Drake's Rock

Drake's Rock

Chapter 1

Pamela Drake strained over the rail of the boat, her slim body arching in spasms of tortured muscles, and vomited into the dark waters of the Southern Ocean. They had rounded Cape Horn despite the virus that had struck down both her, and her husband Alec, a few days before. Long intervals of delirium had taken them mostly by turns so that just when it had appeared that one of them was recovering the other would succumb to it again or vice versa. It was more due to luck than anything else that they had rounded that most dangerous of all capes with any margin of safety at all, but they were round and the worst of the voyage lay hopefully in their wake.

The objective of the voyage had been to celebrate their first wedding anniversary and was in fact the honeymoon that they’d been obliged to forfeit a year ago. Forgoing their honeymoon had been no real loss as both of them were deeply involved in their outside interests. He had spent the year consolidating his new business by obtaining the dealer concession for Toyota cars for the area in order to boost his services as a garage. She was given the welcome opportunity of time to research dolphins in the Pacific to complete a paper she had to write for her university course. She was well on the way to becoming a marine biologist and the cruise was a welcome opportunity to do some field work. It was all coming together for both of them.

From their first meeting their lives had changed in many positive ways. In Alec she had found the perfect counterbalance to her mother’s perpetual criticisms of her capabilities. Not once had he ever found fault with the way she was doing anything. It still took a lot of getting used to, not having everything she said or did pulled apart by a dominant tongue. It was almost like she had not begun to live, or be a complete person, until the day she met Alec. He gave her room to grow and find herself without any obvious effort on his part. She had once asked him about it but he had simply shrugged, genuinely not knowing what she was driving at. She soon came to realise that his attitude, like most peoples, was normal and her mother’s abnormal. It was a freedom she had never known, and she was forever finding it difficult to adjust to it. She often found herself waiting for some negative reaction to something she did, but nothing ever happened. She and Alec got along like two bodies sharing one soul. Anger was never a part of their relationship and when she looked at those of their friends’ she wondered how many marriages were so perfect.

Having finally taken her degree in medicine her mother had assumed that Pamela would continue her career as a doctor but Pamela had had other dreams. Alec had allowed her the space to grow, and still did, willingly giving her the time she badly needed to find her true worth. Her mother, for whatever reason, had always held her back when Pamela’s tendencies had been to follow paths that went against her mother’s ideas of what a young woman of Pamela’s character should do. After their engagement she had entered the university to study marine biology and Alec had always been there to encourage and support her. The fact that he was a keen sailor with a well-found boat had made so much difference. He would sail her, using his personal knowledge of the area around Gisborne, to show her places that had some interest to her studies. While still macho he had a lot going for him when it came to considering her needs. He taught her by degrees to sail and handle the eleven and a half meter wooden ketch. He never appeared to be worried that anything she did with it would result in any severe damage. He left her often to sail it on her own, although it was his pride and joy, confident that the cold laminated hull could resist almost anything. The inner layer was of mahogany which gave the interior a warm, homely glow. Next came two diagonal layers of oak for strength, with a final skin of teak as defence against marine worm. The total thickness of the hull was close to forty millimetres, tough enough for almost anything it could hit. They had cruised, for miles, before they were married and Pamela could handle the ketch as ably as he and her navigation was improving all the time.

Pamela's grip on the stanchion post tightened as her body retched again to evacuate her already empty stomach. A rope, she had secured to her ankles to prevent her going overboard, strained as her involuntary retching tried to throw her into the sea. Gagging for breath she leaned back in an attempt to put an end to the agony; gulping cold air down into her stomach, air that seemed as black as the ocean itself, until the sickness seemed to abate. Clinging to the rail, and spreading her legs against the incessant rolling of the boat, she gazed out over the constantly shifting ocean, screwing her eyes up to aid her in the impossible task of seeing anything. Overhead the impenetrable ceiling of black clouds raced along, at the vagaries of the wind, starving the scene of any light that might have come from the moon, or the sun, which didn’t quite manage to completely set at that time of year. The horizon, had it been visible at all, she knew would be a glowing deep pink, a smudge of colour that would slowly move eastwards through the night until the sun rose again in the early hours of the morning. Gleaming like a miniature sun from three-quarters of the way up the mizzen mast, the solitary spotlight cast a yellow funnel of light down onto the boat producing the effect that they were sailing inside a pot of the blackest ink. Nothing was visible beyond its golden cone of light. As the spray was licked up by the wind it glittered like diamonds cascading through the powerful beam.

