Free Caught by the Sea by Gary Paulsen

line into the jackstay that went forward and moved up to the mast to reef.
    I was halfway there when we got hit.
    With me halfway to the mast, the whole world went mad.
    The wind hit the boat with a demonic shriek, screaming, roaring, driving spray into my eyes and blinding me. I felt the boat go over on her beam and slide sideways. I was thrown off the boat, hanging in my lifeline and harness on the down side, dangling across the deck and in the water, disoriented, upside down, then right side up, the wind a wild howling filling my ears, my mind, my soul, and with the sudden onslaught of wind came the waves.
    They were true monsters, steepsided, galloping, twenty, thirty feet high, almost vertical walls with breaking tops that caught the boat and held her down on her side with me in the water, clawing to get back on, ripping my nails, cutting my hands, now fighting to live, not sail, not obey the call of the sea, nothing noble or high-flown now but just to live, get on the boat and
live
. Even while I fought I remembered the tales of boats found sailing on their own with their owners, singlehanders, hanging off the stern dead in their harnesses because they couldn’t get back on the boat before hypothermia stopped their ability to function and they drowned.
    What saved me was the mainsail. I’d bought a new one, but frugality had reared its penny-pinching head and I had decided to use the old mainsail until it was completely shot before putting the new one on. The sail was twenty years old and the sun and wind had done their work on the threads and with a stunning
whaaaack!
the stitching let go and the sail exploded downwind. With the sail in tatters the boat’s ten-thousand-pound lead keel could work and it pulled her momentarily upright between the slamming waves. I was unceremoniously jerked back over the side and lay sprawled on the cabin top, dripping and cold, my clothing soaked under the foul-weather gear. But I was up and out of the water. I was clutching at anything and everything like a crab, slithering back toward the cockpit, still half blinded by spray—and it’s difficult to believe what salt water driven into your eyes at high velocity can feel like until it happens to you; the pain is immediate, excruciating and constant—I was little more than an animal, but I was up, and out of the water.
    The boat slammed down again, but by this time I had reached the temporary protection of the cockpit—temporary because the next wave broke quartering over the stern and filled the cockpit with seawater, perhaps a thousand pounds of it, which almost dragged her back under by the stern. I thought I actually felt her sinking but the next wave rolled her again and dumped the water out.
    She seemed to be foundering, staggering, and I grabbed the wheel. Maybe I could somehow help her by steering. I’d read of boats in storms running downwind and kept from being knocked over and down by being cautiously steered between the peaks, in the “valleys” of the waves, but there is a world of difference between sitting of a quiet evening reading about storm tactics and trying to do them when the wind is tearing you apart, the seas are slamming you and the spray has you virtually blind. I couldn’t even see the waves, let alone find a peak or a valley, and the concept of steering becomes meaningless when you are spending more time hanging off the side of the wheel than standing up to it.
    There was never a time when it abated. Not a moment when I could shrug and shake and take a breather or catch up or even react sanely to what was happening. The boat slammed and pounded and rolled and shuddered and the cockpit filled and she would seem to be foundering and then she would roll and empty—the three little inch-and-a-half cockpit drains were a joke; the boat would take on two or three hundred gallons and turn the large cockpit into a full-size Jacuzzi. I was under water more than I was out of it. I had closed the companionway,