LITMIR.BIZ

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and said the captain told them there was a reef called the Madagascar Reef near a little fishing village we all knew called Hamburg. It is roughly the halfway point between Port Alfred and East London. We had been blown about 80 kilometres down the coast overnight. We had no idea how deep into the open ocean we were.

      In the meantime, the captain was still trying to fix the motor.

      He had made several futile attempts to contact the port authorities in Port Elizabeth.

      That afternoon, the wind started picking up again. It was a southwesterly. The captain told us to brace ourselves. He suspected the calm we had experienced was probably just the result of being caught between two storms.

      How right he was.

      By early evening, the southwester was howling at gale-force strength. We were now being blown back up the coast. The only difference was that the waves were much bigger.

      A massive storm swell from Cape Town had reached us. The yacht felt like a toy boat as it slid down the monstrous faces of the giant swell. By now we had all found our sea legs and no one was getting sick.

      At about 11 pm, we heard Eyeball shouting excitedly from the deck that he could see land.

      Miles and I went up to the deck to join him. The captain popped his head out of the engine room. Eyeball pointed in the direction of what looked like city lights.

      We kept looking and realised it wasn’t land or a city.

      It was a massive freighter.

      We had been blown into the international shipping lane. The freighter? Heading straight for us. The old man panicked and asked me to get the signal light from a storage box in the galley. I plugged it in. Passing it to the captain, I went down again to turn on the switch.

      ‘Plug it in! Turn it on!’ the captain shouted. By now, I knew that it was probably not working.

      ‘It is plugged in and turned on!’

      The captain dropped his head.

      Yip, it didn’t work.

      We all stood on the deck watching this massive ship coming closer and closer. There was nothing we could do. We had no way of steering the yacht out of its way. We were at the mercy of the wind. I didn’t know what to think. What would it be like if this ship hit us? Would they even know? The captain tried the radio, once again, with no luck.

      With panicked looks, we kept staring at the foreboding hulk of metal.

      Then, suddenly, it dawned on us that it was busy turning and making its way into the open ocean.

      We all shouted, ‘It’s turning, it’s turning!’

      We never knew whether it changed course because the bridge had seen us or whether it simply followed the course it had been set. It came so close, however, that we could clearly see the roiling wake, as the freighter’s giant propellers churned up the ocean.

      Apart from the storm that was now growing stronger, our close encounter with the freighter was more than we could handle, and we decided to bunk down for the night.

      None of us slept well that night. The storm kept battering and bashing us back up the coast.

      We were all up by sunrise on Sunday, the third day of being out at sea. Significantly, we could see land for the first time in two days. It lifted our spirits slightly.

      The ocean had turned an ugly brown colour, with dirty yellow foam whipped around by the wind floating everywhere. The swells were so big that, when we were at the trough of a wave, all we could see was a wall of water in front of us. Then, as we made our way up the back end of these monsters, the water would lift us high above the ocean surface, and hurl us sideways down the face.

      Between the three of us, we were trying to steer the boat. Unlike the steering wheel of a car that responds immediately, a yacht’s steering takes a lot longer to respond. We never did manage to straighten the yacht enough to counter us from careening sideways down the swell. Whenever we’d whip the wheel in the other direction, in a few minutes it became obvious that we had completely overcorrected. We were tired. Traumatised. The exchanges between us became very heated – until we spotted what looked like two large rocks sticking out of the ocean.

      We called the captain.

      His eyes widened immediately, and he grabbed the wheel from us. It was two colossal adult whales. They were side by side. He said they were mating. If the whales felt threatened in any way, they could destroy the yacht, much like two mating elephants might feel about a bolshie 4x4. He desperately tried to steer us away from the mating mammals.

      The wind and the waves, however, kept driving us in the direction of their looming bodies. We got so close we could clearly see the barnacles and scuff marks on the sides of their huge bodies.

      The tension on the boat was unbearable.

      We were moving at a snail’s pace, about 4 to 5 knots. With every excruciating minute that passed, we hoped and prayed. We could barely breathe. It literally felt like we were tiptoeing our way around them.

      As the ocean kept hoisting and lowering us, we could see the whales disappearing into the distance. Once we got in the clear, there was a little moment of relief. Until we realised we were still lost at sea.

      At lunchtime, I started feeling the first real pangs of hunger. Our food supplies had consisted of a two-litre bottle of Coke and a humble bag of Ghost Pops chips. The captain said there was food in the galley, but all I could find was mouldy brown bread and something that resembled smelly ham. Nonetheless, Miles and Eyeball would join me and lunch would be ham and chip sandwiches. I took my first bite. I gagged as I tasted the mould. But I was too hungry and soldiered on with the eating. Eyeball’s eye twitched slowly as he tried to chomp his way through the mouldy sandwich.

      It lightened the mood considerably.

      We heard the Captain shouting from the deck. We all went up.

      He was shouting and waving at a fishing trawler making its way towards us. It was painted bright white. The crew signalled from the control deck that we should get onto the radio. Finally, the radio made contact. Why in the world we were in the ocean during such a terrible storm, they asked. It had become too rough for them – they were making their way in. Our captain explained. They promised to contact the port authorities in East London to send out a rescue boat.

      I started feeling some hope.

      We made our way to the centre of the deck. We tied ourselves to the lifeline with pieces of rope and soaked up some of the sunshine that finally broke through. Buoyed by anticipation, we tried to see who could stand the longest without holding on to anything. We were trying to ‘surf’ the yacht, but it turned more into a contest of falling around than anything else.

      Later that afternoon, we heard the sound of a small propeller plane. It was flying low and directly towards us. Eyeball and I danced around and waved like crazy. Miles, ever the conscientious one, made the international signal for a boat in distress – slowing and repeatedly raising and lowering his outstretched arms.

      Thank God he did, as the pilot would then hopefully identify us as the boat in distress.

      The plane passed us.

      Then it turned to bank for another flyover. The pilot waved at us the second time.

      Apparently, he reported that we were fine and had been suntanning on the deck. He also reported our coordinates to the National Sea Rescue Institute.

      Unbeknownst to us, Miles’s and Eyeball’s parents had been desperately looking for someone with a private plane to fly out and search for us. They eventually got hold of my girlfriend’s uncle, who volunteered to fly out and search down the coastline.

      The NSRI would set up a search-and-rescue team and send out several vessels to find and retrieve us. The southwesterly had driven us hard through the night and that whole day. We had made a lot of progress back up the coast.

      When the NSRI found us, we were

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