Hurricane by Ken Douglas

women, “is called heaving-to. We’re going to sheet in the main as tightly as possible and then we’re going to backwind the jib.”
    “ Won’t that make the boat heel over in the opposite direction and push us around in a circle?” Meiko asked.
    “ Not really,” Victor answered. “The sheeted in main and the keel will try to force the boat to go one way, the backwinded jib will try to force it to go in the opposite direction. The result will be that we won’t go anywhere at all. We’ll just sit here.” And in five minutes time they were sitting calmly, bobbing along in the four foot seas.
    “ Wow, this is great,” Meiko said. The boat was perfectly balanced and there wasn’t a cloud in the star-filled sky.
    “ Yes, it’s nice,” Julie said. “Now what do we do about the leak?” She wanted to ask who would do such a thing, but Victor wouldn’t know any more than she would, and besides, stopping the flow of water was the most important thing right now.
    “ Let’s go below and check,” Victor said. They followed him below and once again he took the flashlight and crawled into the generator room under the cockpit.
    “ Is it still leaking?” Julie called in after him.
    “ A little,” he said, “but not as bad as when we were sailing, We have to stop it and I can’t do it from in here.” He came back out. “If we were at the dock it would be simple, but we’re not. Someone has to go down there and jam some rags up that tube.”
    “ You’re not serious?” Meiko said. “We’re in the middle of the ocean.”
    “ We’ll lose the boat otherwise.”
    “ We’ll lose more than the boat,” Julie said.
    “ No,” Victor said. “We can call for help on the SSB. We’re only an hour out of Trinidad. We’re pleasantly hove-to, all we have to do is sit here and wait for help to arrive.”
    “ SSB?” Meiko said.
    “ Single sideband radio,” Victor said.
    “ Not so simple,” Julie said. “We don’t have an SSB.”
    “ Sure you do, just above the VHF, in the nav station.”
    “ No SSB,” Julie said.
    “ I’m seeing it from here.” The British accent was gone. Victor was pure Trini now.
    “ That’s the control head, it connects to the radio via a fiber optic cable.”
    “ So?” Victor said. The muscles on his neck started bulging and his Adam’s apple started bobbing.
    “ The radio was damaged during shipping. We didn’t find out till after it was installed. Hideo sent it back just before he left. We should be getting a new one any day now,” Julie said.
    “ That’s not going to do us any good,” Victor said.
    “ But the radio works, Mom. I’ve seen you talking on it,” Meiko said.
    “ That’s the VHF, it’s used for short distances. For long range you need an SSB.”
    “ Oh,” Meiko said.
    “ Which means that we are in deep trouble,” Victor said. “We should think about getting out the life raft.”
    “ You can’t be serious?” Julie said.
    “ If we don’t get help in the next couple of hours the boat’s going to sink. Those bilge pumps are handling the water now, but if we try to sail the extra pressure will overpower them. We’re stuck, the life raft is our only way.”
    “ The current will take us half way into the Atlantic before anyone even knows we’re missing,” Julie said.
    “ Do you have any better ideas?” Victor asked.
    “ We could just wait here. You said if we don’t sail the pumps will keep the water out. We’re in a major shipping channel. Someone will see us in the morning and we can call them on the VHF.”
    “ That same current that would take the life raft out into the Atlantic will take Fallen Angel as well,” Victor said. He seemed to be a little more together than he’d been in the last few minutes. For a second or two Julie thought that he might be afraid, but that didn’t make sense, not Victor Drake.
    “ Every half hour or so we could turn the engines on and motor against the current. That would keep us in the shipping