(4)

The morning after the quarrel was a Saturday, the Sabbath and most holy day of the week for Jim’s religion. It was a day when he had hoped to enlist Bob and Linda for informal worship services, but now the two men were barely speaking, only when it was necessary to transfer information about the course and the wind. No joyous hymns would fill the Triton as Jim had imagined. Before departure, he and his wife—Bob’s sister—had prayed together that the spiritual aura of the Triton’s missionary voyage to Costa Rica would somehow, someway bring Bob back to the church of his family.

Instead, Jim knelt alone in the cockpit during his shift and prayed, one hand on the wheel, the other grasping his Bible. He held it tightly against his forehead in an attitude of repentance. It was impossible not to mark the agony that Jim was suffering, and Bob felt an occasional nag of guilt over his outburst. But he still felt real bitterness toward Jim for the radio incident. Under no condition would he stay on the Triton after she reached San Francisco.

Below, Linda stayed in bed most of the day, feigning a headache, but in reality contending with nausea that would not go away. Only when Bob cried that dolphins were swimming near the Triton did all three young people come together, hanging over the side for a few minutes, enjoying watching the gracious creatures leap and spin and prance across the ship’s path. Linda could stay for only a moment before hurrying back to bed.

The winds continued to rise, reaching eighteen knots on the indicator. Contrary winds, seemingly blowing at the Triton from all points on the compass, they confounded her progress. By sundown less than twenty miles had been made that day, a fifth of what had been charted.

At day’s end, feeling better, Linda rose to cook dinner and turned on the kerosine burners. As the fumes rose, she grew dizzy again. Only then did she realize a contributing source to her discomfort—the stove. At that moment, Bob appeared in the cooking area and saw his wife’s pale face and trembling hands.

“You’ve got more than a headache,” he said. “Little seasick?”

Linda denied the idea with a shake of her head. “I just figured it out,” she said. “It’s this damned stove. I’ve been getting sick twice a day, morning and night, only I didn’t want to mention it because I thought I was a bad sailor.”

Bob reached for the skillet. “We won’t be sailors much longer. I’ll do the cooking. I’m a liberated man.”

Linda embraced her husband, thanking him for his thoughtfulness, and sat down gratefully on the nearby bench. “I’m sorry it turned out this way,” she said.

“I’m sorry, too.… I feel awkward, Jim and me splitting up this way—as enemies.”

Linda thought for a moment. “I don’t know him very well,” she said.

Bob agreed. “Neither do I. And he’s married to my sister. I don’t think anybody really knows Jim, except maybe Wilma. He doesn’t volunteer much about himself.”

A decade prior, Bob had met his future brother-in-law at Walla Walla College. Bob taught history at the Adventist school, and Jim was majoring in German. Of German ancestry, he was the poster-perfect Aryan—hair the color of fresh wheat, piercing blue eyes, all forming into a sturdy, muscular youth of remarkable beauty, for that was the word to describe him then. He always looked foreign, remembered Bob. “When I first saw Jim on campus, I figured he was an exchange student,” Bob told Linda. “He wore his hair a little long, before it was fashionable.”

When Jim married Wilma Tininenko, Bob had had but brief conversations with his reticent new brother-in-law, for they had little in common save family ties. But, then, Bob had had scant contact with his large family for several years, they being sorrowful over his renunciation of their church, he in no mood to explain his position. Moreover, he felt they lacked the intellectual capacity to grasp his reasons. “Things were pretty cold there for a while between me and them,” Bob had told Linda. “It was mutual freeze-out time. Not until I married you did things thaw.”

Pouring vegetable oil into the skillet to fry the artificial burgers, Bob held his nose to indicate to Linda that he sympathized with her over the cooking odors.

“Jim is still the most religious man I know,” said Bob, as the oil popped. He dropped the patties in and waited to turn them. “I just think he was so anxious to get to Costa Rica, so excited over finally becoming a missionary, that he cut a few corners. And now he’s up there paying for it. He’s going through the tortures of the damned.”

Linda looked pensive. “I think,” she said softly, “that you ought to let up on him.”

“I will. One thing has come out of this, though—I believe he finally knows me. I think he may understand that it is possible, after all, to have principles without having an Adventist preacher pound them in every Saturday morning.”

