Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
his brilliant green and turquoise colors sparkling in the sun. I always hated doing this, but
I leaned his head out of the cockpit and onto the deck, and I took a sharp knife and stabbed
him in the head, and his sporadic flapping decreased until he lay still. I gutted and filleted
the fish, throwing the remains overboard to the sharks. There was a lot of meat which I put
down below in a big, old, cast iron pot to deal with later.
All the while Murphy sat wide-eyed and still, watching this massacre with great interest.
“Got all that Murphs?” I said, floncing his big ears, “Next time you get to clean the fish,
OK?” I gave him a nice big piece of flesh, and he hungrily attacked it, growling as he ate it.
When he was done, he sat in the weak sunlight washing his ears contentedly. Some things
never change.
Looking high up in the sky I could see dark, little clouds scudding along, and I knew I was
in for a good blow. I thought it prudent to change the Genoa to a smaller one; the heavy
lurching roll of Déjà vu galvanized me into action. I went below and from my safety locker
where I keep all my flares, life vests, and safety harnesses, I retrieved my trusted safety
line. This line I had worn the day I left Cape Town, and I was lucky enough to have been
wearing it at the time of a freak wave. It had saved my life. It was just a length of three
quarter inch, halyard rope, about ten feet in length, with a slip-knotted loop on the one end
and a great, stainless steel, pelican hook with safety wire catch at the other. I would slip the
loop over my head and tighten it about my waist.
It was around three in the afternoon that the wind picked up in alarming intensity. The seas
had become a lot nastier and were typical channel seas: they were more frequent and had
more force than seas generated over an obstacle free ocean. The refracted waves could be
felt as well, and they generally came from another direction than the wind-generated ori-
ginals. It was rough sailing and getting cold. I went down below and changed into warmer
clothes. I threw Murphy into his box with towels and put the box in the forepeak, closing
the companionway doors in case he tried to get out. All I needed was a kitten under foot
in the cockpit. All traces of love, peace, and Kumbayah for sailing had evaporated, and I
was gearing up for a cliffhanger as I rounded up to the southwesterly tip of Lanai where I
decided to seek shelter in the little, pineapple loading harbor of Kaumalapau.
Lanai was now about two to three miles away. She looked brown and barren from where I
was. I was looking at the lee of the island, where little vegetation appeared on the hillside
due to lack of rainfall. Farther down towards sea level, I saw scattered trees and greenery.
There were a lot of black, volcanic rocks and boulders strewn around and at the base of the
sea cliffs where the land ended abruptly into the white foaming sea. About a mile out, the
wind ventured off these cliffs and came screaming across to meet me. Déjà vu was thrown
over onto her beam ends, and I sprang into action.
