Overboard
Man overboard. The cry we hope never to hear. Ever since the late Mike Peyton, Yachting Monthly’s longlived cartoonist, told me of the day he came across a woman adrift who’d lost her husband overboard it has played on my mind.
I’ve been there myself, twice. The first time, as kids, a pal and I were sailing, one Easter weekend, across the Thames Estuary in Sarabande, a leaky old 18ft Essex One Design which I’d barely enough money to fit out. My friend, Derek May, was crew and the wind was stiff. When the rotten jib-sheet, which he was holding up on the weather side, parted, he went head over heels into the bitterly cold river.
It was easy enough to put the boat round, those Morgan Giles’ designs were handy craft, and pick him up. He was still wearing his bobble hat and, although he was very cold, we thought the whole escapade hilarious.
The second time I was alone aboard Powder Monkey, my Alan Buchanan 30ft Yeoman Junior, on her mooring. I misjudged getting aboard the sailing tender and semi-capsized her, going into the river complete in wellington boots.
Powder Monkey’s topsides were too high for me to get back aboard. The dinghy, though half full of water, was fortunately still afloat, and the wellington boots, though completely full of water, were a size too large and easy enough to kick off.
I hung there in the water, under the boat’s beautiful counter, holding onto the dinghy painter. I had torn a muscle in my left arm during the momentary fight to prevent myself pitching in.
Even so, using my good arm clipped over the dinghy transom and kicking furiously, I managed to catapult myself into the dinghy. I was fit then. I couldn’t have done it today.
Watching the film Open Water about a crew of young Americans who jump overboard for a swim during a calm, but forget to lower the passerelle, we all had our theories about surviving.
Mine was to use the lightest female member of the crew on the shoulders of a group of treading-water males to try and hook her lifejacket crotch strap on something inside the rail at the lowest point of the boat’s sheer. But, over the years, my mind has returned to the distressed woman Mike came across. She couldn’t sail, she couldn’t operate the VHF, she was somewhere between grief and panic. She blamed herself for her husband’s own failure to train her up.
And it is this strange reversal of culpability I wanted to consider in my just-published second novel, Dead Reckoning (Amazon Books). How would I handle losing my own wife overboard? How would I find her? How long should the rescue services search?
We have all watched Duncan Wells’ informative operation of retrieval systems at Southampton Boat Show, and, although they are well worth understanding, others prefer to rely on their own ingenious methods: after Mike’s chastening experience he built steps on his transomhung rudder. My own boat has the same arrangement.
For those without accessible rudders you might want to adopt the method used by a pal of mine, Pete Willetts, who often sails Aztec, his 28ft Seal, solo, but who never puts to sea before deploying a small rope ladder over the rail.
One thing is certain about abandoned boats: the crew are in the water. Somewhere. They have not been abducted by aliens, or eaten by sea monsters. They have either been swept into the sea or made a choice, for whatever reason, to consider the vessel more hazardous than the element it is floating on. Some, like Donald Crowhurst, leave a log, others, like the crew of the Marie Celeste, half-eaten meals. None of us wish to join their ranks and so we must have an arrangement to become Man Back Aboards.
How would I handle losing my own wife overboard? How would I find her?