Rescue at Sea: Postscript
It’s a story of courage and kindness, friendship and competence.
Read MoreRescue at Sea (Epilogue)
Epilogue. “Even Butter Wouldn’t Bring It Back” On September 18th the crews of Restive and Sparky will gather in Marion for the presentation of the Bavier Trophy to Sparky’s crew for their courage and seamanship during a rescue at sea one late afternoon in early July.
Excerpts from two letters capture something of the bond that grew between the crews.
July 8th Dear Rob
It’s been a week since you took us aboard Sparky from our life raft. . . .So thank you, Eric – for being strong and helping us aboard, thank you for understanding some of our emotions as you took us in. Thank you, Jack – for being so strong, for hugging me from the raft over the lifeline, and, later, for your sense of the ridiculous, helping re-attach me to reality and the present, and not the rescue. Thank you, Nancy – for your warmth, generosity, nursing, and selflessness. Thank you, Bob – for applying your seamanship skills perfectly at the right time for Restive’s crew – and for cooking, cleaning, and loving each of us.
And Rob, thank you. You exemplify the essence of being a skipper, of helping others in need, under all circumstances – from the mundane to the extreme. Cool-headed, experienced, strong, thoughtful, skillful and prepared. Thank you.
George
August 21st Dear Jamie,
Hearing the account from your perspective and the thoughts and conversations of the Restive crew prior to and during the rescue was fascinating! I assume that your experience that day will stay with you for a the rest of your lives, and as strong as your lifelong friendships with these extraordinary men have been in the past, this experience will create a bond that few people ever enjoy.
Know this is from our heart – we will never forget the calm, courageous, caring, thoughtful, gentlemanly men that we had the honor of meeting on July 1, 2015. You all have affected our lives in a most wonderful way. The crew of Restive showed us how to handle adversity with the utmost of grace and courage, and we will never forget any of you.
Warmest regards, Nurse Nancy and Bob
And finally this:
August 28th James,
I came back yesterday from a three-day sail on Restive with George to Block Island, Tarpaulin Cove and back to Jamestown, and it was great fun. Needless to say, the food was superb, matched only by the wine and company. I did have to toss out the French toast, which was still in the oven. Even butter wouldn't bring it back.
Fred
Thank you all for the wonderful responses to this series, which is now available in its entirety at: www.jamesgblaine.com.
Rescue at Sea (23rd in a Series)
Part 23. Restive’s Fate Because Restive immediately began taking on much more water than they had anticipated, the salvage crew “began to harvest whatever materials they needed” to try to save the boat. They also managed to get the engine started and pumped water continuously until they arrive at Fairhaven the next afternoon. “It appears,” wrote David, “the salvage crew experienced many – if not every – adverse, unpleasant and even life-threatening condition and challenge we imagined, only short of having Restive actually sink.”
Efforts to take Restive under motor to Brooklin, Maine, where she was built, failed when she began leaking significantly almost immediately. She was hauled at Jamestown Boat Yard, where a flange on top of the lower rudder bearing was discovered to have been sheared off.
Musing on the possibility of repairing Restive at sea, Dave wrote: “To fix something in an emergency, you really need three things: the right materials, a way to shape them to your needs, and a way to attach them together.
At that moment, I was looking at Restive not as a fine yacht, but as a floating lumberyard, filled with different types and shapes of wood. What I needed was something to hold the wood together, and three-inch deck screws would have been just right. But we didn't have deck screws or anything else with the requisite strength and ease of use.
“I want to follow that up with another thought. When do you start breaking stuff to save yourself or others? If we did have deck screws, who would smash the first set of drawers to get lumber? Fireman and salvage crews don't hesitate. They are there to save the house or the boat, and aren't afraid to chop through a door or rip up a teak deck to do their job.”
Restive will be back on the water next month.
Rescue at Sea (22nd in a Series)
Part 22. Tears It turns out that captains aren’t the only grown men who cry. As we awoke aboard Sparky on the final day of our journey, much of the morning’s talk centered on the events of the day before. When we got within cellphone distance of shore, Fred called his wife and daughters, who were still under the impression that he was out for a leisurely sail with old friends.
“I don’t know what it is,” said the man on whose physical strength we had so heavily relied. “I can talk about what happened with everyone here, but when I try to describe it to my family, I start crying.”
