The Black Tide

We were making towards Selvagem Grande then and by the time breakfast was over and everything washed up and stowed, the sun was beginning to burn up the mist and just visible as a golden disc hung in a golden glow. Water dripped in rainbow drops from the gold-painted metal of the main boom and the only sound on deck was the tinkling gurgle of water slipping past the hull.

Shortly after 10.00 I handed the wheel over to

Pamela. Saltley was dozing in his bunk, which was the starb’d quarter berth aft of the chart table, and Toni and Mark were up in the bows servicing the snap-shackle end of the masthead spinnaker hoist which was showing signs of chafe. I paid a visit to the heads, had a shave and then began checking Saltley’s DR position. I was just measuring off the distance run on each course during the night when Pamela called down to ask me how far off the island was supposed to be.

‘According to the dead reckoning at ten o’clock approximately nine miles,’ I said. ‘Why — can you see it?’

‘I think so.’

‘Speed through the water?’ I asked.

She checked the electric log and reported 4.7 knots. We had covered perhaps 2V2 miles since the last log entry. ‘I’ve lost it now,’ she called down. ‘The mist comes and goes.’

I dived up into the cockpit then, for if she really had seen the island it must be a lot closer than Saltley’s dead reckoning indicated. The sun’s pale disc was barely visible, the mist iridescent and so full of light it hurt the eyes. Visibility was little more than a mile. She pointed away to port. ‘The bearing was about two-thirty.’

‘The island should be on the starb’d bow,’ I told her.

T know.’ She nodded, staring into the mist, her eyes narrowed, all her hair, including her eyebrows, sparkling with moisture. ‘I just caught a glimpse of it, very pale and quite sheer.’ But in a mist it is so easy to

imagine you can see what you are expecting to see. ‘I’m sure it was those sandstone cliffs.’

I stayed with her, conscious of her proximity, the female scent of her, finding the bluntness of her hands on the wheel, the intentness of her square determined face somehow attractive. She was such a very capable girl, so unemotional, quite the opposite of Karen. There had been an early morning watch when everybody was still asleep and she had joined me in the cockpit, sitting so close that every time the boat rolled I could feel the pressure of her body against mine. I had touched her then and she had let me, till without saying a word, but smiling quietly to herself, she had gone below to get breakfast. But that was two days ago, when we were hove-to in the gale.

‘There!’ She pointed and I saw the mist had thinned. Something glimmered on the edge of visibility. The boat lifted on a swell and I lost it behind the port shrouds. ‘Gone again,’ she breathed. It was as though we were sailing along the edge of a cloud, a lost world, all blinding white, sea and air merged together and fleeting glimpses of blue overhead. Then I saw it myself, like a pale cliff rising out of the opaque miasma which was the horizon.

Her brown hands shifted on the wheel, the boat turning to put that pale glimmer of a cliff close on the port bow, our sight of it unobstructed by the sails. I was standing now, my eyes narrowed against the sun-glare, the mist coming and going and nothing visible

any longer but a glimmering void. ‘What do you

think?’ she asked. ‘I’m steering two-forty. Shall I hold on that or get back to two-seventy?’

I hesitated. Had we really seen the cliffs of Selvagem Grande, or had it been a trick of the mist in the confusing glow of the sun’s hidden light? I brushed the moisture from my eyelashes, watching for the horizon to appear again. ‘I’ll hold on then,’ she said. ‘I’m certain it was the cliffs.’

I nodded, imagining I saw something again. But when I shifted my gaze I could see the same vague shape on the edge of visibility wherever I looked. A trick of the light. I closed my eyes, resting them against the glare, and when I opened them I could see a horizon emerging and there, over the bows, was that cliff, shining palely in that opaque world of mist and sun. ‘Something there,’ I murmured, reaching for the binoculars, and she nodded, standing herself now and steering with her bare foot on the wheel, her hair hanging loose and all bright with moisture like an autumn web. Swirls of mist and a little breeze cat’s-pawing the surface of the sea. The binoculars were useless, making the mist worse. Then the veil was drawn back, drifting astern of us, and suddenly we were in hazy sunshine, with the horizon hardening to a line and those cliffs emerging again and sprouting a funnel.

No doubt about it now, it was a ship hull-down ahead of us. I shouted to Saltley, my voice echoing Pamela’s, and the others came tumbling up on deck, The breeze was picking up and we were moving through the water at a good five knots. Nobody spoke,