The vegeburgers were tasteless, and the accompanying soda pop did not improve the menu. Both Bob and Linda agreed that their first night in San Francisco they would find an outrageously expensive steak and a bottle of red wine to match, and to the devil with those who considered it sinful.

The weather bureaus that watch the sea off the western coast of the United States report that the summer months are normally benevolent to sailors. Gale force winds (by definition, from thirty-four to forty-seven miles an hour) occur only one per cent of the time from late June until early September. But this is a class statistic, scooping up tens of thousands of square miles of the Pacific Ocean. It does not accommodate those freak storms that rear up seemingly out of the depths and shriek their furies for several hours, then vanish before an observation can be made—unless a boat has the grave misfortune to be ensnared by one.

During the first few days of July 1973, a series of weather fronts advanced across the North Pacific, edging slowly onshore at British Columbia and the State of Washington, but losing punch as they dropped downward toward California. By July 6, the day that Jim made his revelation about the radio, the summer storm seemed to be disintegrating, according to observations made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Office in Redwood City, California.

But on July 10, the storm was reborn, smearing the seascape a scowling gray, creating winds that reached nearly thirty miles an hour, commanding the waves to twelve-foot swells.

At mid-afternoon the day of the renewed storm, Jim took a reading with his sextant and estimated that the Triton was about forty miles off the coast of northern California, near a place called Cape Mendocino.

“How far is that from San Francisco?” asked Linda, whose nausea had returned despite abstinence from the stove. Her face was as uneasy and turbulent as the sea.

“About a hundred thirty miles above, I think,” said Jim. “We should get there tomorrow.”

“I thought you said we’d be there yesterday.”

“Blame it on the winds,” said Jim, almost apologetically.

An hour later, near 5 P.M., the receiver picked up a small craft warning issued from Eureka, predicting winds gusting to twenty miles an hour and six- to eight-foot seas. Jim hurried up to the cockpit to inform Bob, who was at that moment encountering weather far more dangerous than that being predicted. Both men agreed to prepare the Triton for a storm, and at the same time make all due speed for Eureka.

Quickly they dressed the boat for foul weather, dropping the mainsail around the boom, stowing the jib, raising a smaller storm jib, dropping anchor with one hundred yards of line from the stern, rigging two drag anchors out of five-gallon water pails and attaching each to three hundred yards of line. These drag anchors, lashed to the outriggers, would slow the boat if the winds hit hard. It was Bob’s intention to go downwind rather than tack, hoping the Triton could ride the waves like a roller coaster.

During the preparation, Jim made directional readings and frowned. The Triton had made but five miles toward shore in more than three hours. Jim relieved Bob at the helm a little after 5 P.M.

As Bob dressed to take the shift at 9 P.M., Linda lay on the bed with apprehension apparent in her eyes. Even at that moment the winds slamming into the Triton caused it to roll and pitch with stomach-wrenching violence. “How much longer?” she asked, trying to put strength in a voice that wobbled.

Bob put his arms around her. “I’ll probably be up there most of the night,” he said. “At least until things quiet down a little. I think I can handle her better than Jim.”

Linda tried to smile. “If Jim has any influence with the man upstairs, I wish he’d make the boat stop doing this.” She held on to Bob tightly, reluctant to let him go.

“I imagine he’s already been asking just that.” Bob pulled on two pairs of jeans, two shirts, a ski parka, his wet suit and hat, and a bright orange life jacket, making him appear almost as round as he was tall.

When he relieved Jim at the wheel, the night sky was oddly clearing, with a nearly full moon in teasing contrast to the rising winds that screamed about him. Jim pointed to the wind indicator. The needle hovered near 30 mph, with gusting up to 35 mph, just short of gale force.

“I’ll stay on until this thing dies down a little,” yelled Bob above the wind. He tied himself into the safety harness. “Get some rest and relieve me tomorrow morning.”

Jim looked surprised. He was holding on to a steel bar and his face streamed salt water from the waves that smashed into the cockpit. “Can you take her that long?” he cried, though Bob was but a foot away.

“Just stay near the radios in case we need help.”

Nodding, Jim made his way down the hatch steps. Bob screamed after him, “And if I holler like this, come running! Hear?”

At ten past nine, the wind indicator needle jumped to an astonishing 60 mph, and the waves became mountains.