The next morning David and I drove back to Maine. We stopped at the Kennebunk Service Plaza, where a young and very nervous trainee took our orders under the watchful eye of her mentor.
“Explain this to me,” said David, as we downed our 486-calorie breakfast sandwiches with 11 grams of saturated fat and 1,037 milligrams of sodium. “I wanted to encourage her, but when I tried to tell her what a good job she was doing, I burst into tears.”
As for me, I held out until I read this comment on my website a month later:
“I'm glad four of my oldest friends (and Dave) are finally safe, very sad about George's beautiful Restive. A wonderful story of seamanship and friendship.
"’It would be difficult to describe the subtle brotherhood of men that was here established on the seas.’*
“But you did.”
*From Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat.
Rescue at Sea (21st in Series)
Part 21. “Those in Peril on the Sea” The sea has many voices, many gods and many voices. (T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages)
As such things go, the North Atlantic is a relatively good place to abandon ship, and my own experience has made me more mindful of the daily, often horrific, dangers faced by others at sea. “In many parts of the world,” writes Ian Urbina, “the waters beyond national jurisdiction represent an outlaw ocean, where crimes ranging from murder and slavery to dumping and illegal fishing occur with impunity.”
The world’s ocean, whose contiguous parts are named Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic and Southern, is a vast, beautiful, dangerous and endangered place. As described by Scott Gass, its 139 million square miles cover 71% of Earth’s surface; it holds 97% of the world’s water and comprises 99% of the world’s biosphere. It has the world’s highest mountain, Hawaii’s Mauna Kea rising 33,000 feet from ocean floor to snow-capped peak; longest mountain range, Mid-Ocean Ridge, ten times longer than the Andes; deepest ravine, Challenger Deep, six times deeper than Grand Canyon; biggest waterfall, Denmark Strait cataract, which falls over two miles and carries 116 times more water per second than Congo’s Inga Falls; and largest animal ever, the 98-foot, 200-ton blue whale.
It is also a place, Urbina writes in “The Outlaw Ocean,” where “tens of thousands of workers, many of them children, are enslaved on boats” and thousands die each year, where commercial vessels devastate the world’s fishing stocks, dump oil and sludge at unsustainable rates, and emit more air pollutants “than all the world's cars.”
From a vital global commons we have fashioned a lawless global dump.
Rescue at Sea (20th in a Series)
Part 20. The Law of Salvage With our heroes safely aboard Sparky, our heroine continued to take on water as the salvage crew worked to secure her for safe towing. Just finding and boarding Restive had been hair-raising enough to validate the salvage company’s “many misgivings” about making the trip at all.
You may be under the impression, as I was, that ships abandoned at sea belong to the person who finds them. But it’s not so simple. While salvage law dates back to the 6th-century reign of the emperor Justinian, no branch is “so little understood,” one scholar wrote, “as the question pertaining to ownership of distressed, abandoned, or wrecked property at sea.”
Common law recognizes four categories of goods lost at sea: wreck (boats and cargo washed ashore); flotsam (still afloat); jetsam (sunken goods thrown overboard to save the ship); and ligan (sunken goods tied to a buoy to facilitate recovery). Restive was now legally “flotsam;” and here U.S. law is clear: an owner must both abandon the property and relinquish ownership to cede rightful possession. The finder, however, is entitled to compensation “commensurate with the value of the property” – and the greater the value and more dangerous the mission, the more compensation the finder can demand.
“Sleep deprivation and sea sickness [took] a severe toll on the crew,” the salvage company subsequently reported to the insurer, “and as a result they could not sleep for fear, if they lost the rudder, they would sink before getting out of the vessel.”
Rescue at Sea (19th in a Series)
Part 19. Old Friends, New Friends
It was close quarters on Sparky, where 10 of us now shared space that had previously been packed with half that number. Sparky’s crew welcomed us with a biblical generosity, if not killing the fatted calf, then giving us the first and largest servings of Trader Joe’s steaming Asian chicken stew. They, too, had had an eventful trip. Their toilet broke during the race, and on the return, the radar antenna had pulled free from the mast, forcing Rob, an ardent rock climber, to shinny up the mast and reattach it in the same high winds we had recently come through.
