We topped off our two thousand-gallon fuel tanks, picked up a few bags of fresh food, and left. We didn't need anything else. There was enough canned and dried food to last us for three years, even if we didn't do any fishing. That didn't count the "emergency" supplies, a ton of dried beans, Bay City being the Bean Capitol of the world. The solar still built into the deck produced ten gallons of pure water a day, and the osmotic water maker could pump out another hundred, at the price of running the generator set. We were as free as any human beings possibly could be, and yet I was living in my own private hell.
I had hardly known Dawn, yet somehow her death and the manner of it weighed on me more than my divorce and bankruptcy had done. It wasn't that I was berating myself with "if onlys," although it was true that if I'd just let her lie there, and not acted like a penny-pinching prude, she would still be alive. It was that an uncaring universe had blotted her out with no more concern than a truck driver has for a bug hitting the windshield.
The new cabins had been completed while we were in Panama, and Adam and I moved into them as soon as we were at sea. They were much larger than the other two, and being near the center of the ship, they bounced around less in the waves.
The rule on board had always been that at least one person had to be awake and in charge at all times. The boat could sail itself once it was away from port, but someone was still needed to keep an eye on things. There were Coast Guard regulations about having somebody there to answer the radio, and assist if someone else got into trouble. Then too, neither of us, being engineers, fully trusted anything automatic. We flipped a coin, and I got the noon-to-midnight shift. It wasn't as though we each had to work twelve hours straight, we just had to be awake in case anything came up. The schedule had the effect that each of us was alone most of the time, and having little to do but look out at the sea has a hypnotic effect that sneaks up on you.
The next stop on the itinerary was the Galapagos Islands. We got there, saw a turtle, and bought a basket of fresh fruit. We had a drink in the bar of another visiting boat, and left before sundown.
We headed out, sailing west.
A few weeks later, we hit another storm. The bouncing around wasn't as bad as it had been on our previous romps with nature. For one thing, we had a few square feet of the jib showing, and this put our tail to the wind. We were running with it, and in The Brick Royal, it made for a smoother ride. Sleeping near the boat's center of gravity helped out a lot, too. Adam had rigged up some hammocks that let you stay put while the boat rocked around you. They were slung fore and aft, which canceled the rolling of the boat, and ropes at the ends of the hammock went through pulleys at each bulkhead, near the ceiling, and connected together above you. This let the boat pitch while you stayed almost stationary. Adam said he was going to patent it, next time he got a chance.
In any event, Adam was in the cockpit and I was sound asleep when trouble happened. My first indication that something was wrong came when I was slammed awake. The hammock let the boat bounce around quite a bit without you noticing it, but when she rolled completely over on her side, I smashed into the ceiling.
The mast was built into the wall separating the two big staterooms. The noise was deafening, and I felt another strange bump. The emergency lights came on in time for me to see the mast pull loose from its socket, and then wrench sideways, shattering the new wooden wall into sharp splinters.
I was tangled up in the hammock, trying to get free when the boat suddenly righted itself, which naturally swung me into the swordlike remains of the wall. I managed to twist around so that I was looking where I'd been, and only a dozen or so sharp wooden shards got through the thick canvas and bedding and into my back. Painful.
The carbon-fiber mast, despite the stainless-steel shrouds and stays that held it in position, had somehow been pulled three feet above the lower deck. It slammed back down like a crossbow bolt, going through the deck, through four feet of assorted stores, and then right through the ferrocrete bottom of the boat.
A spray of wet lima beans blasted into me as I renewed my struggle to get out of the hammock. The boat went over again on its side, reacquainting me forcibly with the ceiling. The mast then pulled itself out of the hole it had made, and the next time the boat righted itself, the mast stayed horizontal. It cracked the upper deck, then pulled itself entirely free of the boat, snagging in the process the rope that connected the ends of my hammock. The hammock was thus pulled straight like the string of a discharging crossbow, and I was bounced off the ceiling yet a third time, this time catching it on the face and stomach.
The lights went out, either electrically or because of the way I lost consciousness. I awoke to find the cabin half full of water and Adam leaning over me.
