MAYDAY!

In all my decades of sailing on or around many of the world’s oceans, I have never heard the word Mayday uttered over the VHF radio. And now, after two days and a night in the middle of the Sea of Cortez, still heaving countless buckets over the side, I am left with that one option. It’s a losing cause. I can’t keep up with the continuous rising water (The floor boards are floating. It’s almost up to my knees.) We’re going down eventually. And unless something miraculous happens real soon, I’m going with her. 

I left Mazatlan in my 22’ Falmouth Cutter, Narwhal on a Wednesday morning, July 21, 2010 with a pleasant 6 to 8 knot southerly sending me motor-sailing north to my next destination, Puerto Escondido about 350 miles across the Sea of Cortez on the Baja coast. All went well until the Autohelm 2000 (steers the boat), under no stress at all, decided to quit about 8 hours later. (It had just been repaired for the third time by the factory after its previous breakdown.) As Narwhal has a good self-steering wind vane, and I had been waiting impatiently over a week for this weather window, I opted to keep going. 

Shouldn’t have done that. It was a harbinger of things to come. The first hint of rampant complacency on my part.

Single handers don’t sleep a lot. I catnap for 15 minutes at a time with the aid of a stove kitchen timer like your mom uses stuck next to an ear. I am used to hopping up and down all night long checking the horizon. I do have a radar detector that works if other boats are running their radars. It has an alarm that goes off to warn me, but there is nothing like taking a periodic 360 scan outside for those that don’t, like the ubiquitous large steel shrimp boats. During one of these forays in the pre dawn hours of Thursday, I opened the engine compartment hatch and looked down to check the bilge sump hole in front of the purring 2-cylinder Yanmar.  

Damn. 

It was full and about to slop over into the area underneath the floorboards where I stow all my tools, oils and eight or ten bottles of vintage, hard to find, five buck chuck red wines. This was serious. I climbed up into the cockpit where my main bilge pump, a manual Whale Gusher 10 resides. It had been refitted at the yard with the factory rehab kit during my last haul out and had worked like a charm the few times I’d used it since. The only reason being to pump out the little water that accumulated from a dripping packing gland or stuffing box after running the engine in the berth periodically. The stuffing box had always stopped dripping after a short while. I figured that was normal as Narwhal hadn’t left her berth in months. 

Bad assumption. Big mistake.  

I started pumping and after 3 or 4 strokes the handle suddenly flopped loosely in my hand, all suction lost. It felt like shaking hands with an Iranian used camel salesman. Nothing happened. 

Oh, no. 

I leapt below, tore out the mattress pad on my bunk and squeezed back to the one foot aperture that manages to call itself adequate access to the stuffing box (This is the small ‘fail safe’ unit that keeps the water outside of where the propeller shaft enters the hull.). The box, re-packed by a yard one year ago, wasn’t dripping. It was gurgling (Picture watering a rose bush with a garden hose). I scrambled back and got out my ‘back-up’ portable electric pump and stuffed it down into the sump hole. It has a 4’ hose just long enough to pour water into a bucket placed on the floor boards. (Yeah, I know. The hose at least ‘should have been’ long enough to go outside a porthole.) I started filling and dumping salt water as fast as possible. With two buckets I could be dumping one while the other filled. In this fashion I was able to reduce the level and keep the water down in the sump. 

I bailed the rest of the night.

I decided to wait for daylight to attempt the always difficult task of tightening the stuffing box. In the past this has generally taken the better part of an hour, assuming I didn’t take time off to swear a blue streak, bandage a torn knuckle and/or have a beer. Because I was going to be stuck down below during this essentially blind operation in the middle of a hopefully empty sea. If not empty, I wanted any other boats to be able to see and avoid me. 

The job requires two wrenches and two hands. However, there being only room for one arm at a time, this takes some effort to balance the tools in the right place at the right time. Especially in a rolling sea. I have learned the hard way to tie a line between the two wrenches. Because when one of them invariably slips and falls into the black abyss underneath the drive shaft, it is a simple matter to pull on the line and retrieve it and try, try again. 

So daylight finally arrived and I attacked the problem. Or, I should say, tried my ancient best to do this. And I couldn’t. I pushed, pulled, swore, yanked and grunted. It was stuck too solidly for one in his 75^th year to manage loosening the required two large nuts with one hand. Getting old sucks. The old isn’t so bad. It’s the getting weak that is. My determination is still richly apparent. It’s just that my body can’t pick up the big checks anymore. 

All I managed to do after an hour of struggle was make it worse.

Then the electric pump quit.

Now I tossed the floor boards aside and began bucket bailing directly from the bilges. An hour later I realized it was a losing battle. I couldn’t keep this up. Time and distance were at odds. I was never going to make it close enough to beach Narwhal if possible. I don’t carry, nor have ever wanted, an EPIRB or a canister life raft. The thought of putting satellites and long range planes into solving my self-made problems has never been an option. I have always thought of Narwhal as my life boat.

And if she goes, so do I. (I’m a guy who in his thirties cashed in all his life insurance and bought an Italian formula racing car. Longevity has never been much of an issue with me.)

Until now.

It came down to two choices. One: keep bailing until Narwhal was overwhelmed and sank, leaving me to splash around while waiting for something hideous and bigger than me to come by. Or Two: whine for help now and see if anybody with a pump shows up before option One becomes a reality.

And I thought a lot about what it would be like to get rescued and then, from the deck of a strange boat, watch my beloved Narwhal sink before my eyes. She is my home. My castle. She represents all I have in the world, except for a grandson I have yet to see. Everything I own, all my so-called assets are aboard her. As you probably can surmise, insurance companies consider single-handers to be devil spawn and in refusing to represent them, charge rates accordingly. (The entire marine insurance industry deserves to boil in their own soup.)

So the fact remained, when Narwhal goes down―other than a social security check―so do I. But now I was actually confronted with the real possibility of having my extremities gnawed on. Live bait? Me? Maybe there is a better option than going down as shark chum.