It’s a motley crew. Rob, the captain, left his Cranston, Rhode Island, birthplace in his late teens, heading for the oil fields of the Southwest and eventually building a successful oil-and-gas company in Midland, Texas. (“We’ve been fracking safely for 60 years.”). Jack, Rob’s childhood friend who never left Cranston, a housepainter whose left foot is curled from years of stretching out from a ladder, who told funny yet heartfelt stories in an incomprehensible New England-Irish accent – to wit: “How many potatoes does it take to kill an Irishman?” The answer, of course, is “none.”
Eric, a quiet physician and solitary sailor who has spent his career studying the human brain at the National Institutes of Health. And Bob and Nancy, relative newlyweds – Bob, the brilliant helmsman who doubled as short-order chef; Nancy, who nursed both our wounds and our psyches.
We headed toward Marion, an allegory of generosity.
Rescue at Sea (18th in a Series)
Part 18. Found Amid reports of calming seas, the salvage team set off on a hired boat. “The trip out proved the weather prediction to be wrong,” according to the subsequent report. “They had an 8-to-10-foot roll with a 2-3-foot chop on top, making the trip very uncomfortable.” At 3 p.m., just over 12 hours later, they found Restive about 127 miles south of Nantucket.
“The poor sea conditions on the outboard voyage were the same on-scene. This prevented a vessel-to-vessel transfer of the salvage team. Our crew had to don diving gear, jump overboard and make a swim for the boat. One crewmember was able to pull himself up over the side with a little adrenaline from the talk of sharks in the area by the boat crew. He would rig a ladder for the second crewmember. They found the vessel taking on water.”
They also found a severely damaged rudder “flopping violently back and forth, [which] would have resulted in massive flooding in the next 6-12 hours.” Night was falling by the time they had Restive rigged for towing. As they set off, it quickly became clear that the damage was far more extensive than they had thought.
“I've given this a lot of thought,” Rob, Sparky’s captain, later wrote George, “and am convinced that the only thing that kept Restive from sinking is the tremendous strength of her hull skin. Any lesser build would almost certainly have suffered hull failure at the lower bearing block. There are very, very few boats that would have survived.”
Rescue at Sea (17th in a Series)
Part 17. Night Time As we head for the Massachusetts coast 140 miles away, Restive rocks forlornly in the waves before disappearing into the evening gloom.
As night falls aboard Sparky, Fred, both injured and exhausted, is given the quarter berth, where he sleeps without moving – until he awakes eight hours later remembering he’d left two pieces of French toast in Restive’s oven. David and I squeeze among Sparky’s luggage in the forward bunk, listening to the waves beat loudly against the fiberglass sides, a discordant sound compared with Restive’s wooden hull. People come and go, getting dry clothes, telling stories. We feel like celebrities as they describe watching us jump into the raft. It’s a kind of theater – like being at a play, David says, where the actors come forward to interact briefly with the audience and then dissolve back onto the stage.
George can’t sleep. He gives his berth to Dave and goes up on deck, where “the full moon is almost dead astern, making a moon path along the water to Sparky – the seas churning, rough, wild, beautiful – as always . . . where I tell Rob that I am amused by myself – I have this sailing disease in a big way: I can love the ocean and the wind moments after abandoning Restive and being rescued from a life raft. Sick. He understands – he has the disease, too.”
At 02:30 that morning, Thursday, July 2nd, a salvage crew sets off from Hyannis, Massachusetts, heading for Restive’s last known coordinates.
Rescue at Sea (16th in a Series)
Part 16. Why Sparky Turned Back Now safely on deck, we were embraced by Sparky’s welcoming crew, who described watching, with a combination of wonder and horror, the pantomime of five aged men leaping one by one into a circular yellow raft. Fred sustained the only visible wound, a deep and bloody gash on his shin, which would turn into a serious cellulitis infection. Providentially (like so much else about this rescue), a woman, who introduced herself as “Nurse Nancy,” appeared with bandages and disinfectant to bind Fred’s wound – after which she offered us all rum and cranberry juice.
Sparky, a 42-foot Hinckley sloop, had also been returning from Bermuda and was less than a day from her destination when she answered our call. She was already packed with a crew of five, who absorbed us seamlessly, insisting we take the bunks and get the first helpings of food, while they slept where they could (in one case, not sleeping at all) and ate what was left, as we set sail for land almost 24 hours away.
