Part III, RED SKY AT NIGHT, SAILORS DELIGHT

   The seas rolled up as high as the spreaders on the mast, and I had to ease the bow over the lip of each approaching wave so as not to slam down into the trough some twenty feet below. It was like skiing big moguls, and there could be no mistakes. There was no star sight that night, or for the next two days. I was given a life harness made of web-strap with a stout caribiner, with which I would strap myself to a hook recessed into the floor of the cockpit. "Wherever you move topside, make sure you are secured", quoth Leon, and I did not disagree.
   A large wave was picked up by the wind and slapped against Blanquita's stern, causing her to shudder and dumping hundreds of gallons of water, filling the well and drenching me. Had I not been strapped in I would have been washed overboard. The water drained out of the scuppers slowly, and the bilge-pumps came on automatically to clear the cabin bilge of any water that had gone through the companionway.
   There were no colors but black and grey for the next two days. Even the seas, which until recently had been a magnificent blue, were now an angry, greenish-grey. Only the phosphorescent plankton brought color to our lives.
   Eventually, the screams of the wind through the rigging dropped an octave, and then another. The waves were still alarmingly high but the wind had slacked enough that we could shake out a reef, our speed was still around ten knots, we guessed, since the knot meter no longer worked. We had also lost our taff-rail log. Our digestive system, which had stopped working due to fear, fear, and terror, started working again, but we had to use the bailing bucket for our exertions since  the sea was too high to hang our bottoms off the pulpit.
   The sun eventually returned and, though we were still far from shore, the flotsam and jetson of our old lives was sighted. There was bull kelp, styrofoam cups and insulation, plastic grocery bags, and floating wood. Wood that had once been part of a boat.
   We figured we were somewhere off shore of the Northern California coast near Eureka, as that was the first radio station we could recieve. Eventually, the Eureka lighthouse could be seen by its distinctive light sequence as listed on the nautical charts. We were some three hundred miles north of where we needed to go, a distance to be multiplied by our tacks offshore and in. But the voyage was nearly over.

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