‘Spineless’ Sam – A Sea Story

May 2023

By David Roper

In part 1 of “Spineless Sam – A Sea Story,” we meet Sam Martin, a down-on-his-luck liveaboard sailor who wants to win back the heart of his ex-girlfriend, Sylvia. His alcohol-soaked plan? He will heroically sail his boat seven hours to see her, braving a Maine winter’s night, after which she will know that she was wrong about him. Here we pick up shortly after Sam has left the bar, and is readying for departure.

He nearly falls again on the snow-slick cockpit grate, catching himself on the steering pedestal. He holds down the diesel’s glow plug button, counts to ten, then turns the key. The engine turns over slowly but fires. Sam nods to himself, satisfied, ignoring the squeal of the alternator belt. He doesn’t wonder if the cooling water intake is ice clogged, but instead moves quickly to remove the canvas tarp from the cockpit and stuff it in the cockpit locker. His hands are already starting to get numb, so he goes below again to warm them by the heater before reemerging to untie the shore power cord and wrestle with the frozen dock lines. His mittens are wet now. He doesn’t have another pair. It’s alright, he thinks. Once he gets outside the marina, he’ll set a straight course up the coast for Portland, put on the autopilot, and go below to dry them on the heater.

He’s further buoyed by the relative ease by which he departs the dock and small harbor. The wind and tide have worked in his favor, keeping a path open through the narrow exit, and before long he has turned on his course of 35 degrees, the wind-blown seas behind him. But as he moves farther offshore, the seas build, and Sea Spirit begins to roll heavily. Sam decides to roll out a small part of the jib sail, just to steady things. He slips again on the cockpit grate, collapsing on a cockpit seat as he tries to move from behind the wheel to the winch and furling line at the forward end of the cockpit.

It dawns on him that moving about on deck will be impossible. He lies there, panting, before finally pulling himself up to let out part of the sail, but the strong wind grabs the jib and unrolls it to full size, yanking the furling control line from his mittened hands. The boat begins to yaw in the building seas, the big jib overwhelming the autopilot. Sam tries frantically to roll in the jib, cranking in on the furling line, but the wind is too much, and the line slips on the winch and in his hands. He lets go. Amidst screeching wind, assaulting seas, and a wildly yawing, out of control boat, fear overwhelms the power of his “alcohol courage.” “Trauma response” takes over. His amygdala is activated, acting as the new base of operations, his brain now making quick decisions about what to do next, instinctively focused on protective measures.

Sam claws his way back to the wheel, unlocks the autopilot, and slowly turns Sea Spirit into the wind, which releases the pressure on the jib, causing it to thrash and snap madly, while the boat pitches like a bronco in the head seas. He locks the wheel, crawls back to the furling line, removes his mittens for a better grip, winds the furling line around the winch, and with a rush of adrenaline cranks the sail in to one quarter its size. He puts the boat back on course and reactivates the autopilot.

Sam Martin is only two miles downwind from his marina, but it might as well be two hundred. He can’t go back against those now towering seas. And he can’t stay on deck any longer. He has to trust the autopilot, his engine, and the small piece of jib to keep him on course. He heads below.

His gear is strewn all over the cabin, none of it was stowed properly for being at sea. His laptop has gone from the chart table to under the stove; his two clothes lockers have spewed their contents on the cabin floor; the rum bottle is rolling back and forth in the sink. The rum has no appeal to Sam anymore. His immediate salvation is the small propane heater, its orange-glowing burner tile beckoning him like a shrine. He kneels before it, hands out, praying for warmth. He feels a strong urge to call Sylvia, and tries. He doesn’t know quite what he’ll say, but it doesn’t matter. His phone is dead.

Miles pass by. Sea Spirit slides down the seas, yawing some, but mostly keeping faithful to her 35-degree course. Sam sticks his head out the hatch every fifteen minutes and looks around the blackness. Not that it matters; there are no ships out there, only a cold, dark, impersonal sea holding up a small sailboat as it struggles toward Portland. Sam thinks of nothing now but the security of land and the glow of the cabin heater. He starts to believe that it’s only a matter of time until he’s greeted by the welcome sight of dawn and the lighthouse on Cape Elizabeth. The rolling is too great for him to lie on a bunk, so he sits on the cabin floor, outlined in the dark cabin by the glow of the cabin heater, and nods off to the steady throb of the old Yanmar diesel. Some time later he awakens with a start. He’s cold. It’s dark. The boat’s motion is chaotic. He reaches around for the cabin light switch over the bunk behind him. It emits only a dim light. He grabs the small flashlight that hangs by the galley sink, slides the main cabin hatch, removes the hatch boards, climbs the ladder, stands in the hatchway, shines the light around. Sea Spirit is now way off course, broadside to the seas. A wave mounts the hull amidships, spray cascades over Sam. The jib is flapping madly again. He shines the light on the immobile autopilot. It dawns on him that he has no battery power now and therefore no autopilot, no GPS, no lights. But the engine still runs without its alternator belt. Maybe it’s enough.