It’s hard to describe the intimacy you feel for people who have just saved your life, but this crowded boat abandoned all formalities and became an instant community of shared lives. Rob, the captain, set the tone, responding to our expressions of gratitude by invoking the camaraderie of those who sail offshore.
“When you do this kind of sailing,” he said, “you know the cavalry isn’t always coming. So when you get the chance, you try to be the cavalry.”
Rescue at Sea (15th in a Series)
Part 15. The Captain “Why do you say, ‘Of course,’ George was the last off Restive?” my daughter, Annie, asked me.
“Well,” replied this former deep-water ingénue turned grizzled old salt. “It’s a tradition on the high seas for the captain to be last. He is responsible not just for the ship but for the well-being of all her passengers and crew.”
“From what I read,” she countered, “it seems like the captain is among the first to get off.”
She has a point:
- In June, a cruise ship with 456 people on board sank in China’s Yangtze River. Only 14 survived – including the captain.
- In April 2014, over 300 people went down on a South Korean ferry. That number did not include the captain, who was among the first to leave.
- In January 2012, Francesco Schettino provided my first “Stumble of the Week,” when, after running the Costa Concordia aground off the Tuscan coast, he “tripped” into a lifeboat, where he refused repeated Coast Guard orders to return to his ship. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison.
George is from an older school, for whom the decision to leave Restive was nothing less than traumatic. “After all I’ve read and experienced,” he said, “I never thought I’d abandon my boat.”
His tears on finally boarding Sparky were the release from hours of unrelenting tension that come with the responsibility a captain assumes. George continues to question his decision, but, as we shall see, it was unquestionably the right one (as, believe me, I knew all along).
Rescue at Seat (14th in a Series)
Part 14. Climbing to Safety As Sparky circled downwind of us again, we watched her crew arrange themselves to haul us on board and vowed to hang on this time. In the raft, the calm that had come over us from the time Dave discovered the compromised rudder bearings continued to prevail. I had become aware of two parallel tracks in my mind: on one, I knew there was a not insignificant chance I wouldn't survive; on the other, I was convinced that, whatever odds Vegas might be laying, I was going to make it. Somehow, that combination – neither denying the reality nor succumbing to the inevitable – kept me peaceful and focused. We were all that way. If we had not been, things might have turned out differently.
Sparky’s skipper again threw the line. Fred reached over and snared it, and each of us grabbed onto either the line or someone holding it, as Sparky’s crew hauled us slowly toward them, both vessels rocked forcefully by the sea. We came up amidships, and Fred, the closest, scrambled up the hull until Rob and Jack could grip him under both arms and haul him to safety. One by one we followed, waiting till a wave brought us close, then clambering up till we felt the grip of men who had come eight miles to rescue us.
The captain went last, hurling himself over the lifeline and landing on Jack, who pulled him over and onto his body. Safely on deck, George burst into tears.
Rescue at Sea (13th in a Series)
Part 13. Five Men in a Raft What, you may be wondering, do men of a certain age and standing in life carry with them when they abandon ship?
Not much. In light of the Coast Guard’s bureaucracy fixation, I didn’t want to wash up on shore without my passport. I also brought my wallet, car keys and medications. We had a knife, water and other provisions in the red “everything bag,” which we had tossed into the raft. I looked back wistfully at the mixed case of good wines, which, because of rough weather and short watches, we hadn’t even touched.
We were amazed by the raft’s sturdiness. With a cover for bad weather and a pump for high water, we felt secure against the elements, becoming practically giddy with relief. David brought us back to reality. “All we have to do now," he said, pointing to Sparky a couple of hundred yards away, “is get from here to there and then figure out how to get on board. Before dark.”
Sparky, whose crew had practiced their rescue procedure three times in anticipation, circled to get downwind of us and as close as possible. “Too fast,” George thought, worried we would be caught by her bow. But the helmsman held his course, and the captain threw us a line, which landed almost beyond our reach. Fred hauled it in, and we struggled to hold on in the heavy seas. But we felt it pulling relentlessly from our hands, until we had to let go. Sparky circled again.
Rescue at Sea (12th in a Series)
Part 12. “A Total Leap of Faith” “For me jumping into that raft was the most frightening part of the entire event. Not being able to jump without turning around and throwing myself backwards into where I hoped the raft was was terrifying. A total leap of faith.”
