CHAPTER 47

FORCE TEN

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The sea, the sea, the sea. It rolls and boils. It feels as if The Wanderer will be swallowed up, and I’m afraid.

We’re in a force-ten gale, Uncle Dock says, with winds at fifty knots an hour and waves like walls of water pounding us day and night, and still we have no sails up. Every twenty minutes a wave breaks behind us and fills the cockpit with water. We all keep saying that the wind has to die down soon; it’s been blowing too hard for too long.

“‘Courage!’” Uncle Dock yelled out earlier. “‘This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon!’” It seemed like a strange thing for him to say, since we were nowhere near shore, but then he explained that he was quoting from a poet named Tennyson.

Uncle Stew (I-Never-Get-Seasick Stew) is seasick. He looks yellow and frail, and the rest of us are covering his shifts and praying that we do not succumb, too.

It’s now one A.M., a wave has just filled the cockpit, and I’m up on watch. Please let the wind die down.