Adrift (18 page)

Lying back, I feel the tube deflate once again. I try to rest and stay calm. Perhaps there is a shipping lane between Brazil and the southern coast of the United States, about three hundred miles away. Still too far. I feel as if I've been taken off my seat in hell only to be thrown into the fire.

My mind wanders to the many repair devices that might be effective—needles, sail twine, and good goop; a huge hemostat type of scissors-vise; maybe a balloon that could be inserted and blown up—but such materials are to be found only 120 leagues to the west. The only solution I can think of is to push a plug into the hole and lash it up tight. How I miss the inspirational advice and hope, the ingenuity, creativity, and charity, of a helping hand.

A bank of clouds slides by to the north. I must beat the weather. A sliver of moon sits in a very black sky like a dreamy eye opened just enough to watch the sleeping sea. I tie my flashlight tightly to the top of my head, like a makeshift miner's helmet. All of the equipment is secured to the windward side to keep it from tumbling down on me. Precut light-line laces hang from the fish strings within easy, one-arm reach. With my nose to the water, I can just see the damaged area. I don't much like reaching down into the blackness. Slowly I work loose and remove the rat's nest of lines and plug. The beam of light shines down upon the still water and catches small fish yards below. From how deep can the beacon be seen? Will it attract fish? I begin to reinsert the plug. The beam is suddenly eclipsed by a huge gray shape sliding by just inches from my hands. I jerk them from the water. The shark is about ten feet long. Average. He lazily swings around the raft, breaks the surface for a moment, and then resubmerges. I thrust at him several times with the spear, but it is like trying to move a mountain with a toothpick. He lazily mops his tail this way and that as if he doesn't even feel the point. I do not see him for some time. Now the awakened eye of the moon is higher and brighter. I bend to work again, forcing the plug deep into the tear, carefully cinching it with the line, winding, pulling hard, winding. SHARP TEETH! My hands catapult from the water. Adrenalin must be oozing from my quaking skin. I flip the flashlight back on. A triggerfish whirls about the patch and disappears. My watch! Of course—the glowing hands and numerals. The trigger must have thought it was edible. I take it off and again dip into the ocean.

The bottom tube has to be completely deflated. Then I can pull a sufficient amount of material up around the plug and lash it into a big enough pucker that the line can catch the outside corners of the mouth. An effective plug will shorten the outside circumference of the raft by four or more inches. When the cheeks behind the mouth inflate, they will try to stretch it back out to its original shape and stretch the mouth out flat. Two and one-half pounds per square inch is the pressure that must be resisted. Using my forearm as a lever and the top tube as a fulcrum, I pull the lashings so tight the lines cut my hands and the top tube rubs so harshly against my forearm lever that it chafes a large hole through the skin.

It's still no good. The patch leaks almost as fast as I can pump it up. I'm so exhausted that I fall asleep, rolling around in my soggy ship.

MARCH
20
DAY
44

I awake at dawn, ready for another try. As I expected, when the bottom tube is inflated, the lips are pulled out flat enough for a corner to slip out from under the lashings. Bubbles snigger out from this side. I stuff shards of foam and balls of gooey sponge into the crevice and tie it to the main plug. A gray hulk with white-tipped fins slips under me. The damned water buzzard is still here, lolling about, biding his time, circling, waiting.

I have retied my spear together, being very careful to make it tight enough that I can neither pull the arrow out nor loosen the lashings. It's a pretty stiff rig. I jab at the shark when I can, but he banks and swoops, gliding just out of range. When I do strike, he ignores my puny stings. I continue my work. I fit a collar of foam around the primary and secondary plugs, and pump up. Air bubbles stream out from every wrinkle of the dentureless mouth. Sixty pumps each half hour, or my legs will poke down like sausages, free for the tasting. I'm getting angry. The beast comes in close. I wait for him, hatred screwing up my face. I rise as high as I can and ram the spear down with all my weight, making a dead-center hit on the lateral line that runs down the side of his head and back. This line is so sensitive it can pick up the vibrations of a struggling wounded fish over a quarter mile away. Within a second he has disappeared, shooting through the depths like a
Millennium Falcon
from
Star Wars
jumping to hyperspace.

I tie a line from the boarding-ladder anchor loop across the patch up to the handline. By pulling on the line, I can put enough outside pressure on the patch that the leak significantly slows. I add a couple of tourniquets as well. At last,
Ducky
requires only forty pumps every two hours, but I hear the constant hissing of the angry serpent looking for any escape route.

Work is burning up the aching muscle tissue in my arms, but there is no rest for the wicked. I must get the still working again and build up my strength. There's no dried fish left. When the dorados come to visit between hunting forays, I am ready. I double-check my spear lashings and get into position. It is all I can do to strike my pose, not to mention a fish. Clumsy, inaccurate, anxious stabs succeed only in thrashing the water and scaring them off. At last one comes within range. Groaning, I drive the shaft down, strike her in the back, but do not get all the way through. She spirals about the end of the arrow at incredible speed and in a moment, before I can grasp my weapon with both hands, she is gone. I look dumfoundedly at the blunt threaded tip of the spear. In less than two seconds, the fish neatly unscrewed the point and left with it. The dorados have awaited their chance to test me. They have destroyed my ship, disarmed me, and now they mock me. If only I were a sea creature. Fish do not get themselves into problems that they must use intellect and tools to solve. They simply swim, breed, and die. I am awed by the intricate perfection of the world in which I find myself, but I am too tired for true appreciation. Instead, I collapse, depressed. I cannot lift my arms easily, but I must. Now there is more work than ever to do.