"You okay?" he shouted.
"I respectfully request sick leave," I said.
"Request denied. We got work to do. Can you move at all?"
"I guess I have to, don't I. What the hell happened to us?" It was hard to talk in the wet, noise, and confusion of the dim emergency light, the slapping water, and the floating junk.
"We must have hit something. I don't know what. The boat broke. I don't know why. Get up."
"Help me up. Maybe we can get a mattress over that hole in the bottom. Unless you know of something worse that's happened to us."
Adam said, "You're bleeding from twenty places, but that shouldn't bother a determined engineer. The spars and rigging are dragging beside us, so we're in the trough of the waves. The engine won't start, so we can't use the big pumps, and the electrical pumps will run down the batteries in a few hours. But what the heck. You're the boss, so we'll fix the hole in the bottom first."
He was talking slowly, but moving fast, throwing foodstuffs out of the hold to clear the area around the hole. He had completely lost his accent, so I knew that he must be in pretty bad shape.
"That's Christian of you," I said while making my way to the forward cabin where we had stored the bunk beds when the boat was converted.
"Hey! Watch it! Coming from an Atheist like you, those are swear words, and now would not be a good time to have God mad at us."
With three mattresses, several dismembered bunk beds, ropes, bed sheets, and some hose clamps, we managed a lash-up that seemed to be holding. No mean feat considering the way we were waist deep in saltwater, with a few more feet of plastic garbage bags containing who knew what floating on top of it. The way everything was sloshing around, and slapping against the ceiling, didn't help any, either.
"The water is getting deeper," I said. "We'd better see about getting the engine started."
"You see what you can do about the engine. I'm going to go do something about the rigging," he said with a crescent wrench in one hand and a fire axe in the other.
"So much for the joys of a unified command. Okay. See you later."
After blundering around a bit in the engine compartment, I found the reason the engine hadn't started when Adam first tried it. The problem was that I had turned the fuel off at the stopcock a few weeks earlier. I hadn't figured that we'd be needing it until we got to the islands, and the fumes had been annoying. Now, however, the engine couldn't be started because the air intake was under water, as was most of the rest of the engine. The same was true with the genset, which was farther underwater than the big engine. I did manage to engage the manual clutch that started the prop-shaft generator turning. It couldn't put out enough power by itself to keep the electric pumps going, but it would stretch the time before the batteries went dead.
There was little more that I could accomplish down on the lower deck, so I went on deck to see if Adam needed some help. The wind topside during that gale was actually refreshing after slopping around in the chest-deep mess below. The boat, which had been broadside to the waves, was coming around with her stern pointed to the wind. Adam was coming back with the axe, his wrench having apparently gone adrift.
"Need any help?" I shouted.
"Nah. The shrouds parted company right from the beginning, and the forestay yielded to a little gentle persuasion," he shouted, gesturing to the axe. "Everything is now dangling from the backstay, and it's acting like a sea anchor."
"So we'll leave it be. There's no hope with the engine, at least not until the water level goes down a few feet."
"And it's likely to get worse without the engine pumps."
"Lovely. Adam, maybe my timing's bad, but we might not get a chance to talk about it later. Can you tell me what in the hell happened? Wasn't this boat supposed to be unsinkable?"
"Yeah, and the hull was supposed to be indestructible, but that's the way things go. Still, we got a lot of plastic foam between the ceiling and the upper deck, so we may go awash, but she'll stay afloat. The stuff we got in the garbage bags should help out with flotation, too. Still and all, it might be a good idea to get the inflatable life raft out and ready, and maybe The Concrete Canoe, too."
"You still haven't said what happened. I mean, it was your watch and all," I said.
"I'm not really sure. The wind was from astern, and we were holding our own, when suddenly a freak wind knocked us on our side. Then, at just that very instant, the tip of the mast hit something, hard. A whale, for all I know, or a submarine. Or maybe a submerged rock, or something that was barely floating."
"It couldn't have been a rock. We're four hundred miles from the nearest land."
"Yeah, that's what I thought. Except that a little while before all this happened, I fired up the radar just for something to do, and there was this island up ahead," Adam said.
