Below deck in our catamaran sailboat, my husband, John, stood in the doorway of our tiny stateroom. I can picture him there in that instant before everything changed. Our four children—we had pried them away from their suburban world for a thousand reasons—were busy elsewhere on the boat, settling in for the night. John had just told me how long it would probably take us to get to Fiji, our next destination by way of Tonga. After Fiji and Australia, the plan was for the kids and me to head home to the States while John stayed behind long enough to clean up the Emerald Jane and sell her.
I was propped up in bed with a laptop as John chatted from the doorway. He hadn’t had a drink since his big meltdown in the Caribbean, and I was pretty much in love with him again. We had done what we set out to do two years earlier when we first set sail. Along the way, our children’s eyes had opened to the beauty of the world. The kids were very strong characters now, very different from when we began. We loved them in new ways—maybe deeper ways, because we had taken the time to finally get to know them. John said he had just finished a sweet conversation under the stars with Amelia, our 14-year-old daughter, during her turn at the wheel.
Amelia had followed John inside and, by tossing the life vest to her 16-year-old brother, Ben, turned the “watch” over. As Ben prepared to go aft for his watch, the boat was running on autopilot.
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Everybody was finally happy to be together—it had taken a few thousand miles, but the family now seemed in sync. I don’t mean that it was perfect, but we had learned to live together in a tight space without too much drama.
We had about a minute left.
As we sped westward in a lonely reach of the South Pacific, the ocean floor was a mile below us—or was supposed to be.
Suddenly, a deafening shrill exploded through the boat like microphone feedback filling an auditorium. It seemed to come from everywhere. A big jostle. Horrible, gouging, chalkboard-like sounds. The twin hulls under us were screaming.
John looked at me the way someone in the next seat of an airplane might look if, at 40,000 feet, all the engines just quit. I had never seen him so instantly confused and horrified. Seconds later we slammed full-on into the coral reef. Our home, the Emerald Jane, came to a ripping halt. John caught himself against the doorway. “My God!” he shouted. Everything about our lives had just changed. Our lives, our children’s lives, could end in the dark of the sea in what? A minute from now? Less?
“Reef!” Ben screamed from the deck.
“It cannot be coral! We’re miles ...” John yelled to himself as he bounded up the stairway—I was right behind him.
“Dad! Dad! What’s happening?” Amelia shouted over the roaring surf and the loud tearing of the boat against the razor coral. Our two younger kids—Jack, 9, and Camille, 5—were on a big sofa in the boat’s salon, their eyes wide and their hands outstretched, shaking.
“It’s a reef, guys. We’re on a reef. We’ll be fine,” John said, running aft through an open door and leaping up to the teak deck of the cockpit. His eyes were terrified and the kids saw that. Then I came through behind him, grabbed flashlights, and they saw my eyes. Jack and Camille understood we were in very serious trouble.
John threw one of our engines hard into reverse just as a high wave crested violently over the stern. Even both engines working together couldn’t begin to pull the boat off the reef.
Only the front, jib, sail had been in use. It absolutely had to be hauled down this instant if the engines were to have any chance. John pulled the jib’s thick Dacron line off its winch, but, in the windy whip and tangle of the moment, the line had jammed in a pulley somewhere forward. Ben, enough of a sailor now to understand that the sail had to be cut, snapped the handle of a diving knife into his father’s hand. John ducked as the hard tip of the freed sail whistled past his eyes.
The surf roared like jet engines all around us. We screamed to each other just to be heard while the boat was being devoured with each great wave.
As the starboard hull filled with water, Amelia and I grabbed canvas shopping totes and started collecting some of the flotsam that might be useful in the life raft. Our hands were shaking so violently that it was hard to pick things up and put them in the bags—and I was slipping terribly on the wood floor. Jack said something, but I could not make it out. “What, Jack?” I screamed over the din of crashing surf and cracking boat.
“I don’t want to die,” he screamed back.
“Me either!” Camille screamed.
“We don’t want to die!” they screamed together.
Amelia was handling this better than I was; she put her arms around both of them. “Don’t worry,” she said, “we have two other boats, remember?” referring to the life raft and dinghy. “This is what they are for—just this kind of thing. It happens all the time.”