Fred not only hit the target; he didn’t go through its bottom. Reassured, we prepared to take our own leaps of faith. I’d like to report that we executed a series of graceful half-gainers, swan dives and cannonballs, but we too leaned as far off the stern as possible, waited for a wave to bring the raft to its closest point and leaped blindly backwards. The captain, as is traditional, went last. As we watched from below, George stepped over the railing, readied himself . . . and then hesitated, as if still uncertain about leaving the boat he loved. The wave passed on, and as we yelled encouragement from below, he timed the next wave and jumped.
With no points for style, but a perfect five for accuracy, we were all safely in the raft – although, we soon realized, still attached to Restive, whose stern rocked unnervingly above us. With a knife honed by his Boy Scout son, Dave cut the line and we drifted free . . . only to become immediately entangled in the drogue line. David, the unenthusiastic swimmer, took the knife and, legs held tightly by the rest of us, leaned far over the edge of the raft, and, with the élan of d’Artagnan, sliced through the line. We were adrift.
Rescue at Sea (11th in a Series)
Part 11. Abandon Ship It was hard at first to see Sparky through the rain, a ghostly mirage whose mast kept disappearing in the trough of a wave. As she hove to about 200 yards off our port side, her five-person crew readied themselves and waited. Dave climbed to the stern, opened the yellow casing, tossed us the ribbon-like red line, which we cleated amidship, and flung out the life raft. Although it is designed to inflate automatically on contact with water, none of us had ever done this before, and so we watched with some apprehension. (I’m told you can practice the maneuver in a swimming pool, but that just doesn’t seem the same.)
As soon as it hit the water, the amorphous blob of material began to inflate with a reassuring whoosh, and – like a balloon that turns into a latex dog to the delight of small children – it gradually assumed the form of a circular raft, about eight feet in diameter and two feet deep. We struggled to haul the now-inflated raft to the middle of the boat for easy entry, but no matter what we tried, we could not pull it around Restive’s heaving stern. Our only option was to bring the raft as close as possible to the stern, keeping it always free of the boat, and then, when a wave had brought the raft to its nearest point, hurl ourselves one by one into it – a septuagenarian high dive into a small pool.
Fred went first.
Rescue at Sea (10th in a Series)
Part 10. Decision Time As we waited for Sparky to arrive, we knew that we had reached decision time. All efforts to stabilize the rudder had failed, and we had, with difficulty, deployed a drogue to keep Restive as steady as possible in the rough sea. It was now late afternoon. The weather wasn’t clearing, the Coast Guard wasn’t coming, and we needed to execute whatever plan we adopted before dark. Moreover, by turning back to help us, Sparky’s captain was putting his own crew at risk, and we had to be both decisive and ready when she appeared. The longer they had to wait for us, the more dangerous it would be for everybody.
We didn’t have a lot of good options. Sparky’s captain radioed that it was too dangerous to try to rescue us from the water, and the safest alternative was to try to get us from the life raft (which was attached to the stern, enclosed in an alarmingly small yellow case). As Sparky appeared out of the mist, bobbing like a toy boat in the waves, we gathered in the cockpit, where George asked us what we thought we should do. Each of the four of us said, emphatically, that the time had come to leave the boat. George listened quietly, clearly struggling with a decision that for the rest of us had become evident. Watching him, I suddenly understood how traumatic it is for a captain to abandon his ship.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s deploy the life raft.”
Trump: An Interregnum (9th in a Series)
Part 9. Trump: An Interregnum Little did I know, as we waited for Sparky’s mast to appear above the waves, that Donald Trump had that day ascended to Number 2 in the Republican presidential polls (he is now No. 1). One of the reasons for going to sea is to get away from – perhaps even get perspective on – the minutiae that threaten to engulf our daily lives. And while in hindsight there may be some ghoulish consolation in knowing I wasn’t the only loyal American having a very bad day, how trivial now seem the rantings of this ridiculous man.
And yet, even as the media insist he isn’t a serious candidate, Trump continues to suck all the air from the public conversation, getting more headlines than he could ever have dreamed possible. He needs not merely to be ridiculed but condemned.
