Eco Warrior (2 page)

A wave of emotion rushed up from my stomach into my eyes, and I was about to burst into tears, but an inner voice interrupted. It was the voice of the sailor I had become over the past two years, the sailor who had sailed around the world, had many close calls, and had always come through. It was the voice of the boy who had learned not to panic, to push fears aside and concentrate on the problem at hand. Surviving a dangerous situation required all of your energy, all of your intelligence, and all of your concentration.

So, I began to analyze the situation. I was a strong swimmer, but was in the middle of the ocean; there was nowhere to swim. I was wearing jeans, a t-shirt, sneakers, and the harness, which was just two strips of wide polyester criss-crossing my torso and waist. I had no flotation devices. I could tread water for maybe a couple of hours—I wasn’t really sure how long I could do it if my life depended on it. There were five hours of daylight left. Could I tread water for five hours? But what if I did, and then it turned dark? It would be dark for at least ten hours. Could I…no, of course I couldn’t! I started to panic. “Stop!” I yelled at myself out loud. “Don’t panic!” It was my inner voice again. If I panicked, I was finished. If I panicked, I was dead.

What were the chances I’d get spotted and rescued? Pretty much zero, I figured, though I didn’t want to believe that. We hadn’t seen a single aircraft since we left South Africa. I felt the ball of panic roll in my stomach again, but forced myself to breathe slowly, and move my arms and legs only as much as necessary to stay afloat. The water was cool, but not cold. So long as I kept moving, I would stay warm enough…for a while. But the risk of hypothermia would grow as my body grew tired. When I became exhausted, I would begin to shiver, which was the body’s attempt to retain heat. Eventually the exhaustion would overcome me, and I’d slip beneath the waves and drown. All of these things I knew because I had studied them, and read other people’s accounts of being lost at sea.

But some people had survived at sea for remarkably long periods of time, against incredible odds, because they had simply refused to give up. I decided that I would be one of them.

At first, I swung my arms in wide, slow, circular movements, and kicked my legs far in front and back. But my arms kept coming closer to my body, as if protectively, and my movements sped up. I looked up at the sun. The clouds were beginning to cover it in patches. I looked for the sub. I could still see it. On the surface of a calm sea, you can see a whole vessel for about three miles. That is all. Beyond that, it will begin to disappear beneath the horizon. If you are on a ship, or a cliff, or in a lighthouse, you can see much further. When I could no longer see the hull of the sub, I would know it was more than three miles away.

But the sub was difficult to spot in the water anyway. Fully surfaced, the portal rose only four feet above the surface. Another seven feet of submarine lay beneath the surface, with the keel a foot below that. I stared at my watch. It was seventeen minutes after two. I guessed I had been in the water for five minutes already. I forced myself to think: if the sub was moving at fifteen knots, how long would it take to sail three miles? It was hard to concentrate. Part of me was already beginning to wonder what it would be like to die. “Concentrate!” I yelled at myself.

Fifteen knots meant fifteen nautical miles in an hour. A nautical mile was 1.15 regular miles, which was close enough to call it a regular mile for a short distance. If the sub would move fifteen miles in one hour, how long would three miles take? Concentrating hard on the math, I swallowed a mouthful of water. I gagged, and spit it out. “Figure it out!” I yelled. One fifth of an hour, I answered in my mind. One fifth of an hour was…twelve minutes. Only twelve minutes? I found that hard to believe. Would the sub begin to go out of sight in just twelve minutes? I searched for it again. I had to raise my head above the choppy waves. There it was. It was smaller but didn’t look like it was sinking below the horizon. I looked up at the sun. It was covered by cloud, but I could still see where it was. I stared at my watch. I estimated I had been in the water for seven minutes.

My thoughts turned to my crew. Seaweed, my first mate, was a seagull. The hatch was open. He could climb out and fly away. There was nowhere to fly, but he could find bits of food on the water perhaps, and return to the sub, and rest. I believed he would survive.

Then I thought of Hollie, my second mate. He was just a small dog. He was safe as long as he stayed inside the sub, where he had food and water for maybe two days. I strained to remember if I had left the storage compartment open or not, where his dog food was. If it were open, he’d have food for more than a month, but no water. So, he would die of thirst. The sub would keep sailing until it ran out of fuel. It was aiming straight for Perth, Australia. If the engine ran non-stop, it would take only a week or so to strike the coast. But if the rudder was pulling it to starboard, as I had suspected, maybe it would miss Australia altogether and sail to Antarctica. Or maybe it would simply go around and around in circles in the Indian Ocean until it ran out of fuel.

Hollie had shown once before that he could climb the ladder by himself, and I imagined that that’s what he’d do when I hadn’t returned for a long time. He’d jump into the water, and in a short time, he’d drown, too.

My heart sank. I was too young to die. Hollie was too young to die. I knew that this was the risk we had been taking every day since we first went to sea, but I had never minded taking it on Hollie’s behalf because I had found him at sea, in a dory, after someone threw him off a wharf with a stone around his neck. I always felt that every day he spent after that was kind of a gift…until now. Now, I would feel responsible for his death because I had made a stupid mistake. It was unforgivable. “Stop thinking like that!” I yelled. “If you want to survive, start acting like it!”

I stared at my watch. It was twenty-four minutes after two. By my estimation, I had been in the water for twelve minutes. If my calculations were correct, the sub should be going out of sight by now. I searched for it. No, there it was. Strangely, it hadn’t grown any smaller than it was five minutes earlier. Why was that? I looked at my watch again to make sure. It was twenty-five minutes after two. What was happening? Were my calculations wrong? I started to panic again, so I shut my eyes and took deep breaths until I got it under control. Then I went through the math again. No, twelve minutes was right. I stared at my watch. It was two-thirty. I looked for the sub. There it was, the same size as before. I looked up at the sun. It was slipping out from beneath a cloud, but had moved. No, the sub had moved. Suddenly I realized I was looking at the starboard side of the sub. It was turning. It was sailing in a circle.