Quickly Bob determined there were two wave systems spawned by the freak storm. The lesser, from the northwest, rolled forty-foot swells against the trimaran, Bob estimating their height at more than twice the eighteen-foot width of the boat as she climbed their sides. The greater system, directly from the north, hurled waves up to fifty feet—as tall as a six-story building, with a vicious fifteen-foot chop of churning white water frosting. Acting in concert, the two wave systems squeezed the Triton in a crushing vise.

It became Bob’s plan to ride first the forty-foot swell from the northwest, then turn and try to ascend the fifty-foot swell from the north. The principal peril to this course was the enormous greater wave, exploding with its violent white water chop, smashing the Triton and drenching her with the angry froth. Each time Bob encountered one of the great waves, the cockpit filled to his chest, the churning water almost becoming a living monster, draining out in great sucking, whooshing noises, then returning in moments and swirling like flood tide about the wheel.

But the Triton held. Shuddering, making humanesque groans and cries as she fought the storm, the now tiny speck on the canvas of the tempest fairly flew. Bob had never felt a sailboat go so fast, rocketing on the winds across suddenly created lakes of foam, lakes a thousand yards across that were born and lived and died in seconds, over and over again in a pageant that seemed to have no end.

But within an hour, the storm eased fractionally, the wind indicator steadying at near 40 mph, frightening under normal conditions, somehow a blessing after what had already passed. The Triton still burst downwind, and, to Bob’s anguish, progressed farther and farther away from land. By midnight, his calculated guess was that the boat was at least ten miles further out into the Pacific than when the storm had begun, although he had no idea at all how far south the Triton had gone. The distance water log had became tangled and useless in the drag anchor lines, but without the lines Bob would have had no control at all. He would have been driving a truck down a mountain road with no brakes.

All night long the storm shrieked, the waves pounding, the white caps chopping and spewing and settling into great patches of foam that became objects of hypnotic beauty. As long as Bob held the Triton to a compass reading between 165 degrees true, and 185 true, as long as he stayed within that slender 20-degree variation, the Triton seemed capable of riding out the weather. Often during the long night, Bob blessed Jim’s craftsmanship and the strong boat he had built with his own hands.

Once during the night Linda crept feebly to the hatch steps and started to cry out to her husband and ask if he needed her. But she heard him singing, bellowing against the wind an old song, “The Green Door,” and she knew that if he could sing, then both he and the Triton were healthy. Jim passed the early night hours sitting at the radio shelf, straining to pick up weather reports, receiving instead only static or an occasional maddening fragment of dance music. Most of the time he kept his head buried in his hands, not in sleep, but in prayer. He felt that he had unleashed God’s wrath with his radio lie, that the storm was his punishment. It was the most terrifying night of his life, for he was not prepared to die with a sin staining his soul.

Near dawn, as the skies lightened from black to mauve, with streaks of dark gold on the horizon like ribbons on the package of a new day, Bob felt the waves would ease. Instead, he witnessed the birth of a new terror—massive whirlpools on the port side, whirlpools a hundred feet across. Now it was Bob’s fear that the Triton would be lured into one of these gaping holes as terrible as the mouth of a volcano, that she would be pulled into the depths of the sea and splintered. He dared not take his eye off the compass for an instant, for if it slipped below 165, there was the danger of broaching. That calamity can happen when a boat turns sideways to high winds and the main wave. If the Triton broached, she would surely capsize, as trimarans have a tendency to do, and be sucked into an eternal whirlpool.

Below, after a marathon of praying and repentance, Jim turned on his radio again at 7 A.M., and, waiting for it to warm up, argued silently with himself. For more than ten hours he had endured God’s punishment, and now it was time for him to take the helm. Would he have the strength to bear the winds, as Bob had done so well? He had confidence in the seaworthiness of his boat, but was he interfering with God’s will by challenging the storm? Perhaps God had a plan for the Triton. Perhaps it was futile for him to interfere.

On the other hand, Jim reasoned, he held responsibility toward his passengers, Bob and Linda. Bound by friendship and kinship, he must get them to safe harbor. Help and rescue were but a few miles away, toward the east, at any of a number of California ports. It would be simple to call the Coast Guard for assistance. But if he did, how would he explain his fraudulent use of the radio and his fictitious call letters?

