The Atua Man: A Novel

Morning dawned grey and blustery. Squalls, heavy with rain, and strong wind gusts assaulted the boat. The weather wasn’t behaving as Larry had planned. The wind kept pushing them further and further south, but they needed to be going north. By that afternoon, Larry was so frustrated sailing in the wrong direction that he decided to tack to another wrong direction. Larry calculated the new tack could bring them closer to where they wanted to go if the wind shifted. David was at the helm when Larry ordered him to tack. Jason went forward to help the jib around the staysail. Melanie handled the sheets.

As the yacht came into the wind, a massive wave slammed into Mata‘i’s bow. The boat dove into a deep trough. The deck dropped out from under Jason, leaving him dangling in the air. Jason kicked and searched for something to hang onto. Just as he was coming down, the deck came up, buckling Jason’s knees. A jerry can tore loose and hit him in the side. Jason stumbled backward, to the leeward rail, hit the lifelines with the back of his legs, and cartwheeled into the sea.

What happened next was a blur. David didn’t complete the tack. He kept the yacht into the wind, common procedure for a man overboard. He ordered Melanie to slack the sails. Throughout all of this, David kept his eye on Jason and was relieved to see him wave, knowing that Jason was okay.

Jason lost sight of the boat when he dropped into a trough but found it again when he rose to the crest of a wave. The wind blew flurries of froth across the warm water, and panic hadn’t hit him yet.

“Do that and you’ll kill Jason,” David yelled back to him. Larry pulled him from the wheel. Melanie watched in horror, not knowing what to do. She had the slack mainsheet in her hand. The steep swell had Mata‘i bucking like a hobbyhorse.

“If we stay heaved-to we’ll drift down on Jason!” David shouted, struggling to get back to the wheel. “Melanie, throw over the pole and life ring!”

David jumped onto the aft cabin, grabbed the lifesaving gear, and leapt overboard with it. “Don’t sheet in!” he yelled back to Melanie.

Melanie struggled with her father, trying to pull him off the wheel. In doing so the boat jibed and the mainsail shifted violently from one side to the other with a deadly crack. The jib caught in the staysail stay and suddenly the yacht was on her side.

Jason watched David jump into the sea with the man-overboard pole and tried to keep his eyes on that. He saw Mata‘i knocked down in the violent jibe. This was it, Jason thought. This was his initiation, to die at sea. He wasn’t in a panic and he had no anger. Life, he realized, was eternal. Nothing would change. He wouldn’t have this body, but he’d still be who he was.

On the Mata‘i Larry was almost crying. “I’m going to lose my boat.” He struggled to stay on his feet as the deck reached an eighty-degree angle. He cursed everyone and everything. Melanie stood frozen in fear, hanging on to the mainsheet to keep from sliding into the sea.

“Sheet in the fucking main!” Larry shouted at Melanie as he swung Mata‘i back through the wind in another jibe. The boat popped back up and Melanie pulled in the sail as fast as she could.

David blindly swam to where he thought Jason was. He kept his eyes focused on where he thought his buddy would be and paid no attention to the yacht. If Mata‘i was still afloat when he found Jason, so much the better.

On the next crest, Jason saw the Mata‘i right herself and saw Larry at the helm. Melanie was handling the sheets and as a result, the boat was recovering. The main went in tight as Larry swung into the wind and when the jib began flapping free, Melanie rolled it up with the roller-furling gear.

Jason dropped back into a trough and when he came back up he saw David on the crest of the next wave. Shouting would be useless; voices couldn’t be heard for more than a few feet. Jason could see the flag on top of the overboard pole and swam toward that. The boys met when the next large swell lifted them both up, Jason from one side and David from the other. They grabbed hold of each other at the crest. Jason was exhausted and David gave him the life ring.

“There’s a fifty-fifty chance.” They both laughed, and then coughed when they were hit in the face with a breaking wave.

Larry maneuvered Mata‘i through the gale and put his boat perfectly upwind from the guys. Again, his seamanship came to the fore. Melanie obeyed every order with the sheets, and the positioning of the boat relative to the boys in the water was textbook. Larry used the flag on top of the overboard pole as his mark, and even with the high seas and having only the mainsail for power, he brought his boat next to the boys and they scrambled on board with the next swell.

Larry brought Mata‘i back to the course he wanted and reset the sails. He seemed very pleased that the wind had shifted to give them a decent sailing angle to the Marquesas. Melanie had noticed something change in her father in the midst of the crises and felt that perhaps now she could get to know him.

David looked at Jason and wondered if he should tell him what an asshole Larry had been or let it go. Judging by Jason’s response to being rescued, David saw how grateful he was and that he’d apparently chosen to forgive Larry. David wondered if he could do the same.