After being thrown violently against the side of the hull next to my bunk, I lunged to my feet and staggered through the cabin, muttering a single curse and wincing with sudden pain as the continued rocking threw me off balance, slamming my shoulder against the locker door in the minuscule hallway separating the forward berth from the main cabin. I’d been sound asleep thirty seconds earlier, and my eyes were still trying to focus as I mounted the three steps leading out to the cockpit. The cabin cruiser, christened the Phoenix, is a 40 plus year old product of the Chris Craft boat works in Michigan. She’s a seven-ton mixture of oak, teak, and mahogany powered by twin Chrysler V-8’s, and it takes a lot to make her 35’ length pitch and yaw the way she was now doing.
Something like the five and six foot waves that were rolling across the water in close formation, striking the Phoenix broadside. As soon as I turned the knob, the door wrenched itself from my hand and slammed all the way open against its stop as the boat pitched to port on the back of a swell. And then it came back at me as the next wave hammered its way in. She’d managed to right herself just in time to avoid taking water over the rail, but I knew the right combination was out there; an even tighter pair of crests where the second one would be able to catch the port beam when the starboard chine was still on top of the first wave. Even knowing that, all I could do for a moment was brace myself to roll with the latest one about to strike while trying to see through the strange, swirling mist that now surrounded the boat. The pans hanging from the galley ceiling clattered against each other. One of them fell. If I didn’t get the Phoenix turned back into the waves quickly, she was destined to be just another one of the fish structures that dot the floor of the Chesapeake Bay. To drive the point home, the tip of the next swell was trimmed off by the sliding, slicing motion of the port gunwale, drenching me as I turned to the helm. My right hand turned the key for the starboard engine as my left fumbled for the throttle, and as soon as the one engine was running, I shifted into gear and nosed the bow around into the waves. Only then did I manage to take my first full breath since being jerked awake.
Being bow-on to the turbulent waters still didn’t make for a smooth ride, but at least it got rid of the side-to-side pitching that can send even a seasoned sailor racing for the rail. Toggling the switch for the anchor winch, it seemed like I had to pay out a lot of additional line before it finally felt as though the hook had renewed its grip on the bottom, and I could only hope it would hold against the snapping strain each time the bow rose with a fresh wave. I kept the engine running just in case. A glance up at the clock over the wheel told me I'd slept less than three hours.
Every action up to that point had been pure reflex, but I finally found a minute to take stock of the situation. Earlier that morning, I'd anchored in about twenty feet of water a mile into the Chesapeake Bay off the Windmill Point Light near the mouth of the Rappahannock River. It was supposed to be a well-deserved day of relaxation and fishing, and when there’d been a notable lack of response to my baited hook, I’d given priority to the relaxation part. At the time I’d gone in to take that nap, the skies were clear, the water almost smooth as glass. There was just enough of a swell to rock me to sleep.
The conditions I awoke to couldn’t have been more opposite. If I was still anywhere near the Windmill Point Light, I should have been able to see its beacon flashing, even through the heavy mist which reduced visibility to barely a hundred feet. But a full circle scan revealed nothing at all.
It was like a cloud had descended to merge with the turbulent waters surrounding me. A glance at the depth finder showed forty- five feet of water under the keel, meaning I must have drifted a fair distance, either east toward the center of the Chesapeake or north, maybe as far as Fleet’s Bay.
The Chesapeake Bay has always been notorious for sudden weather changes, where storms can come up without warning. I’ve heard of sailboats that capsized and sank because there wasn’t even enough time to drop their sails. This is due to the fact that, for all its size, the Bay is a pretty shallow body of water. Until recently, geologically speaking, it was just the valley at the mouth of the Susquehanna River. And then the glaciers melted, causing ocean levels to rise until the Atlantic backwashed into the valley, drowning it and turning it into the broad body of salt water it is today. Except for the original riverbed, the average depth is only about twenty feet, and they say it only reached that level about five thousand years ago. Archeologists have even found the submerged remains of Indian villages along the original riverbanks.
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