Chapter Two

THE FIRST SHIVER JOLTED my body like the shock from an electric fence. It scared me, too, because the water wasn’t really that cold. But it
was
colder than my body’s temperature, and so, sooner or later, it would bring my temperature down, and there was nothing I could do about it. The harder I worked to keep it up, the faster it would fall.

I checked my watch. It was 2:43. I had been in the water for half an hour. It was surprisingly hard to stay positive. Even if the sub was sailing in a circle, what were my chances of catching her? Pretty small, I figured. I couldn’t believe my life had come to this—a couple of years of sailing around the world in a submarine, then one stupid mistake, and my life is over. No one would ever know what had happened to me. I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t.

The sub could only be sailing in a circle because the rope had gotten stuck in the rudder. But how long would it stay there? And if she were cutting a circle, how long would she take to come back to where I was? I tried to remember how to do the math for the circumference of a circle. I was pretty sure it was 2πr, with π being equal to 3.14, and r the radius of a circle. Math was the only thing I was any good at in school; I wasn’t great, but good. If the diameter was three miles, then the radius was a mile and a half, so the circumference would be 2 times 3.14, times 1.5, which was almost the same as 3 times 3, which equalled nine. So if the sub were three miles away, and travelling in a perfect circle, she would cover about nine miles in one loop. But how long would that take? If she took an hour for fifteen miles, then nine miles would take her three-fifths as long, or, thirty-six minutes. That meant she should be really close. I raised my head again. Well, she
was
closer, but nowhere near enough for me to catch her. I would have to be right in front of her, or right beside her when she went by, and grab hold of a handle on the side, or pull myself onto the dolphin-shaped nose on the bow. But that was underwater, and would be slippery.

By the time I realized the sub was going to make a pass, and swam as fast as I could towards her, I was too late. She sailed wide of me by about two hundred feet. She wasn’t cutting a circle but a spiral, probably because the ocean current was pushing her wide. There was no way I could know if her movement was consistent until the next pass. I could only hope it was, and swim into what I thought was a wider lane. But it was so difficult to know in which direction to swim. There were no land features or buoys or anything to indicate direction, except the sun and the sub, both of which were moving.

I was getting tired. Three more shivers ran up my spine and shook my body. My teeth began to chatter. By the next pass, I would have been in the water for over an hour. If only I were wearing a life jacket, I could pull my arms and legs in close to my body, shut my eyes, and rest. I’d survive so much longer. I needed to rest. Treading water for so long was wasting me.

Then I thought of something. When I was calm, I could hold my breath under water for two minutes. I had trained myself to do that for free diving. So, I started taking deep breaths the way I did before diving, then filled my lungs with air, held my breath, curled up into a ball, and let myself float just beneath the surface. With my lungs full of air I knew I wouldn’t sink but would float, like a log. I took a peek at my watch before I went under. I planned to hold my breath for one full minute—slowly counting the seconds in my head, then raise my head out of the water for a few seconds, and do it again. That way I could conserve energy, and hopefully last much longer.

It worked for a while. I still shivered on and off but was able to slow down my pulse, and let my tired limbs rest. The only thing I had to do was watch for the sub coming for her second pass. But an unfortunate consequence of this exercise was that it made me dizzy after a while, and I had to take breaks from holding my breath so long. I used those breaks to search for the sub, and tried to gauge her position on the curve, which was difficult to do. In fact, I was really just guessing.

About halfway through the second loop, I had a visitor. Seaweed climbed the portal, jumped into the air, and flew over to me. It was so easy for him. He flew over my head, hovered for a few seconds, and then landed beside me. I felt emotional to see him. I cried. I couldn’t help it. We had been through so much together. I spoke to him, and told him how much I admired him. I realized as I spoke out loud, that I didn’t really believe I was going to make it. I would never give up, of course, but I knew my chances of surviving were very small. Seeing Seaweed reminded me that Hollie might also climb out, especially once he saw Seaweed leave, and that worried me tremendously.

“Go back, Seaweed! Go back and find Hollie. Go find Hollie, Seaweed!”

He wouldn’t leave, so I splashed water at him until he took off. I watched him fly away and land on the sub, which seemed awfully close now. She was coming again! I started swimming. But I was so tired, and my limbs were stiff, and I couldn’t swim very fast. There was no way I could make it.

Once again the sub passed a few hundred feet away from me, and this time I saw Hollie on the hull. He had climbed out, and was clutching the hull with his paws, searching the sea for me. When he spotted me, he jumped into the water and started to swim my way. I felt so sad. I didn’t even know if he could make it all the way. If he turned back, he would never catch the sub, couldn’t climb onto her anyway, and would drown for sure. As tired as I was, I started swimming towards him, and kept calling to him to encourage him to keep swimming towards me. Hollie was a good swimmer but he was so small, and the choppiness was hard for him. He had to hold his head high to be able to see where he was going.

Once again I cried when I was united with one of my crew. But this time it was tragic because I knew that Hollie could never go back. He had to stay with me. He could not tread water; he could only swim, and I was too tired now to hold onto him for long. I couldn’t escape the reality that the end was near for both of us.

Hollie scratched at my face with his paws. He was looking for a place to rest. We looked into each other’s eyes, and I wondered if he understood. I didn’t think he did, or perhaps he simply wasn’t accepting it. Something about that look in his eyes inspired me in an odd way. I didn’t really understand it but felt it. He simply wasn’t giving up. So I shouldn’t, either.