Their voyage had abruptly taken on nightmare proportions. When they could have sailed straight back home to New Zealand they had decided to continue by way of Cape Horn for two reasons: Alec had always nurtured every yachtsman’s dream of circumnavigating the globe, so they had decided between them to head for Cape Town by way of the Horn, where some of his relatives lived. This particular aunt and uncle had at the time been unable to attend their wedding, and had never actually met Pamela, so this looked like a good opportunity to meet this part of his family. Then their intention was to sail around the other great cape, the Cape of Good Hope, and continue east on the last leg and head with, mutual reluctance, back home to Gisborne, New Zealand.

Apart from the fiasco of sickness that had stricken them, the whole voyage had been idyllic, but now Alec lay sweating and moaning behind the lee-cloth of his bunk, a canvas sheet set there to prevent him from falling from the comparative comfort of his berth. His mind slipped in and out of consciousness, just as she had done the day before. However his discomfiture was added to by a badly injured leg from taking a fall on deck during one of the many vicious tempests they had encountered two night ago. He had not been able to move from his bunk since.

She felt her stomach heave once more and gripped the stanchion with heavily gloved hands still numbed by the bleak polar wind. The smothering cloud cover cracked briefly to shed an eerie light from a winking moon. Blue hints of illumination that flickered across a tempestuous sea dotted here and there with growlers, small pieces of ice that derived their name from the sound they made as they rubbed against each other and along the sides of boats at the vagaries of wind and current.

The waves appeared to grow slowly in the distance, developing fearsomely, becoming massive and jet, rushing at them like a moving wall causing the counter of the boat to rise crazily. On the face of the angry water she could just make out the huge loop of heavy hawser that Alec must have laid out to help keep the boat stern on to the remorselessly advancing seas and to slow them down a little as they plunged down the faces of each successive wave that lifted them. As she watched, they raced down into a deep trough. The bow dug into the surface of the next wave throwing up spray that mixed with the flying spume torn from the peaks to sweep out on the gale, like old men's beards. It carried on the wind to smart like pellets against any area of unprotected skin . She turned her face downwind as it lashed her. The loop of thick rope bit into the water behind leaving its own trail of agitated water. The wind moaned in the rigging, rising slowly to a screech as its intensity increased, pressing the bow under. Glancing forward, she noticed that Alec had also set the small storm sail on the inner fore stay. Creeping, on her hands and knees, she returned to the cockpit just as another mammoth hump of water passed under the stern hissing like a crazed leviathan. A monstrosity of mythology that became real to any sailor at sea in such conditions.

Almost falling from weakness down the companionway, she flopped into the seat at the chart table, struggling to bring her mind to bear on the problem of fixing their position on the chart.

‘That can't be right,’ she muttered in disbelief after a few frustrating minutes of calculations that just would not come right. According to their dead reckoning they were almost six hundred miles from Cape Horn having moved in a south-easterly direction. She checked again, but their entries in the log had been sporadic and mostly illegible due chiefly to their malady. Had they, while confused in their delirium, neglected to keep the log up to date? Could they have missed a couple of days? What mistakes had they made during the worst of their sickness? The spidery scrolls on the pad, what did they mean? Was that a two or a seven, and that a five or an eight? Whatever calculations her fuddled mind made she still came up with the same sort of results: They were many miles from where they should have been!

