Rescue at Sea
We were barreling along in our chartered, 36-foot sailboat on a passage from Carriacou to Mayreau, two islands in the St. Vincent and the Grenadines chain. I was at the helm, Michael checking the charts, as we approached the Grand de Coi Reef -- nasty and sprawling. The sailing conditions were rugged that day with the seas cresting to 10 feet, the winds blowing 20 to 25 knots. While I was concentrating on the course and the depth meter, an even stronger gust snatched my hat and spun it out of reach over the churning waves before dropping it into the sea far from the boat. With the jagged reef so close at hand, there was nothing to do but carry on as my beloved hat and I parted company.
The hat was nothing special, a little white baseball cap I used to keep the sun off my face. But it was a sentimental favorite, a souvenir from a 60th birthday trip two years before that Michael, my head-in-the-clouds professor of a husband, had planned for me with astonishingly uncharacteristic attention to detail. I cherished the hat both for the lovely occasion and his efforts to make it so.
“Don’t worry about the hat,” Michael said. “We’ll go back for it as soon as we’ve cleared the reef and are in a good spot to drop the sails.”
It was a harebrained idea, though I appreciated his offer. We were streaking north at almost eight knots while the hat was disappearing to the west carried not just by strong winds but by a heavy current as well. How could we possibly calculate a course that would pinpoint its location long after we had sailed away from it? Not to mention picking out a tiny white hat embedded in a mass of foaming white breakers.
But even as I continued steering our course past the reef, I saw Michael pouring over the instruments and the chart. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“Calculating our course back to your hat.”
Twenty minutes later, I was still laughing at the lunacy of our fool’s errand. Yet: we miraculously spied the errant hat, slipping and sliding in the waves. Putting our long-practiced “man-over-board” drill to excellent use, we rescued it with the boat hook.
We were in high spirits at sunset that evening, celebrating our triumph with a good bottle of wine and a lobster in the boat’s cockpit. Unspoken but underlying our celebration was the relief that, just 8 weeks before, Michael had finished a course of radiation. We had three more years of fine and funny sails in our much-loved Grenadines before Michael’s cancer came back to claim him.
The lobster feast is delivered by fisherman and chef, MandyMan.
The lobster feast enjoyed by Hilary and Michael in Saltwhistle Bay, Mayreau.
Twilight in Saltwhistle Bay.