Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat Read Free Page B

tides. This more oftenthan not involved leaving in the middle of the night or, worse still, just before the onset of night, so that just as you got out into the sea you would be enveloped by an intimidating and unhelpful blackness. I comforted myself with the thought that in the Mediterranean everything would be simpler, as the tides are negligible, so we would be able to go wherever and whenever we wanted.
    Here, though, we were confronted by dark and empty distances, filled only by the stars, the little light on our compass, and a constellation of far-off winking lights that, according to Keith, were telling us where to go. Once again I had little idea of the dangers of sailing, especially on a boat with Keith, a person who was only marginally less incompetent than I. As far as I was concerned, he had concluded from the events of our previous adventure that I was a menace. However, perhaps as a consequence of his halitosis and his parsimony, he was not exactly inundated with eager applicants to be his crew.
    The dangers became all too apparent the next day when we attempted to return from Chichester. We were about a mile off the beach at Climping when the weather turned truly nasty. The wind began to howl and soon whipped the sea into a convoluted mass of raging waves, and every way we looked there were immense walls of gray-green water, capped by dirty white foam with skeins of spray coming off the top. The roar of rolling and breaking water and the shrieking of the wind made it impossible to think straight. We both wore oilskins but even so we were sopping with salty water, and only the business of staying alive kept us from feeling the hellish cold. Thelittle boat was tossed from trough to peak, and Keith and I were hurled about like ninepins in a skittle alley.
    I was on the tiller with a handful of sheets (the ropes that control the sails), and Keith was up on the front frantically tying up great folds of sail. I was all for scandalizing the main … that is to say, dropping the whole shebang and letting the sails flap about harmlessly on the deck … and, as it happened, given the way things turned out, it wouldn’t have been a bad thing to do. For suddenly all hell broke loose as we were hit by a gust of wind like a battering ram. There wasn’t much of us in the water anyway, as a result of being hurled into the air at that same moment by a colossal wave, and the next thing I knew Keith and I were thrashing about in the furious sea, and the boat was upside down, with its keel (the fin that ought to be at the bottom) on top.
    There was a brief moment of shock, then the icy cold water flooded into my oilskins, making me catch my breath and start to sink. The water was cold enough to seize up all my muscles, but the sudden imperative of keeping afloat in order to gulp the next breath kept me moving. Curiously, I also recall hooting with watery laughter—which with hindsight must have been the beginnings of some sort of hysteria.
    I still had little idea of what was at stake, though. When we bobbed to the top of a wave I could see the white foaming breakers on the beach about a mile away. I thought we could always swim if the worst came to the worst. I’ve never actually swum a mile, and certainly not wearing oilskins or in a cold, rough sea. Keith told me later that we wouldn’t have stood a chance, indeed that itwas little short of a miracle that we had survived. And in no uncertain terms he made it clear that it was my fault that we had capsized. I had unaccountably hung on to the sheet, instead of letting it fly.
    However, then and there, Keith appeared in his best colors as he showed me how to stand on the keel of the boat and pull it back upright again. This was a a lot harder than it sounds, because by this time
Ana
was completely full of water. However, as a result of titanic effort and a big helping of luck, the dear little boat righted herself, and after a protracted struggle to get ourselves back onboard,