His fingers reached for the knobs to begin vocal transmission, but they failed him. He could not face the disgrace of conviction, of answering to a crime whose penalty could be two years in prison and a fine of $10,000. God’s work in Costa Rica was more important than that risk. The storm would surely die soon. The best thing, he decided, was to alert his friend in Auburn that they had encountered a storm, but that the Triton had bested it.

Quickly Jim tapped out his identification to Wes Parker in Auburn. In code, Jim reported that there had been high seas and winds, but that they were subsiding. Twice he repeated, “We are OK.” Signing off abruptly, he made no requests for Parker to pass on messages of assurance to his wife or to Bob and Linda’s people.

A noise behind Jim made him turn. Linda, still in her nightclothes, very ill, stumbled to the hatch steps to see if Bob needed his thermos jug filled with hot tea. At that moment, another giant wave slapped the Triton, and Linda grabbed a beam to keep from pitching forward onto the wet floor. She stayed there for a moment, as if glued to the board, her slim body shaking in sickness and fear.

Abruptly Jim turned back to the radio and prepared to find help. Setting the indicator on the 40 meter band, he began announcing his fictitious call letters, T12JF, interspersing with the triple break. In amateur radio, a triple break means emergency. The first receiver to pick up his plea was so faint, so far away that Jim could barely hear. Later he would tell Bob he thought he had reached Guam, an unlikely possibility considering the inexpensive antenna, hardly more effective than a car radio whiplash. But within ten minutes, response was heard from a seventy-two-year-old ham operator named N. C. De-Wolfe, who lived in San Carlos, California, twenty-five miles south of San Francisco. While making his morning broadcast and chatting idly with fellow hams, DeWolfe heard a faint voice, fading in and out weakly, crying “Break! Break! Break!” Immediately DeWolfe terminated his other conversations and answered the distress call.

Transmission was so weak that DeWolfe could barely hear, but he was able to determine that the caller was aboard a ship, was requesting a telephone patch to the nearest Coast Guard office. “Stand by,” shouted De-Wolfe, quickly finding his telephone book and looking up the number for Search and Rescue in South San Francisco. Accomplishing the patch, DeWolfe monitored anxiously as the conversation from sea to the Coast Guard took place.

Jim gave his name, the identity of his boat, his destination of Los Angeles (he did not mention Eureka or San Francisco), and said the Triton carried a crew of three. High winds and waves were being encountered, he said, but the storm was easing. He estimated the Triton was seventy-five miles southwest of Cape Mendocino. The duty officer at the Coast Guard said, “Do you need assistance?” Jim replied, “Negative. Do not need assistance at this moment.… We are becalmed.” Then, after a few moments of crackling, suspenseful silence, transmission went dead.

Now N. C. DeWolfe happened to be a most thorough man, and he could not let a mystery like that go un-pursued. Never in fifty years of ham radio had he picked up an emergency call, heard someone in distress somewhere on the sea ask to be linked to the Coast Guard, then listened while the caller contended that, after all, he needed no assistance.

It’s crazy, thought DeWolfe. Immediately he notified WESCARS, an emergency network of California amateur radio operators who are on constant standby to be used in case of disasters. DeWolfe told of the strange call from the Triton and advised his fellow hams to be alert for another distress message. In the meantime, DeWolfe kept his radio on the same channel and tried to raise the Triton through the call letters Jim had used. All morning long DeWolfe broadcast Jim’s name, his letters, his boat. But he was unable to elicit a sound from her.

A few minutes before nine that morning, Jim climbed to the cockpit to relieve Bob, now exhausted to the point of numbness, his hands long since a part of the wheel. But his face showed unconcealed pride at having held the boat throughout the night.

He had been on the radio, Jim said, looking out in wonder at the sea, still mountainous about them, still churning with white anger, still spawning the sucking whirlpools. The wind gauge was below 30, but the waves seemed higher than Jim had imagined them.

Over the winds, Bob cried, “We may need some help! It doesn’t seem to be slacking any. For a while, about six this morning, I thought it was calming, but she kicked up again and now it’s just as bad as last night.” In exclamation, a wave crashed, sending showers from the sea into the cockpit. Both men were drenched to their waists. “Who did you call?” yelled Bob.

