All’s Well That Ends
By Louise Lang
March 6, 1983
THE HOWLING WIND was shoving California into Arizona that night, and the sea off San Diego protested.
“Mayday, mayday! This is the yacht Marie.”
The Coast Guard responded calmly, ordering us to don life vests and drop anchor. Panicked and with a mouth full of cotton, I turned the radio over to my sister, Judy, then dashed into the ebony night toward the surf-lashed foredeck to help my husband, Tom, with the anchor. He had just dropped it overboard, and a good thing too since my 100-pound, 5-foot frame was useless as a baby toe on jobs requiring brute strength.
Incoming tide, monstrous combers and relentless gales whisked our 36-foot sailboat toward the shore’s boulders. Following the hook like railroad cars tailing their engine, the anchor seized bottom and the entire 450-foot chain clattered across the bow in a few seconds. Marie’s shoreward flight ended in a rude jolt, and I briefly wondered if the eyebolt holding the chain would be able to withstand the jarring punishment as the ketch danced up and down like a kite in high wind.
Scrambling back into the cockpit, I flipped on the fathometer. Judy and I watched, horrified, as the needle registered 15 feet then plummeted instantly to seven. We’re gonna crash.
The needle stayed at seven for a brief moment then returned to 15. We exhaled. Seven, 15, seven, 15. Eight-foot waves raised and dropped us.
“Come in, Marie,” the radio voice said. “What is your location?”
Glancing out at the inky blackness, Judy replied, “I can’t see anything but a single bright light on the shore. We’re very close to it.”
“That’s the treatment plant. We know where you are.”
Tom rejoined us in the pilothouse, brushing the water off his face and flowing, salt-and-pepper beard. My husband was a middle-aged man of medium height and slightly heavy build with expressive — fierce or gentle — pale eyes. Although not handsome, he had thinning, dark hair and neatly trimmed graying mustache gave him a distinguished appearance. He was a man who exuded confidence and reveled in being master of his own vessel. Tom motioned Judy away and took the helm seat, ready to respond to rescue instructions.
Judy’s presence comforted me. We’d always comforted each other. She’s half a foot taller than me and her light hair and blue eyes the obverse of my brown features. We look like we have different parents but act and emote like twins. She was in her mid-40s at the time, I in my early 50s. We worked well together with an easy companionship that became even more important as the voyage wore on.
Life jackets secured, we sat tensely around the small table in the cockpit. I dreaded the moment when the cascades of ocean hammering Marie would tear the anchor loose and send the boat crunching like an eggshell onto the massive monoliths guarding the shore. Forcing my voice to sound much calmer than I felt, I said, “If the anchor lets go, we should probably just hang on to something here in the cockpit. The boat’ll protect us. Then, when daylight comes, we’ll be able to pick our way over the boulders and get ashore.” Tom nodded agreement.
“We must be awfully close to shore,” Judy said, “It sounds like it’s right behind us.”
“I’m sure it is,” Tom said with no reassurance. “That’s why we can’t get Marie outta here by ourselves, if the anchor holds.” He shivered and added, “I hate to think what’ll happen if we’re still here when the tide goes out. Everything we have is here. Almost everything. If we get shipwrecked, we’ll have to give up our South Pacific cruising dream forever. We can’t afford to buy another boat.”
Resolute breakers pounded loudly, wracking our nerves as the pit bull-stubborn anchor clung to the water’s floor and the minutes dragged.
A lifetime later: “Point Loma Coast Guard to Marie. Point Loma Coast Guard to Marie. Come in, please.”
“This is Marie,” Tom replied.
“We’ve come as close as we can, but we’re unable to operate this 83-foot cutter within the surf line where you are. We cannot see you.” Nor could we see them. Even though our exterior lights were lit, in the enormous expanse of night our little craft was lost.
We rode a wave up, then slid down. The next one broke over the boat, threatening to immerse it. Rhythmic crashing surf, abandoned sky and black, wild ocean were our nightmare.
Much later, via ship-to-shore radio, the cutter’s voice announced, “Two crewmen are coming to you with a heaving line. If you can signal with a bright light, they’ll have a chance of finding you.” I rushed below, found our high-powered searchlight and pointed it out a porthole, flashing on and off, on and off…. I began to think they’d never find us.
“I can see a light out there!” Judy shouted down to me from the cockpit. Poor Judy, I thought. What a way to start her first sailing trip. Even so, I was glad we’d invited her along. She then sighed, disappointed, “No, it’s gone.”
I continued pushing and releasing the button on the light. She called once more, “Wait, wait, I see it again! They must know we’re here. They’ll find us. Keep signaling.” She paused, then: “They have to find us, they just have to,” with a little catch in her voice.
And soon they did. Clad in wetsuits and life vests, the men appeared in their nimble rubber craft, coming near enough to pitch a heaving line that was attached to a towline from the mother ship. Out on the bow again, Tom caught the rope and secured it to a cleat.
With a gunshot crack, the line snapped in two as Marie jumped on her tether in the rampaging sea. Judy passed this development on to the cutter, and they informed her that they’d remove the women one at a time.
“Did you hear that?” she asked me.
“Yeah, I heard. But I don’t want to leave. This is home.”
“I know. Same here. And I dread the trip between us and that cutter way out there.”
“Me too. With the water so awful, I feel safer here on Marie.”
