I knuckled my eyes wearily, trying to grind down the slabs of sleep that lay over each eye like a tombstone. The previous day, on 20 January, a Force 10 storm rose and knocked the wind clean out of me. Waves drove in over the horizon, grey and immense like a herd of woolly mammoths.
Fifty-foot pounders, they smashed into Mhadei, bent on scuppering the boat. For over twenty straight hours, they kept coming and for nearly all of those hours, I was on my feet. Or to be accurate, on my hands and feet, for I sometimes had to crawl around on the deck on all fours to keep myself from losing balance and toppling over.
I was no steadier inside the cabin. Moving around the tiny space required me to stretch out my arms like a scaffold, reaching for walls and grab handles to stay upright as the boat rolled. The rolling and pitching had me tossing about from port to starboard, and with every lurch, I slammed hard against something or other, the air rushing out of my lungs like steam from a piston.
Mhadei heeled or went sideways time and time again, leaning closer and closer to the water at dangerous angles. Each time she tilted, I was sure she was going to capsize, but she always found her feet again.
At times like this, the safest place is inside the cabin. Scores of sailors have been snapped up by the sea when out on deck in similar weather. Some were sucked in by a ravenous wave. Others slipped across waterslick planks and bounced over the gunwale when their boat suddenly heeled.
On older, square-rigged ships, with sails stacked along the yardarms (the horizontal poles on a mast, at right angles to it), sailors have even been plucked clean off the ropes or rigging if they had the misfortune to be up there in a gale, untangling the lines or securing loose sails.
I’d read about single-handers like myself, whose boats had capsized in storms. One found himself on the ceiling of his cabin when his boat turned turtle. He managed to climb out through the escape hatch, to be finally rescued by a search vessel two whole days later.
Another sailor’s ketch, or two-masted sailboat, rolled 360° like a log. It righted itself again, but not before water sluiced into the cabin through a broken porthole, flooding it. Yet another sailor lost a finger to a hatch that slammed shut in the tumult.
In such times, it’s not just the courage and resilience of sailors that are put to the test, but their skills at navigation, their knowledge of the boat, and their ability to think fast on their feet even as their feet hit the ceiling.
Sodden, chilled and rattled to the bone, I waited out the turbulent weather. The storm would pass, I knew. And after what seemed like unending hours, the wind did pipe down and the seas settled. By now, it was ten in the morning. After a quick scan of the weather forecast to make sure another storm wasn’t about to sneak up on me, I battened down the cabin hatch and fell like lead into my bed.
Sailors going alone on long and dangerous voyages don’t sleep like folks on land. They might get as much as six hours or as little as fifteen minutes of sleep in one whole day – but only when the weather lets them go to bed at all. Days it doesn’t, a sailor might be awake for a full twenty-four or even forty-eight hours, battling the elements. And that can be very, very dangerous.
Because when sailors don’t get sufficient sleep, they’re not well rested. And when they’re not well rested, all kinds of nasty things can happen. They start to lose their memory, they find it hard to concentrate, they make wrong decisions while navigating, they become irritable and anxious, and worst of all – they hallucinate!
Now, it’s one thing to occasionally daydream while you’re staring out at a quiet sea. But if sailors are not careful to get the rest they need, they might mix up the world within them for the world around them.
Some sleep-deprived sailors drifting for long days in troubling weather imagine they’ve arrived home already, picturing crowds of people cheering them at the harbour – when they are, in fact, still in the middle of the ocean! It is even said of some that they imagine they’ve moored their boat at a wharf and start to climb out on to an unseen quay, only to sink straight into the sea.
As for me, I was careful to rest every chance I got. In good weather, I managed to sleep six hours a day, and in bad weather, no more than four – not at a stretch, but in fitful snatches of an hour or two at a time. We call this pattern of choppy sleep, ‘polyphasic sleep’. In my kind of sleep, dreams came quickly and when they did, they were a special kind of virtual reality.
Excerpted with permission from Journey to the Edge of the Earth, Joeanna Rebello Fernandes and Abhilash Tomy, Penguin Random House India.