He is a compulsive dissembler (“I’m a really smart guy”), intimating that he graduated from Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business (“the best school in the country”), when in fact he spent two undistinguished years in Penn’s undergraduate program, a decidedly inferior brand – and from which, appropriately, he received, not an MBA, but a BS. When Timothy O’Brien wrote that his wealth was a fraction of the billions he claimed, Trump sued him – and lost.
His candidacy has been likened to Hitler’s, but the more apt – and worrisome – comparison is to Sen. Joseph McCarthy* of Wisconsin, an earlier buffoon who did terrible damage to America.
* McCarthyism: “demagogic, reckless, and unsubstantiated accusations, as well as public attacks on the character or patriotism of political opponents."
Rescue at Sea (8th in a Series)
Part 8. Waiting for Sparky We were putting our faith in Sparky, the boat that, serendipitously, we had docked beside in Bermuda and that was now seven miles ahead of us and turning back into the wind. Of the two choices the Coast Guard had offered, the first (waiting 10-12 hours for a rescue boat) required us to stay afloat, of which there was no guarantee; the second required all of us to jump into the water, where a rescue swimmer who had dropped from a helicopter, would put us one by one into a sling, which would then be hoisted to the hovering craft. There was one small downside: because we were five people 140 miles from shore in bad weather, the helicopter might not be able to haul us all up before having to return to base to refuel, leaving some of us in the water.
I figured that both alphabetically and by seniority I should be first in line. But it dawned on me that the others might be devising their own metrics: Baldest? Youngest? Richest? Smartest? In fact, we drew our strength from knowing that we were in this together. David, “the unenthusiastic swimmer,” told me later that if he had to go into the water, he little doubted he wasn’t coming out.
He and Dave continued their resourceful, if increasingly Sisyphean, efforts to stabilize the rudder. By now it was late afternoon, and we knew that whatever rescue plan we devised while we waited for Sparky needed to be executed before nightfall.
Rescue at Sea (7th in a Series)
Part 7. “If I Only a Box of Deck Screws” Looking back, the sandwiches Fred brought on deck seem more than just lunch. Amid the growing external chaos, they reflect the task-oriented calm that pervaded Restive. We were all now aware that we were in pretty deep stuff, and yet there was not a hint of panic. As with all things on a boat, the captain set the tone.
We initially had to radio the Coast Guard through a boat closer to shore; and after satisfying the bureaucratic requirements (Restive’s registration number, etc.), we were presented two alternatives: a boat, which could get to us in 10-12 hours, or a helicopter sea rescue, whose dangers in current conditions were forcefully emphasized. Moreover, while the rescuers would come to save the crew, they would make no effort to save the boat. Informed that we were still trying to fix the problem, the operator said they would await further updates. George then put out a VHF call to all boats in the area. Three responded immediately, the closest being Sparky, a 42-foot sloop seven miles ahead. Her captain immediately reversed course and radioed they would be there in about an hour.
Meanwhile, David and Dave had the wheel off and were trying to stabilize the rudder directly, first using the emergency tiller, and when that failed, using ropes, hammering makeshift wedges – anything to keep the rudder from swinging wildly. The waves snapped every effort like a dry twig.
"If I only had a box of deck screws," said Dave, "I could fix this thing."
Rescue at Sea (6th in a Series)
Part 6. The Rudder and Lunch It’s not for nothing that they call the rudder “the most important part of the ship.” A defective rudder renders a boat unsailable, and no matter how seaworthy its design, a boat without a working rudder is little more than debris bobbing among the waves. As Dave described what he had seen below, it was clear that Restive no longer had a working rudder.
Dry rot in the rudderpost had caused the upper bearing to fail. This made steering impossible because the rudder could no longer be controlled by the helmsman, but was being driven solely by the force of the waves. It was just a matter of time before the lower bearing failed, particularly in rough seas, and even I had figured out that when that happened, Restive would sink. But no one could predict when that would happen. An hour? A day? A month?
The seas were growing rougher. The once-distant line of squalls was now directly above us and seemed in no hurry to move on. Heavy rains fell, waves surged to 12 feet, and winds were gusting to 40 knots. George was on the radio trying to notify the Coast Guard and locate any nearby boats. David and Dave, whose mechanical aptitudes had them speaking in what to me appeared to be tongues, devised ever-more-ingenious efforts to stabilize the rudder, all of which failed. And the cook went below. Fifteen minutes later he reappeared with a platter of sandwiches.
“We might as well eat,” he said.