could at last sleep an entire night, I didn’t. I bailed the bilge knowing that it would not fill again until after midnight, lay down and fell asleep, only to awaken thirty minutes later. For five months I had not slept through a night, and for the past three of those months I had awakened to bail every half hour. Through habit I lifted the cover and glanced in the bilge. There wasn’t even enough water to think about.
I stood in the companionway and watched traffic moving on Customs Street and the lights of the high rise buildings. It was all quite amazing after seeing nothing but ocean for so long. Restlessly I wandered about the cabin, took a book and tried to read, but soon put it aside. I tried to go back to sleep and failed. I got up, put on my clothes, and went ashore.
I had not exchanged money that afternoon. Probably I could have done so that evening at one of the hotels, but I didn’t think of it, and for that matter I didn’t really want to buy anything. Some part of me was curious, some part starved for new sights, new sounds, new sensations.
I was a complete stranger to the shore and the country. I looked at people almost as an alien species.
I experienced everything through a veil of exhaustion. Corners of buildings, stoplights, window displays, other pedestrians, all blurred. As I walked up Queen Street, my legs quickly gave out. I stopped in front of a takeaway called Uncle’s, offering the novelty of American hot dogs. It seemed an appropriate spot to turn around.
I was waiting at a stoplight halfway back down the hill when a woman came up beside me. Through the city smells, damp pavement, car exhausts, her perfume reached me.
The light changed, but I just stood and watched her cross the street.
The cold of the sea, the warmth of a woman. It had been a long time.
I remembered my first glimpse of Suzanne’s legs. Her husband brought her with him to see EGREGIOUS in the boat yard and to invite me to dinner. She was wearing a rust colored skirt and a white blouse and sandals. I was working on the hull when they arrived unexpectedly Sunday afternoon, and I held the ladder for them to climb up and see EGREGIOUS’s interior. Her body moved up the ladder only inches from my face. My eyes followed her. She had nice legs, good ankles. I found myself staring at her bare thighs, and, not wanting to desire someone I could not have, deliberately looked away.
Two days later she stopped by the boat yard alone.
Three weeks later, EGREGIOUS repaired and back in the water, I rowed Suzanne out to the mooring and we made love for the first time.
New Zealand was still Suzanne to me when I sailed there nine years later with Jill, but this last time it was not. My memories of Suzanne were more than a decade old. No emotions clung to places I had been with her. It was as though it had never happened. And Jill and I had been particularly happy. That was still this year, I thought, as I swam ever more slowly.
I was in Paris with Jill. On the first fine day of spring we left our hotel near the Louvre and walked through the Tuileries.
We passed the circular fountain where seven years earlier I had sat one afternoon watching children sail toy boats. The children pushed the boats from one side of the stone fountain and then ran, laughing and shouting, to where they expected the boats would touch the other side. Often a slight breeze backed sails and caused a change in course. And there was the falling water in the center as a permanent squall. I was alone at the time. It was the year between Suzanne and Jill. As I watched the children, I expected that some of them must dream of real voyages, and I wondered what would become of those dreams.
Near dusk a woman in a burgundy coat came and took the last two children, a boy and a girl, by the hands, and they walked together in lamplight toward the river. She was a pretty woman, with a sweep of raven black hair, high cheekbones and long legs. I envied the man she was going home to.
Jill and I walked along the Seine to Notre Dame.
We sat for a while outside the church beneath cherry trees in bloom, beside buttresses and gargoyles, before crossing to the left bank. From the bridge we saw that the ledge below was filled with pale Parisians in bathing suits, sunning wintry bodies and picnicking beside the dark river as though at the seashore.
We caught a cab to Napoleon’s Tomb. Jill had never seen this one, although we both remembered his first grave, an unmarked slab hidden in a grove of trees on a hillside at St. Helena, where we had stopped on the passage from Namibia to Europe. There had never been an inscription on that grave because the British and French could not agree on whether to include the title ‘Emperor’. When a generation after his death, the former enemies had become allies, his body was moved from the lonely South Atlantic island to Paris where the French built him this grandiose monument.
Leaving the tomb, we turned toward the Eiffel Tower and recrossed the river to find a crowd at the Trocadero: street musicians, singers, dancers, African men selling windup paper birds that soared in brief bright flight, families out for a Sunday stroll. We stopped and watched a slalom course roller skaters had made with tin cans. Many of the skaters were talented, zigzagging down the paved slope at speed, some backwards.
We were hungry and headed to the Champs-Elysées where we sat in a restaurant and drank a bottle of wine and ate salmon.
We had finished the salmon and decided to order another bottle of Chablis when from the avenue came loud music. Everyone stopped, and several of the patrons rushed outside. A sound truck appeared followed by an open convertible, carrying a young man, who was smiling and waving as people cheered. In a minute the small caravan had passed; the music and cheers receded in the distance.
