Waterwitch – Chapter 1 – The Storm
The sixteen-ton boat surfed over the gigantic waves. Its metal hull the only strength that prevented the boat from breaking up, yet it was this steel that within minutes of flooding would sink to the ocean floor like a stone slung into a pond. This smallness in the immense ocean, the vulnerability of our situation, that was the major worry.
The Atlantic is a cold and lonely place in a gale.
Safety, the Portuguese coast, was twelve miles off, but it was becoming further away with each wave, we were being driven in the direction of America over three thousand miles to the west with only enough water for two days at the most. The Azores to the Southwest might as well have been the same distance. Both wind and wave drove our vessel westwards, the waves were in command, we had no control.
Clouds hung in stratus layers, rain fell at the wind’s whimsy, drops angled to the back of the head or darting, diagonally, onto the deck as another wave of water crashed over the bow. Helplessly we bobbed into the shipping lanes. Waves, rising ten metres high, raised us above the blue boiling water below, we rested on the foaming crest, afforded a glimpse of a ship or a tanker or just grey cloud horizon, before plunging down, sliding along the wave into a deep trough where another wave would splash over the bow as our boat dipped its nose into the bubbling brine. In a heartbeat we were lifted up again on a swell, as it grew higher we floated up like a chair on a Ferris wheel.
Our boat was a heavy 52-foot sailing cruiser, a yacht designed for day sailing in safe seas with the occasional overnight anchorage. The boat was never designed to be buffeted by waves that swamped its own size. The sea rose and fell all around us, an inconstant billows, and we were dwarfed by the swirling swell.