“I think I got Guam the first time,” said Jim. “Then I talked to Wes Parker. I told him we were in a storm, but that we didn’t need any help right now. Then I reached a man named DeWolfe in San Carlos and he phone-patched me to the Coast Guard.”

“What’d you tell the Coast Guard?” Bob’s strength was suddenly leaving him, now that he was ready to turn the wheel over to Jim. He wondered if he could unpry his hands, if he had the stamina to fall down the steps and into his bed.

“About the same.”

“Did you ask for help?”

Jim evaded the question. He seemed unready to answer.

“So what happened, Jim?” pressed Bob. “What’d the Coast Guard say?”

After a time came Jim’s reply, a soft and hollow one, as if he had found it with difficulty, as if the words were located in a forbidden, even sinful place. And the winds roared about his words, so that they were delivered in a cacophony. Later, Bob would wonder if he had heard them correctly. “They said they’d probably have a plane out sometime today,” said Jim. “But I told them that no assistance was needed.”

Bob stared at Jim incredulously. “You don’t think we need any help? You realize how long this has been going on?”

Jim nodded, chewing on his lip.

Bob felt anger growing.

“Jim, this is serious. I’ve fought this boat all night long. I’m beat. I can’t hold her any longer. I think you’d better call the Coast Guard and get some help out here.”

“I can’t.”

“What do you mean, you can’t?”

“The battery’s low. It won’t work the radio.”

Bob slammed his clenched fist against the railing of the cockpit. “Then start the motor and recharge the battery. Dammit, Jim, move!”

Jim shook his head helplessly. “The battery’s too low to start the motor. We’ll have to wait. Maybe later this morning.” Now the color was gone from Jim’s face, and his voice seemed curiously separate from his body. Bob wondered if Jim really understood the severity of the situation.

“I’ve got to get some rest, Jim. Do you think you can take her for a while? I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

Jim nodded. Carefully, twice, Bob explained the dual wave systems still at war with the Triton. He showed Jim how vital it was to keep the compass reading between 165 and 185. “If she falls below 165, we’ll broach. Do you understand that, Jim?” Bob fairly screamed the warning at Jim’s soaked face, inches away, but the winds grabbed his words and swallowed them.

“She’s mine,” said Jim. “I built her. I understand her.”

“Then take her! I’m about to pass out!”

Without stripping off the bulk of his wet clothes, Bob fell down the steps and through the curtains and into the bunk, burying his face in the pillow, throwing an arm about Linda and drawing her to him. For a few moments he was silent, then he turned and saw her face, and as he gripped her as tightly as he could, he broke down and wept, tears falling on his cheeks. Linda understood what he had gone through and why his tears were necessary. She was proud of him, and between the sobs, she tried to gentle him.

“I’m glad we’re getting off in San Francisco,” she said, “I’ve had it with sailboats.”

“It was the worst thing I ever went through,” said Bob, his voice unsteady. “Just the physical torture, not letting up, knowing that at any moment the thing could flip.”

“I know. I’m just glad you were there instead of Jim. He had a hard night, too. He spent the whole time praying.”

At that moment, 9:05 A.M., the Triton broached for the first time.

Only five minutes after taking the wheel of his boat, Jim let the compass reading slip below 165, and the boat turned sideways against a giant wave, a force that slapped it broadside and sent a rending shudder across its timbers. Leaping out of the bunk, Bob ran to the hatch steps and cried, “Jim, watch it! Don’t let her broach again. We lucked out that time!”

By the time Bob got back to bed, the Triton broached a second time. Another sickening scream of uncountable tons of water crashing against one ton of frail sailboat. Bob started to rise in fear and worry. “I’ve got to go back up there,” he said. “I don’t think Jim can handle her.”

“But you’ve got to have some sleep—” began Linda. She was not allowed to finish her sentence.

At 9:18 A.M., this time with no sound, nothing but an eerie silence, the Triton broached for the third and last time.

The wave snatched her, squeezed her in its power, and flipped the Triton completely over. In the cockpit, Jim was hurled out and down and into the violent sea. And below, Bob and Linda were thrown out of their bunk, onto a floor that had seconds before been the ceiling. The seawater rushed in and over their upside-down world, quickly filling the doomed trimaran.