“What was that all about?” Jill asked.
“I cannot remember the man’s name. We saw his arrival on television the other night after he had just completed the fastest solo circumnavigation.”
It had once been my record, but I had not held it for many years.
The waiter brought the bottle of wine.
We rowed ashore to a patch of sand and brush, frequented by frigate birds and boobies, and walked out onto the reef. At Suvarow, one of the few deserted islands in the South Pacific with a usable anchorage, the reef is more volcanic than coral. Those parts washed by the tides have been smoothed through the ages, but near the shore lava spikes remain almost as jagged as when they first exploded into air. The black reef becomes salmon pink as it is uncovered by the outgoing tide. Brightly colored fish are often trapped in tidal pools, trying to hide from soaring birds until they are released by the returning ocean.
I rose from studying a tide pool and turned to see Jill standing with her back to me, looking out at the sea. I felt as though we were on the edge of the world, a primitive world of great beauty in which there were no other people. A vast blue sky and sea, a white turmoil of waves breaking on the outer edge of the reef a few steps away, just beyond which the reef fell off to a hundred fathoms. The lush green vegetation on the islets; a narrow band of white sand; black lava; salmon pink lava; fish; scuttling crabs; the bright sun and the shadows of circling birds; the elegant lines of Jill’s nearly naked body. It was a perfect, timeless moment, a rare moment when I felt at peace, a moment I knew even as it was happening that I would remember as long as I live.
And all these memories will soon be lost, I thought, as I swam ever more slowly.
The overcast sky partially cleared and the moon came out. Despite improved visibility, I found that I increasingly lost my sense of direction and was swimming the wrong way. Only pain was clear and sharp. My eyes, my mouth, my throat, thirst, were intolerable. For a while I felt a painful urge to urinate, but could not. There was no more fluid in my body. My right elbow, bending with each sidestroke, was becoming excruciating and useless. I stopped swimming and hung almost motionless in the water more and more.
Two or three times I started to shiver uncontrollably. The Gulf Stream was warm, but it was not body temperature, and I thought each time that this was the end. But each time inexplicably the shivering stopped. Two or three times I was brought up short by swimming into jelly fish. The stings were unpleasant, but not serious. Two or three times my body was wracked with dry retching. There was nothing in my stomach to come up. Two or three times I fell asleep for a few seconds, but woke when my head fell below the surface and I breathed in water. A flick of the wrist was enough to keep me afloat.
I made two discoveries. First, that Saint-Exupéry was wrong: dying is neither natural nor simple; and that the weaker and more exhausted I became, the stronger my will to live. I was ‘not going gently into this good night.’ If for the first nine hours I had been Socrates, now, as I weakened, I became Dylan Thomas.
By about 1:00 a.m., judging by the moon, I knew I would never reach land. Lights were still only a loom, a glow to the south, then darkness, and two other patches of light farther north. I began to hallucinate, while aware that I was doing so. A particular cloud, illuminated by the moon, turned into a filigree of lace each time I looked at it, starting at the bottom and working upward. I rather enjoyed watching the process. And I thought I saw a sailboat, a large sloop, motionless, sails down, unlit, seemingly at anchor. While I was certain about the cloud, I was unsure of the sailboat, and spent some time treading water, studying the image. There really seemed to be straight lines of rigging and mast that could not appear naturally. Sometimes when I looked it was there, and sometimes not. I resumed swimming.
On my right side, facing south, I saw the loom of lights concentrate into specific pinpoints that seemed to be running lights. I dismissed these too as hallucinations; but they persisted and came closer, until my mind finally accepted that they really were the lights of two fishing vessels. About a half mile away, they stopped. I continued swimming, slowly, painfully, favoring my right arm, for a few more minutes, then I stopped too.
I hung in the water and considered the fishing boats. One of them remained stationary, while the lights of the other described a long oval in the darkness. Of course I did not know how long they would remain; but I knew beyond doubt that I could not reach the shore. It was not really a gamble to turn south instead of west.
I swam harder than I had since nightfall, trying to ignore the pain in my elbow; but it was like trying to walk on a broken foot. I kept myself from looking at the running lights as long as possible. When I finally did pause to rest, one set of lights was far out to sea, but the other was definitely closer.
I resumed swimming, trying to maintain a sustainable pace. When adrift in the South Pacific, I had been surprised that after two weeks of near starvation, I had enough energy to row the final miles to land. But that had been a decade earlier. I was fifty years old now and had had no water for more than twenty-four hours and no food for forty.
I prevented myself from stopping to rest by trying to remember when I last had a drink.
