The raging gale inundates my senses. The waves' white crests tumble into gunmetal blue, churn up gray and green, then submerge leaving a momentary slick of dark water covered with delicate lace. Billowing cotton clouds scud across ominous shades of gray. The sudden crash and sweeping whoosh of the waves play melody to the ceaseless bass-line moan of the wind.
I stand on the top step of the companionway ladder under Hawk's hard dodger, protected from wind and waves both, trying to find the horizon somewhere between the shifting kaleidoscope above and below. Fore-reaching under the double-reefed main on starboard tack, Hawk is pendulumlike, swinging between 10 and 20 degrees of heel. She also corkscrews and rolls, pitches and yaws, responding to the ever-changing seascape beneath her hull. My back's braced against the port side of the companionway, but the rest of my body moves with her, unconsciously absorbing her motions-feet spread wide, hips rolling, knees soft, hands resting on the companionway hatch. But my mind cannot absorb the sensual assault, can only process piecemeal the jumble of sea and sky.
Memories of other gales flood me, and with each one comes a shock of recognition. "Oh yes," I think as Hawk's bow rises up until I can see only boat and sky, then crashes down with a bone-jarring thud washing the bow right up to the mast in a froth of white water. "This is what it's like.
"I remember now."
I remember the fury of sustained gale-force winds on the open ocean, how they whip the water into waves and the waves into whitecaps, how they decorate the back of each wave with intricate patterns of tiny wavelets and frost them with white tendrils of spume and foam. I remember how the waves look rolling toward our bow, their white crests tumbling; how it seems as if the bow can never rise quickly enough to the next wave. I remember how looking aft at the waves retreating offers proportion, the gray ridges rolling away in stately procession seeming harmless once past, the wind against my back so much less ferocious than the same wind on my face.
I remember how the frightening racket of wind and water wears on the nerves, contributes to emotional and physical fatigue. I remember the taste of salt on my lips, the smell of it in the sea's breath, the feel of it in the tightness of my cheeks and the roughness of my hands. These and a thousand other details I remember, can't believe I ever forgot.
Evans' voice drifts up to me from where he lies on his sea berth.
"Everything all right?"
I glance again at the instruments just in front of me under the hard dodger, then crouch down on the step so he can hear me, holding the handgrips on either side of the companionway like a monkey. He lays on the top bunk in the aft cabin, curled into a ball with his back flat against the hull side below him and his knees just touching the bunk board above.
"Wind's up a bit steady 35 to 37 knots with gusts to 40. She gets up to two and a half or three knots of boat speed before she luffs up. These waves are nasty. Not dangerous, just short, steep and too close together. Hawk bounces over one and crashes into the next."
"The George's Banks," he says. I nod.
Since the gale started four hours ago, the bottom has leapt up from 1,500 fathoms to 150. The water temperature has dropped from 70 degrees to 54.
The cold, heavy water of the Labrador Current wrestles with the northernmost tendrils of the warm Gulf Stream, jockeying for position in the increasingly shallow water. The resulting waves bother us far more than they do Hawk. We're both fighting seasickness. The repeated swallowing and uneasy stirring of my traitorous stomach remind me of another thing I've forgotten-in this seagoing partnership between boat and sailors, Evans and I are the weak link.
"She's doing fine," I tell Evans, though I know he knows. I resume my position in the companionway, watching Hawk weave and curtsy, comfortable here on this wind-whipped sea. Her grace and beauty in the face of nature's utter indifference buoy me. Amidst the chaos of wind and water, against such awesome forces, she bows like a tree in a summer thunderstorm but she doesn't give way. All of the thousands of decisions we've made as this boat went from plan to hull to finished over the last four years have created a vessel worthy of the sea.
Another familiar but long-forgotten feeling floats just out of reach, then surfaces as a certainty, rock solid and comforting. This boat will take care of us. We can trust her.
I will forget again the brutal immediacy of noise and motion, seasickness and anxiety. But the warm, unshakable feeling of trust will remain long after this gale blows itself into an oily calm. Both the remembering and the forgetting will carry us over the horizon on our next passage.
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