The storm did not abate. At dawn Kurt came to our cabin door. ‘I have a very severe announcement,’ he said. ‘And I don’t want you’ – he jerked the word and jabbed a finger at me – ‘to make things worse than they are.’ He said the rudder was jammed. The force of the waves had slammed against it so he couldn’t now steer, and the boat was beyond control. The only way to free it was for him to dive beneath the hull, which was impossible in these seas with waves converged in force ten winds. A wave would crack his head and kill him, and anyway he might need a jack and a wrench which he didn’t have. The wind had apparently again changed and we were now back where we’d been twelve hours previously. He said we’d have to drift until the sea was calm enough for him to dive, which might be for two weeks, and that though now we were again heading towards Pitcairn, the wind was so capricious, the sea so turbulent, all might change again and again.
I remembered Bligh’s notes about how, in the open boat, when they’d got through the Great Barrier Reef and were pulling the boat ashore on a tiny uninhabited island, a gudgeon had broken from the rudder. That had been in May 1789. He wrote that, had it happened at sea, it ‘would probably have been the cause of our perishing as the management of the boat could not have been so nicely preserved as these very heavy seas required’. I’d looked up ‘gudgeon’ in the dictionary. It was the metal socket in which the pintle of a rudder turns. I’d looked up ‘pintle’. It was a pin or bolt. I supposed that the same thing had gone wrong now, but in very heavy seas.
I thought of Randy Christian and Dr Scantlebury in a small boat near the Pitcairn coast, of a wave snapping the boat like a twig, and of him dragging Scantlebury with his head bleeding into the dark cave he knew about, and of how these sorts of things were always happening to someone somewhere.
Kurt railed about the seaworthiness of his catamaran – how the mast had broken in the Mediterranean, so helicopters had to guide him in to St Tropez, and things weren’t yet sorted on that because the insurers said it was his fault, but that this was worse. These were the worst seas he’d ever seen – worse than when he’d rounded the Horn. These winds were at fifty knots. They were force ten to eleven on the Beaufort scale and the swell of the waves took them forty feet high. He asked me what I’d done on Pitcairn to make the seas so violent.
I got five milligrams of Valium from my sponge bag. Kurt said the wind was again building up. I didn’t see how it could build up more. I noticed he moved round the boat with his legs apart the way drunks do when trying to keep their balance. Lady Myre started to sing ‘A Life on the Ocean Wave’ and kept saying, ‘Where are my chocolate brazils?’ She seemed to have even more teeth and an ever wider smile. She wanted us all to play a board game. She’d found one called Dingo and another called Murder on the Orient Express. She dropped both boxes and counters scattered everywhere.
Between me and Kurt was an atmosphere of accusation. He blamed me for exacerbating things. I asked him to use his satellite phone to inform someone of our whereabouts. I said I thought it would be a consolation if someone knew where we were, and they might think of a way to help us. What ‘someone’ did I suggest? he asked with scorn – his sister in Frankfurt perhaps. I volunteered the cellphone numbers of Graham Wragg on the Bounty Bay, and Nigel Jolly on the Braveheart, both of whose boats plied these seas. Or the Pitcairn Administration Office in Auckland, or a shipping agent there, or a journalist in Tauranga.
‘Do you really think’, Kurt asked me, ‘that a small boat would divert to help us in these seas, or that anyone would send out a ship or a plane to rescue us? Do you know where we are? We’re in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Do you know the size of the Pacific Ocean?’
I very easily feel guilty, but I couldn’t see how it was my fault that any of this had happened. But he went to his cabin and I heard him speaking to what must have been the Pitcairn Office in Auckland. He gave our latitude and longitude and explained our plight. He said we were 22° 51 mins south in latitude and 132° 06 mins west in longitude. He said it wasn’t a Mayday – he didn’t think we were in immediate danger – but we had no manoeuvrability and if the storm changed direction and we were carried at this speed towards Pitcairn’s rocky coast, we’d be in real trouble. Then he went outside and I saw him sort of swinging from the rigging, and again I hoped he wouldn’t be washed overboard, though he seemed a rather redundant captain as things were.
Lady Myre decided to scramble eggs, but