"That's impossible. It must have been some kind of ghost, or reflection off the storm."
"Yeah, only it showed up on sonar, too."
"Our navigation can't be that far off. Besides all the different electronic stuff all agreeing with each other, you took a noon sighting with your sextant yesterday, and it agreed with everything else."
"I know. Look, we got other problems just now. You're still bleeding, so maybe you ought to do the light work and get the lifeboat out. I'm going to go down and work the manual pump."
The safety equipment was mostly stowed in and around the aft cockpit, where there was always supposed to be someone on duty, as things had been originally planned, at least. I got out the life raft, tied it securely to the boat with the rope provided, and popped the carbon dioxide cylinder. She inflated like a champ. The raft was covered with an inflatable roof, and had room and supplies for twenty.
The Concrete Canoe was big enough for thirty in a pinch, but it was an open boat. Furthermore, it took at least two men to launch it, so I left it in its compartment aft.
There was a combination Global Positioning System and satellite transceiver aboard the raft that was supposed to send a distress message to whatever ships were in the vicinity. I hesitated, and then decided not to turn it on for a while.
We weren't sunk yet, after all, and I wasn't ready to give up on The Brick Royal just yet.
Rescuers have been known to forcibly rescue people who really didn't need it. The feeling seems to be that if they had to go through all the bother of being heroic, then you had damn well better appreciate it and act humble. I once heard about a couple of mountain climbers who ran into a bad snowstorm while halfway up a slope. They were experienced men, well trained and well equipped. When the weather got impossible, they had pitched their tent, gotten into it, and then into their sleeping bags. They were quite comfortable, even though their tent was soon almost buried in the snow. As far as they were concerned, the snow was just more insulation. Their intent was to wait out the storm and then to proceed to the top of the mountain as they had originally planned.
Their rescuers, being much less well trained and prepared than the supposed `victims,' and having had three of their members injured in the storm, had forced the recipients of their unwanted favors to abandon their equipment and to accompany them down off the mountain. The net result of this supposedly heroic rescue was that everyone concerned, victims and rescuers alike, became severely frostbitten. I had heard the story directly from one of the two unfortunate mountain climbers. A quarter inch of his nose was missing, along with all of the toes on his right foot.
Better to wait until we had abandoned ship ourselves, I thought, and were in the lifeboat before we called for help. If the Coast Guard arrived before we had abandoned ship, they might force us aboard their vessel, and then we'd likely lose The Brick Royal.
Our radar dome was mounted on its own mast, just in back of the cockpit. Despite the drain on the batteries, I turned it on, and by God, there really was something big dead ahead. I tried the forward-looking sonar, and it said the same thing. Switching both off to conserve juice, I tried the Global Positioning System, and it said we were four hundred miles east of the Line Islands. I tried our depth gauge, another kind of sonar, and it gave a depth consistent with where the navigation stuff said we should be. I turned everything off except the Chrysler windshield wipers and looked ahead. The clouds and spray to the west of us parted for an instant, and I saw what looked like a huge, multitiered city dead ahead.
"Adam!" I shouted over the intercom, "You'd better come up and look at this."
His head came up through the hatchway beside me.
"Sweet Jesus! You know, I read about something like that once. It was supposed to be an optical illusion. They called it the Fata Morgana, after the witch in the King Arthur legends. There was a big write-up in Scientific American, about how the different layers of calm air made it appear. It made a lot of sense at the time."
"There's nothing calm about the air out here. We've got gale winds going! This optical illusion is showing up on radar and sonar. I turned them on for a little while, and I saw the same thing you did earlier."
"Well, given the choice, I think I'd rather be marooned than sunk. But I'd rather be sailing than either of the above, so I'm going back to the pump. If you feel up to it, you might relieve me in a while, Fata Morgana or no Fata Morgana."
He went below and I went back to checking our emergency equipment. After a while, I had done everything I could think of, even reading the checklist, and went below to help Adam. Then, suddenly, the ladder wasn't where it was supposed to be, and I was knocked unconscious again.