I thought I recalled drinking a can of Coke Friday evening. It was now sometime around 2:00 a.m. Sunday. I thought of Jill and wondered where she was at that moment. We had separated almost as soon as RESURGAM reached Fort Lauderdale. And then I thought about what would have been the last piece of music I would like to hear. I could not decide from a short list of Bach’s Art of the Fugue, Beethoven’s late string quartets, Satie’s Gymnopédies.
When I could not take another stroke, I stopped, looked up, and saw that the fishing boat was only a hundred yards away. There was no point in saving anything. I took a couple of deep breaths and set out again.
I had not gone more than twenty yards when I had to stop. My body had no more strength. When I looked, the fishing boat seemed no closer. I could see details, the deckhouse windows, the booms. I yelled, “Help!” as loud as I could. The effort hurt my throat. The sound seemed to fill the night. But there was no reaction from the boat.
I lowered my head and swam, desperately trying to close the gap. But this time when I looked, the lights seemed farther away. I swam again. Each time covering less distance before having to stop. Twenty yards. Fifteen. Ten. Yet each time the fishing boat was no closer. Finally, in despair I understood that it was powering slowly away from me. “Don’t go,” I shouted. But the gap steadily increased. “I am dead,” I said unnecessarily.
The effort to reach the fishing boat had exhausted me. I could not swim, but lay back in the water, keeping myself afloat with sporadic hand movements. I watched the clouds turn to lace. I began to shiver. I stopped shivering. I became aware again of the torment of my eyes and mouth and throat, and of thirst. This is unendurable, I thought. Truly unendurable. Part of me would have welcomed oblivion, but it did not come. And gradually, as I floated, I regained some strength.
I came upright in the water. Dawn should only be two or three hours away. I could last that long. And perhaps in daylight another boat would come along. Life had become simple again. Just do one more thing. Bail when EGREGIOUS’s hull was cracked. Row when I went over the reef after CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE pitchpoled in the Pacific. Now, swim until dawn.
Floating and swimming a few strokes, then floating, mostly floating, I tried to move west. I began to see the sailboat again. ‘I don’t believe in you,’ I thought. But then I found myself stopping and staring. I really did think I could see the hull and the straight lines of rigging and mast. I looked away and then back. It was all still there. I still did not believe in the sailboat, but it was not far out of my way so I swam toward it, breaststroke, my least effective stroke, but the one which enabled me to keep my eyes on the boat and caused the least pain in my elbow.
The sloop remained in place. ‘I don’t believe in you,’ I kept telling myself; but part of me was beginning to. Then, off to my left, I noticed a light. I turned. My vision, blurred by exhaustion and salt water, was suspect; but there seemed to be a white light, an anchor light. I turned my head back to the sailboat. It was still there. Then toward the light. It was still there too. I did not know what to believe, what was real, if anything. Somehow the anchor light made more sense. Giving the sailboat a final glance, I started toward the light.
I did not hurry. My goal was to survive until dawn. I had to swim somewhere, so it might as well be toward that light. I did not have the strength to do more than inch my way. Whenever I looked, the light was closer; but I did not feel the elation I had when approaching the fishing boat an hour or two earlier.
What seemed to be a long time passed. Not until I was close enough to see the hull in detail was I convinced that there really was a boat. It was a small commercial fishing vessel about forty feet long, anchored in the middle of nowhere. There was no sign of activity. No lights except the anchor light. No sound of an engine. This was very strange and made me suspicious that I was hallucinating. The only way to find out was to swim over and knock on the hull. But as I watched in horror the boat began to move away from me. “Help!” I yelled. “Help! Don’t go!” The gap between us continued to widen. “Help!” I yelled again. And from the darkness a sleepy voice answered.
“Is there someone there?”
“Over here. In the water. Fifty yards off your port quarter. Don’t go!”
“Where? Keep shouting,” a second voice called.
“To port. Astern. Don’t go.”
Deck lights came on. Then a handheld spotlight flicked across the low waves.
“Farther out. No, to your left.” And the beam found me.
“Where’s your boat?”
“It sank yesterday off Fort Lauderdale.”
“Fort Lauderdale?” The voice sounded confused.
“Just don’t go. I’ll swim to you. Just don’t go.”
The pain was still there, but I covered the final yards without stopping. The hull rose sheer above me.
An engine was turning over. A voice shouted above it, “Come round to the stern.”
“The prop?’
“It’s in neutral.”
I swam along the starboard side of the vessel and came to the stern. Two young men were leaning over and staring at me. Water from the cooling system and exhaust smoke were bubbling out.
“Put your foot on the step and try to reach up.”
“I don’t have much strength in my legs,” I said. My foot slipped, found the step, and I pushed myself high enough for hands to reach me. I did not think: I will live. I thought: at last I will get a drink of water.
