Pacific survival
This extract is from A Single Wave – a book by Webb Chiles which includes his 1979 voyage on Chidiock Tichborne, an 18ft open Drascombe Lugger. He has already sailed from San Diego to the South Pacific. Fourteen days before the narrative begins he was pitchpoled, swamped and kept afloat only by the boat’s air tanks. The rig was badly damaged leaving him drifting. Unable to clear the boat of water because of the open centreboard case, he launched his inflatable and settled down to drift with the current towards the New Hebrides.
“In the last light, I searched for land. There was none. I wrapped myself in the tarp and tried to settle in for the long night of broken sleep. How many more long days and nights: four? Forty? A hundred and four? And what was at the end: an island? A ship? Death? I drifted on.
The blackness that came in the night was a cliff. I went to sit in the chest-deep water, trying to steer the swamped clear of an island which, after promising life when I first
