Dom looks up the stairs at me, wide-eyed. He stumbles up the pilothouse stairs and I show him where we were and where we are. I tell him to get up front and start pulling the anchor in. He grabs a radio and rushes off to the bow.
I am looking at our position and direction and doing calculations. We have 300 feet of chain to pull in. The reef is coming up on our stern. I’m slowing us only as much as I dare. This is going to be close.
I can barely hear Dom over the VHF. It sounds like he’s 100 miles away from the speaker, and there’s a lot of rustling fabric in that gap. I tell him to start taking the chain in. It’s not like the anchor is holding to anything, so just drag the damn thing to us. While he’s doing that, I’m slamming laptops shut, turning off security monitors, dimming the radars… there’s too much ambient light to see a thing. I pop my head up top and look for the radio tower at Highbourne Cay. A dim red light shines through the rain in the direction Highbourne should be… I assume I’m not seeing things.
At some point Dom tells me he has the anchor up. I don’t hear him.
I’m bumping the controls all over the place, I even have the bow thruster roaring now. That’s going to wake the other two crew members up for sure. They sleep right on top of the 250 HP beast. The waves are breaking over the bow anyway, and shit is falling all throughout the boat, so what the fuck should a little more cannon fire mean? Speaking of cannons, I hear the bimini give some more. This is turning out to be an expensive gale.
Looking at the plotter, I see it’s going to get more expensive quick. I figure we’re 40 feet from the reef. 80 at the most. Less than the length of the ship. I yell into the VHF for Dom to get the fucking anchor in. He comes in the side door, wet as a drowned ferret, telling me it’s already up.
Fuck. Just in time.
I kick the 4 turbos into gear. 2,200 HP drives the two 5-foot props in frenzied circles. I really hope I’m facing the direction I think I’m facing. Can’t be sure. I rush up top to look for the red light again.
Back down below it looks like we are crawling away from the reef. Didn’t touch anything… that’s good. I wheel the bastard around to get the seas on our stern and to cancel out the wind with our forward progress. I’ll just head toward Nassau a few hours earlier than I expected to. As long as the china survived, we might get out unscathed.
The rush of saving the boat is intoxicating. We’re surfing down monster waves in a fucking gale at 5:15 in the morning. We just drug anchor half a mile and barely kept the yacht off of a reef. One of the girls comes up with a puzzled look on her face.
“What the hell’s going on?” she asks.
“Nothing,” I say. “Could you make Dom and I some coffee?”
All is grins and giggles. I’m weaving through the cuts and reefs to get back out to safety and deep water. We’ll be at the dock before breakfast. What a fucking rush.
I make a little course correction, but the wheel feels a little looser than normal. I try and turn back, and just as it’s clicking, an alarm goes off. “Rudder Response Failure.”
Fuck.
“Dom.”
“What.”
“We’re losing steering.”
As I say this, the boat broaches, going sideways in the seas and rolling like a fucker……..
A normally sluggish wheel can now be spun like a goddamn perpetual motion machine. Just a nudge and the thing starts doing lazy circles forever. But the rudders aren’t moving. I get down on the floor and listen for the hydraulic pump that usually hums under the console. Nothing.
Dragging Anchor - A True Story
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