Here’s a second excerpt from Susan Cole’s cruising memoir, “Holding Fast.” (The Chapter 1 excerpt ran in November) Cole joins the many Northwest sailing and adventure authors already here, including Wendy Hinman, Jordan Hanssen, Jim Lynch, Jeffrey Briggs and others. KH
Excerpt from Chapter 21: Hurricane Mitch
I first heard about Hurricane Mitch at dinner with Andre and Vivienne in the thatched-roofed marina restaurant. John had been gone about a week. Eating at the awful marina restaurant, our conversation revolved around fabulous meals we had enjoyed elsewhere, in contrast to the rubbery steak and tasteless bread we now consumed. Kate, Emilie, and Hugo played tag under the empty tables. Some boaters focused on a TV at the bar where a weatherman pointed to a cloudy mass drifting around the Western Caribbean.
“A hurricane but it doesn’t look like it is headed our direction. And Category 1 is not bad,” Andre said after wandering over to the TV to check it out.
I trusted Andre’s judgment. Andre and Vivienne had sailed across the Atlantic and raced in world-class sailing races. I wasn’t sure, though, whether he would play it down to keep me from worrying. The pit of my stomach tingled. The others who had listened to the weather milled around, ordering more watery Gallo beer, yawning, and playing cards. A couple of people leafed through the used books, looking for something to read before bed. It was the end of October, late in the season for a hurricane. It didn’t feel like a crisis. Still, I wanted John around if something major was happening.
The next morning, I dropped Kate off at Renee’s boat, Big Easy, and went to Felipe’s Internet café in Fronteras to write John and see what information Felipe had about Hurricane Mitch. Before this voyage, I associated the dinghy with New England seafood dinners in Connecticut harbors or Block Island. On summer weekends, we would pass other sailors heading into shore to quaint seaside restaurants—a man running the dinghy, a woman, and children crowded alongside. Since John left, Kate and I had been bombing around the river on White Fang together, and on our own. We wondered how we could have been so chicken about it earlier. We were like teenagers who had just gotten our licenses. But we were not on a summer vacation; the dinghy was our lifeline.
Felipe sat before his computer with a small crowd of locals and cruisers around him. He was in his thirties, mustachioed, and six feet tall, an unusual height here. He had lived in the States before returning to his native country.
The satellite picture on Felipe’s screen showed a fiery mass covering most of the Western Caribbean. Mitch was huge. Winds had strengthened to Category 5. At two hundred miles per hour, it was the largest and strongest hurricane on record. It had strengthened rapidly from the evening before. A few hundred miles out, its direction was unclear. Mitch seemed to be heading north, meaning it would miss us, but there was talk of evacuation. We gawked at each other.
“I’ll keep track of it and broadcast over the radio. Check channel 67 and call me if you want,” Felipe said in Spanish, then in English. He printed out a copy of the satellite map and scotch-taped it to the window in his door.
In a daze, I headed for a computer to check email. I would have to handle a Category 5 storm without John. Right now, the sun was out but that would change soon enough. John and I had weathered a couple of weak hurricanes when we lived in Connecticut on Phaedrus, but Hurricane Mitch was on a different scale altogether. This was not the first time John was away during a storm, either. He had been away for the storm in Beaufort, North Carolina. But now, I was in a poor foreign country, in what was shaping up as a major disaster. I became conscious of my shallow breaths. As I sat at a computer to log in, a cold shiver wriggled through my gut.
John had just heard about Mitch—his email had yesterday’s date when Mitch was not yet very powerful. He wished he could be with us. Just hearing his words in my head calmed me. I looked around to see people shouting anxiously into Felipe’s long-distance phones and frantically typing on keyboards.
To learn more about Susan or order Holding Fast, visit Susan’s website.