Gilboy’s Quest

by Sam Ivey

Chapter V: Capsized
part 2 of 4

The tether for the drogue was still attached to a cleat on the port side of the submerged deck, and it occurred to him that perhaps this tether might be used to right the vessel. So he shoved the drogue back into the water on the starboard side, drawing the tether taut over the upturned bottom. Perhaps now he could apply enough body weight to pull the boat back to an upright position.

Back into the water he went. Then, bracing his feet against the starboard rail, he leaned back, pulling with all of his might, and meeting with stubborn resistance. And now he wished for a heavy sea, reasoning that some big waves could potentially help him considerably in rocking the vessel to an upright position. But the sea was quite moderate now, and his task appeared to be Herculean — to be hopeless.

Nevertheless, it had to be accomplished; the boat must be righted. There was no questioning that it was his only chance for survival. The water, while not frigid, was cold — colder than one might expect among such tropic islands — and his life expectancy in such an environment could be measured in hours at most. As a professional seaman he knew that well. Hypothermia was a predictable outcome, and following that: drowning. And so he continued to struggle, driven by the innate, virtually irrepressible, desire to live. And the long, long minutes passed; minutes in which his life force was imperceptibly ebbing.

“Pull! Pull,” he kept repeating to himself. He said the words aloud as though he were another person offering encouragement: “Pull, Bernard. Pull!”

And he strained. His muscles, already feeling exhaustion from long hours at the helm, were now screaming for relief; and the hull rolled sluggishly back and forth, barely responsive. He was drawing on everything that he was inside, summoning up strength he did not know he had. The boat must come up!

Finally! After an hour’s exhausting labor, the stubborn inertia began to succumb to his insistent heavings, and she began to right. Then, as the port rail came above the water, a great bubble of trapped air burst from under her and she was up!! And there she lay, with her stern still awash, the foredeck pointing to the dark sky; air was still trapped in the watertight compartment forward.

Quickly he set about cutting the rigging that held the masts in place. He needed to get all of the top hamper off of her in order to restore her stability. But he had hardly begun when the ponderous weight of the wet sails tipped her, and she slowly went upside down again. Had he not been so preoccupied with the overriding need to survive, he would have wept at the failure.

But now, like some miserable wretch in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno — damned to an eternal, purposeless and impossible task — he resumed his position and began pulling again. From whence the strength came he would never know. He knew only one thing: the boat must be made to float.

In laboring to right her a second time, he had the wished-for unwitting ally, the sea itself. The hull, however — in particular the after part — was now filled with water, the trapped air having been released at the first righting. Its buoyancy therefore was greatly diminished, and rolling it over was like rolling a barrel. It took only a few minutes before the masts stood upright again, water streaming from the impotent sails.

Below deck, however, water was beginning to work its way into the forward part of the boat — into the cargo storage area — running through limber holes in the watertight partition that separated the cockpit from the small hold. Those two, one-inch holes were for the purpose of allowing water — water that might somehow have gotten into the forward part of the vessel — to drain aft into the cockpit where it could easily be bailed or pumped out. And there were wooden plugs to be fitted into those holes under ordinary circumstances. But Gilboy could not at the moment recall why they were not in place. Nor did the thought even occur to him but for an immeasurable flash of memory.

The reason was moot however, and the recollection was of no significance. What was important was that the forward part of the boat — the only buoyant part — was now also being inundated. If the weight of the flooded vessel became sufficient to overcome that remaining small measure of buoyancy, she would sink. He was very close to losing Pacific... and his life.

Another problem presented itself: the water casks were loose; they were rattling and banging about under the forward deck. He was not surprised. Here, in yet another way, was evidence of the numerous days — the long and sodden days — of almost constant rain. They had taken their toll.

Running fore and aft along the frames below deck, the builders of the boat had solidly affixed four-inch wooden strips. Lashed to these, with hempen rope, the water kegs had been kept in place; low in the hull where they could serve as ballast. It had been intended that they should help minimize the potential of a capsize.

Nevertheless, that very thing had had now happened. Because the lashings — new when he left San Francisco over 120 days ago, and with the exclusion of only three or four — had fallen victim to all of the damp; they had become quite rotten. With the boat’s violent gyrations having been added to that, the lines had given way. He had seldom had the forward hatch open except to access supplies, and since the whole of the forepeak was by now exceedingly wet and moldy, such failure was not to be unexpected.

So now he could hear those kegs thumping away, hammering forcefully against the underside of the deck. True it was that most of them had been emptied of their drinking water, but they had then been refilled with sea water that they should continue to serve as ballast. And now he feared that their pounding could loosen the decking strips, creating numerous and irreparable leaks. However, he would have to deal with them later.

The immediate matter of concern was to reduce the weight aloft, lest the boat turn turtle again. So, floating alongside his stricken vessel, there in the darkness, he fumbled with the halyards. After finally freeing them, both main and foresail were allowed to collapse, splashing themselves into soggy piles. Then, altogether contrary to preference and driven by sheer necessity, he cut the standing rigging.

Crawling up onto the partially submerged deck, and then half standing, half kneeling, he wrapped his arms around each of the masts in turn. With near superhuman effort he pulled them from their sockets. Then bundling them all together — masts, booms, sails and anything else that was loose on the deck — he wrapped them all with the drogue’s tether and pushed them over the side, using the whole mass as a sea anchor.

Now he must bail.

He reached into the cockpit hatch, his hands groping in the water for anything he could use to get the water out of the boat. There was the pump, of course, but where was it now? In all the chaos, it could be anywhere, even at the sea’s bottom. And in any event it would be too slow. He needed something, anything.

