The Hand of God

The ocean was boiling around us as we held our small dive boat off avoiding the edge of the surf. The cliffs,  kelp and submerged rocks radiated doom to our heightened senses. Our target was a potential anchorage in what looked like a lee behind a pinnacle rock, just beyond the surf zone. I was holding the stern into the swell and easing the throttle in reverse to hold us gently off as we surveyed the site. We were on the edge and we knew it. One mistake and we were history.

On the flying bridge, my buddy and I  noticed the wind go calm and he looked at me. In doing so he saw it. “Dave, a wave,” he said, in what I mistook for an offhand comment. I looked over my shoulder. “Holy. . Mother… .of…….I blurted as my head tilted back to take it all in. The biggest wave I had ever heard of was towering above our heads, not yet breaking! I slammed the boat into forward, twisted the wheel hard around simultaneously thrusting the throttle as far as it would go. As the boat spun it started to lift, level and straight up. In a second we were eighty feet higher and still rising. To our right, I could see a white curl of doom fifty feet off and racing in our direction as the wave started to break. We shot over the precipice and raced down its backside seconds beyond its deadly reach.

There was no sense of victory as we motored away back toward Avalon, our safe harbor, just a sense of awe. No one aboard spoke for hours. We just stared straight ahead and contemplated our close encounter with the Hand of God in a boat named after him— the Dominico (God).

Adventure is never planned and when the weather broadcast told of a hurricane headed in our direction we planned to avoid adventure by heading the Dominico to the nearest safe harbor. We entered Avalon anchorage in the dead of night amidst an eerie calm. All the local boats were tied in the south part of the harbor, leaving the north clear for us. A moderate storm blew that night and relieved the locals that no damage was done but another storm was predicted so it looked like we’d be staying for a while.

My buddy and I were too broke to buy anything more than fuel for the boat and peanut butter, so we rowed into town to see if we could get work for food. My buddy played guitar and sang folk songs and I played blues harmonica and made primal noises. A deli hired us to entertain their breakfast crowd for tips. Four dollars richer and an egg sandwich fatter we set out off to explore the sleepy little town and find the harbormaster.

We found him in a cafe disseminating bad news to the locals about the latest storm. “A real doozie” was coming in tonight.” straight up the harbor,” “worst in forty years. He waved us over when he saw us approach. “You boys own that sport fisher” he accused? We looked at each other and decided to confess. “Yup, just gettin’ in from the weather” I defended. He took on a fatherly wise expression. “You better move over to the south end of the harbor or we’ll be pullin’ you off the beach tomorrow”, he sang.

“It just looks a little crowded over there to me “, I said politely.” One boat comes loose and you got a problem.”

“Suit yourself, but don’t say ya wasn’t told” he warned with a patronizing smile. We told him we would think about it and set off to ready the boat for the worst.

Well, it was a bad one, no doubt about that. The worst in forty years didn’t half describe what we felt as the waves in the harbor got higher and the winds pulled the sea up into the screaming sky. Hour after hour it worsened. We would tie everything down and twenty minutes later we would retie it all over again as it would buck loose. Our thirty-foot boat was anchored fore and aft and it pitched like a wild horse nonstop. We replaced chafing gear every hour and still, it worsened. At one point the boat was jumping clear out of the water.

When the sun came up we still hadn’t slept but as it broke through, it seemed to signal the end. The storm seemed to quietly slink away, beaten. We felt victorious.

As dawn illuminated the harbor we realized that others weren’t as lucky. The south harbor was chaos.  Scrap wood on the beaches and helpless masts reaching up out of the water.  A group of men was in a cluster on the beach, shaking their heads slowly over their stooped shoulders.

Seven boats sunk, four of them big ones. It seems one had broken loose of its moorings and pinballed through the pack.

The town took it bad too. Waves had crashed through store windows and totaled a lot of the stock inside, large pieces of sidewalk and pier were strewn everywhere. We didn’t find about the town damage until after we woke six hours later. We had boats tied up all around us at the north end when we got up.

By eight in the evening, the seas had calmed and the weather station had predicted no more storms for forty-eight hours, so we decided to head home. We had been feeling cocky about our right choice of anchorage until I went to cast off our stern line. The cleat just fell off the boat into the water. It was a grim reminder of our frailty.  Five more minutes of the storm and it would have won.

The lesson, of course, is that when you go to sea, you put yourself in the hands of God so it seems that traveling in a boat named after him was a really good idea.