Students of the Gale

Last week we took a week-long voyage to Catalina, though as with many of our voyages, high winds modified our plans. Instead of staying a week at the island, we returned to the mainland early and anchored off Long Beach for several nights--a frustrating decision but, given the swells we'd have to sleep on at Catalina, a good one.

We still managed to sail the daylights out of the boat. On our next to last day, Captain Steve Peckham, whom no one will ever accuse of cowardice, chose to exit the Long Beach breakwater and sail into the open Pacific with 10-foot swells and a constant wind of between 30 and 40 knots.

He did it with too much sail up, I thought, given the wind, but if anyone knows what the ship will bear, Peckham does. It was no surprise to me when the first 40-knot gust sent the captain running around the deck screaming “strike the upper now,” while the crew scrambled about in mayhem and the ship heeled way over and our high school students wet their pants.

I think he did it deliberately, for the adrenaline rush, but he denies it. For several hours we tore around in this maelstrom under reefed sails and damn few of them, water breaking over the bow and the masts creaking and popping and the seas tilting one way and another around us, and some of us on the top yard furling the wild sails and hanging on like leeches.

Up in the rigging you sometimes aren’t looking down, and so see nothing of the pitching and rocking of the boat. But you’d better believe you feel it up there, as if barrages of invisible force were thrusting you first forward and then back, first against the shrouds you’re hanging on to and then away from them. You learn to hold on with your eyelids. The students I took with me were exhilarated.

Somehow your response to all this throwing about passes beyond fear and goes right into giddy laughter, and the wild shout of the rodeo rider. I have seen the deck of a pitching boat erupt in a perfect riot of laughter. My own little crew of high schoolers—after I challenged them not to scream at every rising of the bow—turned immediately into a party of the most gleeful and concentrated little sailors I have ever seen on this boat. They hauled on their lines with an absolute crowing confidence, as they realized they were equal to this weather.

And they were. Next day after a calmer sail we got back into the harbor and the trifle of wind that manages to get in through all the cranes and hills and illegal immigrants. The students didn't want to leave. Neither do I.