The GPS, that wonder of modern communications science, which would have given them an instant and accurate position, was out of commission with the antenna broken during Alec's fall and he had been unable to fix it in his present condition. Their hand-held unit had been stolen during their short stopover at Tonga when the Stella Maris had been broken into and burgled. Though they had tried but had failed to find one to replace it. It could also have been at Tonga where they had bought the food that had given them this sickness.

She went to Alec in the hope that he was lucid enough to understand what it was she was trying to say. She was nothing like the sailor he was; she hadn’t the experience he had and couldn’t find the solution to this problem on her own. Only he would know what to do. She found him with his wetsuit trousers down revealing an angry, abnormal looking swelling on his right thigh. Bringing the lamp closer, she immediately diagnosed that it was a fracture rather than just the bruise he had claimed it to be. It was typical of his need to maintain a macho image that he had not admitted just how seriously he was injured. Nothing must tarnish that notion, and she wondered just how much of him was image and how much the real him. Was she in love with a dream? What was the real Alec like, the persona he kept so well hidden by this need of his to always appear so manly? She didn’t like these thoughts racing unaided through her mind. She judged them to be childish, that they were edging towards disloyalty, so brushed them aside as she reached across to feel the leg.

‘Alec. That’s broken.’

‘I know.’ The sheepish admission made the look in his amber-brown eyes appear anything but manly. Together with his unkempt dark curly hair he looked so boyish. ‘I didn’t want to worry you. I figured we’d reach Port Stanley any day, where I could get it fixed.’

For two days she had been handling the boat on her own because he was sick and had often cursed him for his weakness in that sickness. How she had felt guilty for all the bad things she had thought about him, but saddened for the extent to which her own weakness had been increased because of these feelings, things she had never voiced, notions that he was making too much of his illness. Port Stanley, she thought, was well away from where they found themselves but she said nothing for the moment as her sympathy drove all other thoughts from her mind.

‘Dear God! You must be in agony. Especially through these storms.’

‘It has had me cussing at times,’ he grinned boyishly.

‘It has had me cursing aloud on deck because I thought you were malingering. You great ox. Didn’t you just think, for one minute, that by being honest with me you would have, in some way, helped me to cope better with all this extra work? And not all of your foul language was under your breath.’ Her anger at his deception melted as she took in his youthful smile. ‘Most of your language was so heated that we haven’t seen a single bird for days. You scared them all off with your blue outbursts,’ she joked, unable to hide her genuine concern for him.

‘I don’t suppose it has anything to do with the fact that we’ve been in a constant storm and that they can’t land?’

‘Nope! I saw them flying off with their wings over their ears.’ She began collecting together an assortment of things from the well-stocked medicine chest. ‘This is going to hurt like hell, darling, but it has to be done.’

‘It can’t get any worse than it is now,’ he grunted between clenched teeth. ‘Do what you have to do, doc’

‘It won’t be easy for you, but you must try to relax the muscles in the leg.’

He nodded and mentally prepared himself for what was to come. Struggling against the motion of the boat, she pulled the limb until the ends of the bone were aligned, then fastened a piece of towel around his leg before applying the splints. He gritted his teeth while she did this but was forced to cry out loud when, as she was tightening the fastenings, the boat lurched unexpectedly causing her to stagger and apply more torque than she desired. She administered to him with painkillers and antibiotics with plenty of water to drink. When she had done everything she could to make him comfortable, she explained their situation as she saw it.

‘We are heading for the ice-fields, Alec, if we keep on this course. I can't be certain of our position but I think we are pretty close to the South Sandwich Islands.’

‘Jesus! What's the sky like?’

‘Too overcast for the sextant,’ she responded recalling the compact covering of rolling clouds competing to block out the sky.

‘I don't know what I can do with it, but I have to try to repair the antenna. If you can strip it from the deck, that is.’