Resigned, Judy asked, “What should we take with us?”
“Just your pocketbook, I guess.”
“I wonder if we’ll ever see Tom again.”
W e gathered our purses and waited in the dry, snug pilothouse cockpit. Judy stayed by the ship-to-shore radio while I climbed out onto the side deck to open the safety line gate. Just then the sailors maneuvered their Zodiac close to Marie’s port side. One of them grabbed a stanchion to keep the inflatable as close as possible then shouted, “Get in fast!” Marie and the dinghy were jigging out of step with one another, leaping this way and that in the turbulence.
I jumped off the deck, and four hands reached up to keep me from being sucked away in the greedy sea. “Hang on tight,” someone roared. With one hand, I white-knuckled the wood thwart I was sitting on; the other I leveraged against the low backrest; and I curled my legs up under the seat as tightly as I could. The outboard slammed into full power, and the dinghy leaped into the oncoming surf, fighting its way out to the refuge ship.
Up the waves then down, sometimes sideways, we were a butterfly in a hurricane, struggling but managing, just barely, to keep control. The boat’s headlight revealed only swirling foam and immense, threatening cascades. Outside the meager patch of artificial light, there was only darkness and noise. Beneath us the ocean writhed and convulsed while the motor’s propellers sounded, sometimes in the water and sometimes out. Wet, cold and shivering, I hung on like I was taking root.
After a while, a light glowed occasionally somewhere ahead, a firefly in the distance, more off than on. Eventually, the bulk of the large vessel came into view. We reached our destination, and it was time for me to climb the Jacob’s ladder hanging from the rolling, heaving cutter. The first try failed: A surge suddenly yanked our little craft away, leaving an unforgiving pond between the dinghy and the mother ship. Two saviors snatched me back just before I hit the water.
With hands steadying me from below and others waiting above, I struggled up the swaying, undulating, wood-rung rope ladder to the sanctuary of the cutter’s deck.
Although I preferred to stay out on the deck to watch for Judy’s arrival, a crew member insisted I go inside. In a cozy room with green-tiled floor and chrome-legged table and chairs, I sat alone worrying until Judy finally appeared in the doorway, her face ashen.
Without words, we understood each other’s feelings, relieved to be safe yet worried for Tom’s survival and concerned about the boat and its cargo. We hugged and cried, exhausted.
At around 3 a.m., a thoughtful fellow stepped in with news. A 41-foot Coast Guard vessel had joined the cutter. The two ships were to combine towlines assembling a single one they hoped would be sufficient to get past the surf line and haul out the Marie — if possible.
“It’s March, so the psychic was right again,” I muttered.
“She sure was.”
I had told Judy about our psychic friend who’d predicted that Tom and I would sell our business by a certain date and get a “clean cash deal,” as she put it. She had also prophesied that we’d be making our voyage on a vessel having two masts, unlike the sloop we’d made an offer on. She had said she saw a boat just sitting there until we were ready to buy it.
“When you go home,” she had told us, “look for it. Keep your eyes open because it looks like a better buy, more seaworthy. I’m getting the word sturdy. I’m seeing two masts. It’s as though it could weather a storm better. March is not the best month, though. I’d be careful around a boat in March. I can see you maybe not getting injured but maybe something happening to the boat.”
Judy and I, warm once again, realized there was nothing more we could do, closed our eyes and half dozed on the hard chairs of the barren coffee room.
Meanwhile, on Marie’s foredeck Tom and a Coast Guardsman, supported by the bow pulpit to which they were fastened with safety lines, were struggling by lantern light to secure the towrope to Marie’s anchor chain with a large, heavy shackle.
Marie bucked like a rodeo bronc, and a few 15-foot waves broke over the top of her, chilling, soaking and momentarily engulfing their efforts. Both men understood how vulnerable they were. If the anchor broke loose… well, better not to think about that.
Tom’s young helper vomited over the rail a few times and confessed to my husband, “The skipper said it would be a miracle if we can save your boat.”
After a bitter, hour-long contest, the shackle was in place. Tom radioed that everything was ready for the rescue ship to start the trip to safety. Once underway, the shackle slid down the chain and stopped at the anchor, pulling it up from the bottom as the towing proceeded.
Upon reaching the outer harbor, the ship had halted, the captain requesting that Marie’s anchor be taken aboard. Without a power winch, the two men strained vainly to comply with the order. In half an hour, they’d managed to get only about 30 feet of chain on deck. After more towing, the ship backed down to Marie’s side, and several more crewmen boarded her. They hauled up all the chain and the anchor leaving them strewn on the deck.
The larger vessel secured Marie to her side and continued her push through the night sea, stopping at the harbor police dock where Judy and I were waiting anxiously, peering out the office window.
They released Marie from the beam-to-beam tie-up, securing her at a dock. When the paperwork had been completed, the harbor police towed Marie, with us aboard, to a courtesy slip at a nearby yacht club.
It had been a long night, and dawn arrived serenely.
The following feature appears in the July 2016 Mensa Bulletin, available in print and online in mid-July. A different version of this story appeared in the first chapter of All’s Well That Ends: San Diego to Hiva Oa, 4,076 Miles, a longer work published in 2001 as part of Lifescapes, a project of the Department of English, University of Nevada, Reno; the Northwest Public Library; and the Nevada Humanities Committee, ©2001 Louise Lang.
