Free Caught by the Sea by Gary Paulsen Page A

but hundreds of gallons went down into the boat and I could hear the twelve-volt bilge pump working to get rid of the water, putting out a little half-inch stream while gallons poured in through the louvered doors of the companionway. Thank God the motor kept running; it could do nothing to move the boat in such waves but it kept the electrical system from running down, so the bilge pump kept working.
    And then it was over.
    Just that fast. I was suddenly standing on a boat that made sense; the rolling and pitching had stopped and while I could still hear the wind roaring and tearing, it was back past the stern, and the boat was once again in the lee of the island in quiet water.
    Later I figured what had happened. We had just barely nosed past the island, only just come out into the wind-shear line, where we got hit. The wind tore at the bow, smashed it around as it pounded the boat over, completely turning it end over end, and though it was moved sideways the keel caught the water and the wind propelled it forward as well, except that we were now moving in the opposite direction, the boat hull itself acting as a sail to drive her back into the lee. I had nothing to do with it. She went out and came back herself, sail hanging in tatters from the mast and boom.
    The motor propelled us peacefully at five-and-a-half knots. The boat moved smoothly, flat in the quiet water along the kelp beds, and I stood, soaked, blasted into a kind of shock, my hand on the wheel in a counterfeit control. I could hear the hum and squirt of the bilge pump and I looked back into the darkness, tried to see what was there, but there was only blackness and the roaring of the wind and the loud smashing hiss of the breaking waves.
    I knew that I had been close to death and that only luck had kept me alive and that I would go back down to the other end of the island and take a mooring in the little harbor of Avalon and make a hot breakfast and spend a day and a night sleeping and resting and thanking whatever higher power it was that kept me alive, and I shivered and the motion pulled up the sleeve of my foul-weather jacket and I saw my watch and thought, no, it’s broken, this can’t be.
    The total elapsed time was twenty-two minutes, start to finish. My life was completely changed and I would never look at the sea the same way again.
    And only twenty-two minutes had passed.
    Later I learned: It was truly a killer storm. Boats were lost, lives were lost. One of the large ferries that went back and forth to the mainland had been hit by a wave so high and strong that it took out the second-floor windows on one side and then went on
through
the boat and tore the windows out the other side as well, from the inside out.
    The storm went on through California and Arizona and destroyed buildings and killed people all the way to El Paso, Texas, before it finally broke apart and ended.
    I don’t know how strong the wind was that hit me because I had no anemometer on my boat. But when I got to Avalon the wind coming over the back and blowing out through the sheltered harbor itself had sporadic gusts up to fifty knots and a man there said there’d been measured gusts north of Catalina Island that went over a hundred knots.
    All that day I lay listening to the wind screaming overhead, dozing safely in my bunk, and all I could think was: There are people who have been in storms that lasted many hours, sometimes
days,
in the open sea.
    I was nearly killed in twenty-two minutes.
    But I was still there, and that very night I began making plans. That night I decided: Someday I would try the one great passage of the sailor’s world. Someday I would try to sail around Cape Horn.



About the Author
    Gary Paulsen is the distinguished author of many critically acclaimed books for young people, including three Newbery Honor books:
The Winter
Room, Hatchet
and
Dogsong.
His novel
The
Haymeadow
received the Western Writers of America Golden Spur Award. Among his newest