He moves to the cockpit. Sam is freezing again. He has no feeling in his hands as he winches in the small patch of flailing jib, puts Sea Spirit back on course, and locks the wheel, hoping the boat won’t wander too far from 35 degrees. He rushes below. In the darkness he struggles to change the small green propane canister on the heater. His numb hands fumble the job; in his haste he crosses and then strips the worn threads on the propane connection on the heater, rendering it useless. He blows frantically on his hands while his mind scrambles to find the steps to survival. But his body is slowly moving from a fright and flight response to a freeze and fawn stage, losing its ability to move or act against this threat, and beginning to emit the fawning, a stress release to simply avoid the conflict. His body is also becoming hypothermic. It’s losing heat faster that it can produce it, affecting his brain and ability to think clearly. The hypothalamus, his brain’s temperature-control center, works to raise body temperature by temporarily narrowing his blood vessels and by triggering the protective response of shivering in an effort to produce heat through muscle activity. Sam curls in a shaking lump on the cabin floor.

Sea Spirit is now approaching 43° 14’ 01” N / 70° 27’ 04” W. This is where Harvey Martin put down his 12-trap lobster trawl a few days earlier. Because of a gear issue, on this particular trawl he had used floating rope rather than sink line from the buoy. And this is the rope that is waiting for Sea Spirit. As the polypropylene seizes Sea Spirit’s spinning propellor, it stops the engine, then slows the boat with its load of 12 connected traps sitting on the ocean bottom. Somehow, the jolt of it all, the sudden stoppage of engine and boat brings Sam back to reality, just enough to let him focus on the small yellow device hanging by the navigation table. He knows it’s important somehow, but his mind is cloudy. He pulls himself up and grabs it. It’s his EPIRB, his Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon. He turns it on. Then he grabs the quilt off his bunk and curls back up on the floor. He doesn’t know enough to remove his wet clothes; he’s thinking they mean warmth. As he moves to the second stage of hypothermia, his pulse slows and he becomes confused as to where he is, until sometime later, with very slow pulse and nearly absent respiration, he starts to hallucinate: someone else is steering now; it’s fine; and there is Sylvia in the galley, making hot tea.

 

* * *

She’s removing the blood pressure cuff when he opens his eyes. She’s pretty, dressed in white, like an angel, he thinks. He looks around. Images float in and out in his head. But it’s a jumble. Like fragments of a dream. “Where is this?” he asks.

She reaches out. Puts a warm hand on his forehead. “You’re at Maine Medical Center,” she says. “Do you remember how you got here?”

Sam shakes his head. Looks at the intravenous tube in his arm. Cocks his head.

“You were rescued. From the sea. Well, from your boat. By the Coast Guard, I guess. You were severely hypothermic. Unconscious. We’re checking your kidney and liver functions. But I’m sure you’ll be fine. The doctor will stop by soon.” She begins to leave.

“My boat?”

She turns back to him, smiles sweetly. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know anything about that.”

“My phone?”

“I’ll have to check. Again, the doctor will be by to check on you and get what information about your medical history she can, and recommend next steps and discharge timing.”

Sometime later, Sam learns that his boat was left at sea, though the Coast Guard was working to make sure it would be returned to port as it is a hazard to navigation. His phone is returned; it was in his coat pocket when he was rescued. He borrows a charger. Sylvia is his first call. He’s thrilled that she picks up on the first ring.

“Sylvia. Thank God. You wouldn’t believe – ”

“You’re all over the internet Sam. What were you thinking? What were you doing out there?”

“I was sailing to you!”

“Why? . . . and you know what else? Your sailing stunt put young men’s lives at risk. Those Coast Guard boys, out there in the freezing storm to pick up your sorry ass, they could have died.”

Sam stares at the hospital-white wall in front of him. “Sylvia, I’m in the hospital! I almost died from hypothermia.”

“I bet.”

“The boat’s still out there. I have nowhere to go, Sylvia. That was my home.”

“You should have thought of that before you left.”

“Can I just stay with you . . . you know, just for a few days?”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know. It’s been tough. I’m not sure about the next steps right now. Because of the trauma – ”

“Next steps? I’ll give you a clue to your next steps: Find the hospital social worker. Take action. Figure it out.”

Click.

When his nurse returns, he asks if there’s a social worker.

“A social worker?”

Sam blinks tears. “I mean, it’s just that, well, I have no home now. My home was my boat. I don’t even have my wallet, which must still be out there with everything else of mine.”

The nurse is not Sylvia. Not yet anyway. At this point, she’s filled with compassion for Sam. Caring is her job. Sam blinks more tears. “I just don’t know. I just don’t know what to do,” he says.

She looks at him more deeply than professional protocol would require. Squeezes his hand. “We’ll figure something out,” she says.

Sam squeezes her hand back. “Thank you,” he says. “Thank you so much. It’s been really tough.”

David Roper’s upcoming novel, “The Ghosts of Gadus Island,” is scheduled for publication this year. Dave is the author of the three-time bestseller “Watching for Mermaids,” as well as the sequel “Beyond Mermaids” and the novel “Rounding the Bend.” All are available through Amazon.com or roperbooks.com.