The coral’s digestion of the boat had now become a steady fusillade of earsplitting cracks and pops as the hulls and bulkheads broke apart. Our belongings began to wash around us. Even above this sound, a new, deep roar behind the boat made all the flashlight beams shine aft to reveal a cresting wave building high above us. Down it came, ripping the dinghy from the deck. The stern of Emerald Jane rose up and crashed on top of it.
“The radio!” John screamed as he passed by me in the cockpit. He headed for the salon, where he stood for a second in shock to see the interior awash. He turned to Ben and pointed to the GPS position readout at the chart table. Somehow, Ben found a pencil and scrap of paper to write down our position. John and I went the few steps down into the port hull, sloshing but not too deep yet, where the radio was still getting power. John put the microphone close to his mouth.
“Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is sailing vessel Emerald Jane. We have struck a reef in position”—Ben reached down the stairs to hand him the scrap of paper—“approximately 16 degrees, 35 minutes south. … We are sinking and in need of immediate assistance. Mayday. Mayday. ...”
Our lights began to flicker.
John bounded up the stairs and looked at Ben. “Life raft!” he shouted, and the two of them were gone. “Come on,” I told the three younger kids. “Let’s gather as much food as we can find.”
Another great wave lifted the stern of the boat. With its broken spine, the Emerald Jane now flexed like an old shoe. This loosened the line between the bow and the top of the eight-story mast, which in turn allowed the lines supporting the mast from the aft to pull the entire mast backward out of its fitting.
The entire 2,500-pound mast came crashing down sideways across the bow, grazing Ben and knocking John backward. He hit his head on the deck so hard he didn’t know for a few seconds that the mast was lying across his left leg, just below the knee. He didn’t know that one of the wing-like line spreaders attached halfway up the mast had come down like a cleaver and cut through all but a few shreds of skin and tendon.
What the kids and I heard after the crash of the mast—a very different sound rising above the sea’s roar—was John’s horrible scream.
John’s brain was trying to sort out the pain from both his head and leg. A wave broke over the deck and submerged him. The water was at first a comfort, but then the panic of not being able to struggle to the surface took hold. He felt sheer panic until the wave subsided, and then he screamed for air. The pain overwhelmed all his thoughts but one: He remembered our son, who might be dead under the mast.
“Ben! Ben! Are you all right?” he yelled into the roar.
“Yeah, Dad,” Ben yelled back as he struggled free of tangled lines.
The inflated life raft was lying on top of John. Ben thought his father’s scream had been about that. He lifted it off. Using a glow stick for light, he saw his dad’s leg pinned by the mast and nearly cut off by the spreader. Ben’s own face ran with blood and salt water, which now poured over his father as he stooped to examine the horrible wound. He struggled to lift the mast. No way. John screamed as another wave shifted the weight.
John couldn’t see over the mast to examine the wound himself, but, judging from Ben’s eyes, it was bad. He pulled Ben close. “You’ve got to take over now, son. Make the decisions.”
Ben nodded. “It’ll be okay, Dad. I’m gonna get you out of here.”
Pain then overwhelmed John—white light, brilliant and hot. Time stopped for him.
For hours, Ben and I struggled to free John as the boat bucked in the waves. The mast occasionally lifted a few inches and then slammed down again on John’s leg, which Ben had in a tourniquet. John could hear our muffled curses as our hands slipped on the wet metal. “Big one!” he heard time and again. “Big one coming.” Ben used the waves to wedge things under the mast, preparing to make one last great effort to move it. Finally, as a huge wave crested above us, the mast shifted when Ben and I pushed it, and John was able to slide free.
We spent the rest of the night huddled on the reef, with John lying in the lifeboat so he had some protection. I asked Jack and Camille to clamp themselves around their father to keep him warm, and Amelia stood chest-deep in a tidal pool to hold the raft clear of the coral ledge. Ben and I saw a high breaker finally tear the Emerald Jane apart.
Hours later, there was another explosion. Turning quickly, I saw Ben standing on a coral shelf like a victorious soldier on a hilltop. He was holding a flare tube in his upstretched hand, and the flare he had just launched was now a beautiful crimson firework in the morning sky.
Then I heard what he had heard: an airplane. A low-flying French navy jet.
“My God,” I shouted. “They found us.”
From the book Black Wave by John and Jean Silverwood. ©2008 by Manihi Inc. Reprinted by arrangement with The Random House Publishing Group.
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