Curiously, there was no fear in his mind; he was on the far side of fear now. His bent was solely on survival. Finally he found a box; a box that once held 25 pounds of sugar. Emptying out the remains of its ruined contents, he then sat in the little cockpit and began to bail. His very presence in the cockpit served to reduce the amount of water still pouring into the boat, the waves continuing to wash over the deck. But even so, it seemed to him that water was coming in faster — alarmingly faster — than he was bailing it out. But he kept at it, the backbreaking task: scoop and throw, scoop and throw. On and on it went. And it was a long time — a very long time — before he could see that he was making any progress at all.

Hour after tedious hour he continued until, almost imperceptibly, the level of flood in the vessel began to recede. He took courage and redoubled his efforts. The stern was still deeply awash, of course, but it was beginning to rise. Also to his advantage were the containers of food in the fore compartment; containers that had been washed to the very bow as the waters had worked their way forward; containers that now lay in a jumble like driftwood washed up on a beach. They comprised a weight that tended to counterbalance the weight of the water in the cockpit.

So as the hours passed, as the bailing became a little easier and a little more effective, as Pacific began to come level, less water was being shipped. Nevertheless, daylight had reached fullness along the eastern horizon before the boat was free of water. Then, having somewhat miraculously located the two wooden plugs for the watertight partition, he inserted them, reminding himself to never again leave them out. And now he could begin to assess the damage. It was staggering.

Thursday had dawned clear and pleasant. And the little boat, as though having been resurrected from an aqueous grave, was now sitting proudly upright. For this he was immeasurably grateful. It was as if the fictitious gods of wind and sea had looked down upon his mortal wretchedness — upon his inordinately grievous discomposure — and had compassionately withheld the imposing of any additional suffering.

It was also a day that would allow for some of his things to dry. However, he made a discouraging and deeply troubling discovery: the compass was gone. Indeed, such was true of most of the articles that had been in the after compartment. The stores of food that he kept in the port side locker: canned meat, canned fish — they were all gone. And as fate would have it, there had been more than the usual amount stored there at the time of the upset, exacerbating the loss.

There had been some of his precious bread there too; a fifteen-pound can that he had opened only a day or two before. Although it had been too large to work its way out of the locker and sink, it was hopelessly saturated with seawater and kerosene. With near tearful resignation he threw it overboard. He now had but one can of bread left, fifteen pounds, and that too had somehow been punctured and partly soaked with salt water. It was, however, usable; it would dry.

But the loss of the compass was a major one. He still had his sextant; somehow it had not gone by the board, and he still had the taffrail log. These would be of some measure in helping him navigate. But without a compass, it is virtually impossible to steer a constant course, even when there are relevant bearing points to be had, such as the sun or a significant star by night. But when the sky chose to turn its face from him — to cloud over and to obscure any such reference — he would feel obliged to heave-to and to drift until he could establish some accuracy of direction. And while the log would tell him how far he had traveled through a given body of water, it would not necessarily tell him how far he had actually progressed.

In estimating his longitude at the time of the capsize, he struck upon 177º, 54’ east; some 44 miles from his noon location on that date. Such a location left him some 1,430 miles from Sandy Cape, Australia, about 120 miles north of Brisbane. It goes without saying that 1,430 miles was a very long way to go without a compass, and with a limited stock of provisions as well. Should he steer incorrectly, that could add hundreds of extra miles.

As he sat looking at the chaos — at the mastless deck and the shattered rudder — the night when he and Howard Sutro had stood on that San Francisco dock came yet again to his mind. Sutro had then described Australia as “another world.” And now, in his present circumstances, Gilboy was beginning to feel that perhaps Sutro had been correct.

As he worked through the morning at setting things to right, as the sun began to warm the air and before turning his attention to re-rigging the boat, he laid out some of the clothing and other remaining equipment to dry. Sorting through the sodden clutter, he found the pump he could have used earlier, and he stored it in the cockpit locker. The bulky mass of sails and spars that he had hurriedly lashed together last night was still adrift. And attached to it was the bundle of clothing, the oilskin coat, and that very precious treasure: his watch. Now he was eager to bring it aboard and to get everything dried out.

As he hauled in the tether and the whole mass came closer, his heart sank. The bundle of clothing that held his so-important watch was gone. The rest of the collection was apparently there, with one obvious exception: the mainmast, with its booms and sail, was also gone; they had somehow worked themselves loose in the night and had drifted away. There was nothing to be done, however, except to bring the mass aboard, dry it out, and jury-rig the vessel as well as possible.

There seemed an almost providential advantage in having lost the main instead of the foremast, because the latter carried two of the boat’s three sails. The result was that he could still set a headsail: this would be a prime advantage.

He hauled the bundle up onto the deck where it was unwrapped, and its contents were laid out wherever there was room. Then having reset the drogue to hold the boat head-to-sea, he set about sorting out the mess in the forward compartment. The loss of food due to the capsize could now be understood in all of its terrible gravity.

A mere total of some 32 pounds of meat and fish were left, along with the one undamaged can of bread. As for the fruit from Tropic Bird, the last of it had been eaten yesterday just before the capsize. There was still some kerosene left in the five gallon can, but it would have to be used sparingly, and there were still about 20 gallons of water in two kegs. These he lashed in place again, along with their saltwater companions. With the brief inventory completed, and things put in as reasonable an order as possible, he did some rough mental calculations.

He had been using his water at the average rate of a half-gallon a day since leaving San Francisco. If he could continue to cover about 60 miles a day, he should make Sandy Cape in about 24 days. So the water situation did not look too bad. And 32 pounds of meat and fish should be adequate if he maintained usage of no more than about a pound a day. Time and distance were now virtually the measure of his life. They were now also his enemies.

Proceed to part 3...