I begin to dig through my equipment bag, looking for anything from which to fashion a new point for the spear. In one of the pockets I find a Boy Scout utensil kit made of flat-sheet stainless steel: a knife, fork, and spoon nested together. It's another item that I had kicking around for years and threw into my emergency bag because I had little other need for it. I can try to make a point from either the fork or knife. The fork is sturdiest and may be useful for pronging triggerfish. I decide to try the knife first. Again I use codline for the lashings, winding them as tightly as possible around the knife handle and the arrow shaft. The knife has two holes in it; I tie a string from the aft hole back to the line that retains the arrow and then farther back to the gun handle. Even if the knife is pulled off the end, I won't lose it. The thin blade sticks out several inches forward of the arrow shaft. It feels very wiggly, and I can easily bend it, so I have my doubts about its effectiveness in catching dorados. I'll try it on a trigger first. Even the triggers' tough hide will probably bend the tip over. But they stand off anyway, as if they know I'm rearmed.

Perhaps it's time to try the hook and line again. Gooseneck barnacles make good bait, and they're plentiful enough. I pull up the line that trails astern to the man-overboard pole, scrape off a couple of fat barnacles, slip one on a trout-size hook, and trail it astern. Within the hour I have a fish on the line. Great! Maybe I can live off triggerfish. When I reel in my catch, it suddenly blows up like a balloon, brandishing hundreds of sharp spines. Porcupine fish are notoriously poisonous, and the spines are another threat to poor
Rubber Ducky.
I shake the hook free and try again. The puffer goes at it again. No one else is interested. To hell with it.

Strange wildlife begins to show. Shrill squeaking comes from the water under the raft. Saddleback porpoises appear, keeping their distance. Light and dark streaks mark the stirrups and seats that give them their name. They somersault over one another and move off, leaving behind a touch of their smiling-face spirits. A fish, longer, slimmer, and less colorful than a dorado, whips past. It's too fast and far away to identify clearly.

Clumps of sargasso appear more frequently and take on signs of age, which they lacked further east. They have had time to develop their own ecosystem. Clear eggs sprinkle the branches, many of which are dead, like dewdrops in a graying beard. While I pick out the eggs, a couple of crabs, about one-half inch across and sporting white graphics on their backs, scurry away. One tunnels through the weed, drops out onto the waves, and swims away like a waterbug. The other I grab and pop into my mouth like an M & M. The tiny morsel of crabmeat is a welcome relief from the taste of fish.

Ducky
drifts over transparent globes of phytoplankton about an eighth to a quarter inch across. I've seen them on occasion since the beginning of the voyage, but as we drift westward they have collected into thick clumps, and many are always in view. If I had packed nylon stockings into my equipment bag, I could have made plankton nets, which I would trail at night when the large zooplankton orbit to the surface, glowing with phosphorescence. But without an efficient collection system, the tidbits I reap from the weed and waves are far too scant to live on.

I lie back and gaze up into the sky, the only thing I share with those back on dry land. A snowy white bird with two long feathers streaming out from its tail and a Lone Ranger black mask across its eyes flaps wildly about, squawking. I've often watched tropic birds try for hours to perch on top of a pitching mast. I hope that this one is silly enough to land on
Rubber Ducky III
After a while, the bird flutters on its reckless way in a vague northerly direction.

Each change in wildlife or weed is a sign. Each heralds altering currents and progress west. Am I closer to the continental shelf than I thought? No. That's just wishful thinking, you turkey! My own whimpering accompanies the pumps as I continue the struggle to keep
Ducky
inflated. I'll hang on as long as I can. Then I'll turn on the EPIRB one last time and hope that I'm in range of western flights and that the battery has more juice than I do.

Dougal Robertson's book contains several useful charts. One marks the migration routes of birds, another shows expected rainfall—not much for my area—another the major shipping lanes. My large chart also shows the lanes, as well as currents, winds, and other details. I transfer the outline of the continental shelf from one of Robertson's charts onto my large chart, though the scale of the small charts may be quite inaccurate. None of the charts show any shipping from South to North America, but I reason that there must be a large number of small vessels running an interisland business in the Caribbean, and there should be traffic from Brazil to islands and to other points north. I sketch in my assumed lanes and possible traffic patterns for the airlines, so I will know when to try the EPIRB. I continually calculate the probable error in my navigation, both for and against me, and write on my chart maximum and minimum number of days to the lanes, to the shelf, to the islands. Even the best estimates don't look good, and each day makes the minimum-to-maximum-number-of-days spread wider and wider apart, which gives rise to incredible hope on the one hand, incredible depression on the other. At my current speed of eight miles a day, I'm not getting to any lanes any too quickly.

Before nightfall I take advantage of a sleepy triggerfish, bending my butter-knife point in the process. It takes me almost an hour to clean the little rhino. I waste nothing. Little bits of meat lie around the eyes and along the snout. Fatty fluid can be scraped from the eye sockets. I even cut off the end of the tongue and pretend it's a crunchy water chestnut. Most of the meat is white rawhide, but from between the fins' bones that fan out of the body a little bit of red hamburger can be scraped. I save a few bones in case I need to make an awl.

Night brings a deep sleep, disturbed only by occasional cramps and one shark that rakes
Ducky's
butt. I drive it off in blasefashion.

MARCH
22
DAY
46

It is March 22, my forty-sixth day. The New York Coast Guard cancels the broadcast that
Napoleon Solo
is overdue. They notify Lloyds of London, Canary Islands authorities, and the Miami and Puerto Rico Coast Guard stations that the "active search has been suspended." They wait until the first of April to notify my family of this.

I still keep watch as often as I can, scouring the empty horizon for hours each day, exploring every wisp of cloud for the hint of a contrail, straining to hear the faraway rumble of propellers. I know that I'm too far away for a search to be effective and too long overdue for people to believe I'm still alive. Officially I must be "lost without trace." I continue my vigil nonetheless.