‘And why not? Why shouldn’t I be capable of unfastening a few screws?’

‘Bolts!’ he corrected.

‘Bolts then. I’ll get some spanners.’

‘The sea water won't have done it any good at all.’ Alec settled himself into as comfortable a position as the boat would allow him while she climbed on deck to detach the antenna from its bracket.

Being new at the start of the voyage it should have come away easily but the bolts had become heavily corroded so she had to return below to hunt out a can of releasing agent from the tool locker by the engine. Returning on deck she sprayed with one hand while shielding the bolts with the other to prevent the agent from being whipped away uselessly by the near gale. The oil also penetrated the many cuts and scratches on her hands until they stung. Her arms were bruised from hanging on against the erratic movements of the boat. At times she had to pause in her work while she held on for dear life, as the boat tossed defiantly against the confused seas. After a prolonged combat with the elements, during which she almost lost the spanners twice and almost had her arms pulled out of their sockets, she managed to unfasten the stubborn bolts and bring the whole contraption below. She passed it triumphantly to Alec. Her smug expression was not lost on him.

‘I knew you could do it. If you hadn’t been so handy I would’ve signed somebody else on for this cruise.’ This was a side of him that she really liked; it was such a contrast to how she had been treated at home, and in particular by her mother. Her father had simply grunted about the amount of money he was having to find for her education.

‘Oh, would you? Bearing in mind this is our honeymoon.’

‘Some honeymoon,’ he grinned as he inspected the antenna closely, wedging his thumb through the wide split in its plastic cover so that he could see inside.

‘Well, it will get worse if you can’t fix that. We’ll be spending the rest of our married lives at the South Pole with the penguins.’ She tried to make light of the situation.

‘Well, you’d have the perfect opportunity to study them for that paper you keep wanting to write,’ he muttered turning the contraption round in his hands. He was competent to repair any type of engine, but with sophisticated electronics he was well outside his league. Even if he could diagnose the fault, he doubted he would be able to replace any damaged parts, but he had a talent for utilising anything to hand though.

‘You always turn the negative into a positive. I don’t know how you do it. Some-times I think your brain must be up-side-down inside that skull of yours,’ she laughed.

‘It would never do for all of us to think the same way. If the occasional man did not come along with a different thought, or way of approaching a problem, we would never have a genius to guide us forward. Without such unconventional thinkers mankind would never have evolved into the fine, intelligent creature that he is.’

‘Oh, sure. Spears and clubs have been replaced with guns and weapons of mass destruction. Fine, intelligent creatures indeed!’

‘Man has to have his weapons,’ Alec retorted. ‘He would feel infinitesimal without them. The reality of the fact escapes him under the illusion that through his technology he is capable of destroying his own existence, if he chose to do so. He doesn’t want to, and I don’t think he will, he just has to be in a position to be able to exercise that power.’

‘And in his search for these wonderful crutches to prop up his macho tendencies, he almost destroys the environment that succours him. His constant experimenting is laying waste millions of square kilometres that should be used more productively to feed and clothe the world, not to mention poisoning the oceans and generally upsetting the whole balance of the planet,’ she protested against this, his latest theory on the brilliance of man.

‘Well, that’s all a component of the cycle of life, don’t you see? Technology begets technology, knowledge leads to further knowledge. Eventually we will have devised ways to counteract all that we have messed up. We will achieve the perfect world.’

By now he was getting into full swing with his hypothesis while still taking apart the antenna using tools that she passed to him. But Pamela bristled at this last statement.

‘Is that what the nuns at St. Gregory’s taught you? They taught me that in the beginning God gave us the perfect world and our part in his creation is to help complete it yet all we have is done nothing short of trying to destroy it.’

‘My nuns were more forward thinking than yours. The world God gave us was perfect for man at the beginning of his development. But if you insist on giving this a religious connotation I’ll go along with it. We were given the task of husbandry of the earth with the purpose not of simple