(Lise and Lizzy thirty years later)
Taku
Between the last two islands guarding safe harbor inside, stiff headwinds had come kicking down the strait, bringing crosswaves pounding against the seas in a rogue's nightmare. And though Lise knew it wouldn't be any fun when the wind shifted, her Lizzy rose up and up, and then surged right along with it like only she could.
Greybeards streamed off the green-gray smother of foam capping giant waves whose boiling crests gobbled the thirty-two foot Lizzy for the thousandth time. Phosphorescing like a million Fourth-of-July sparklers, electric bubbly froth stampeeds up and over the cabin, swallowing everything hellbent.
“CR-R-ACK!” jolts the boat as the last fishpole stanchion rips loose, taking with it another four feet of bulwarks. Two more rifle shots announce its wire stays whipping their chainplates off and away. The foam diminishes with the passing of the wave crest and the boat slides down the backside into the trough. The day before, after a rogue wave smashed engineroom portholes, suffocating motor and killing batteries, she pumped water out manually until increasing violence of pitch and roll made even that too dangerous.
Awake seventy-two hours fighting a relentless onslaught of increasingly immense rollers, the haggard survivor of five days and nights of this madness clipped her safety line to a rope trailing over the stern, but whose end came back aboard to the bow of her rowboat, Peapod. As the thickening gray gloom announced dusk; survival suit over her wetsuit; knowing Lizzy was sinking, she had gathered a watertight bucketful of survival aids plus two jugs of water and had managed, in between wave mayhems, to get them lashed underneath the skiff's seat, let go its tie-downs, and scurry back inside the cabin just in time to escape the next wave top. As she had hoped, Peapod had washed over-side and she payed the line out until it jerked taut.
Poor old boat, so full of water, it was now or never for going overboard and trusting her life to the skiff. Battered and weary beyond sleep, she had considered just lashing herself in and riding Lizzy down. How much longer could she survive forty foot seas in an eight foot rowboat, anyway? Built-in Styrofoam flotation tubing lashed to its top edges gave the deciding glimmer-of-hope. The skiff would float. Whether she could or not was iffy at best. If she made it, she might buy some time . . .
Cinching her life jacket tighter, Lizzy's slave cries, “Poor dear sweet thing!” as the next smothering wave crest shatters, tears, and shreds. In the receding swirl of a billion phosphorescing bubbles, she pulls Peapod close and leaps into the already half-sunk skiff and, fighting down tears for her beloved old boat, began bailing for dear life.
Sprayshield notwithstanding, wild wind-blown wave tops battered her. Twenty, thirty, fifty gallons of icy water bashing a beat-up body. Full of water more often than not; twice rolled over completely! In a dazed fog, instinct alone hung on to roll the little boat back upright. “NO!” The second rollover had wrenched food and water loose and swept them away. Gasping for air, she bailed feverishly in a desperate nightmare of fatigue; then collapsing in a heap, only to be roused again and again by the maelstrom madness every forty seconds, like clockwork, as the oncoming wave top roars up out of fog and spume.
Hyperactive phosphorescence in the water became intense! Fishes' wakes mimicked shooting stars, leaving glittering showers of sparks trailing after them to explode in myriad darting yellow-green pinpoints of fire. Little compensation for all that had been lost, but nonetheless worthy of note.
It was one tough seadog who survived to the gray pre-dawn's revealing of the large white-capped rollers, four-hundred feet from crest to crest, spray trailing off their tops in nature's awesome fury-unleashed; reducing all you are to less-than-nothing in the immense scheme.
The wind relaxed a bit at dawn and for two minutes, the sun shone through a sliver of blue at the horizon before disappearing into the thick cloud cover, but suggesting an easing of the storm. Day number six of the worst ocean and wind. That glimmer of sunshine was the last thing she remembered, all live?-or-die? worry dissolving in blessed way-overdue sleep. If seagods or goddesses wanted her: they could have her. Fog settled back in and wavetops began to smooth out, saving her from going under, as little-by-little, weather subsided with the day.
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