When Zeus is mad

As we rounded Appledore Island at the Isle of Shoals Saturday afternoon, I crossed my fingers. It was high season, a weekend, and unbelievably hot ashore, so I feared all the moorings in the Shoals’ Gosport Harbor would be taken. But it was worse than that: Many boats had to raft together, four and five abreast, despite the harbor’s complete exposure to the west.

“We may have to anchor,” my pal Spencer said.

“That’s tough. It’s all kelp and ledge,” I replied. Then, way down at the head of the harbor, one hundred feet off the stone breakwater, we spied an empty white mooring ball.

“It says PRIVATE,” Spencer told me as I rounded up Elsa by the pennant.

“Grab it for now,” I said.

And so we did, then went below to escape the intense heat and sun.

“Tell me a story about this place,” Spencer said, looking out one porthole at the old hotel on Star Island and then out another porthole at Smuttynose Island to the north. So I told him about a chapter in my book, “Watching for Mermaids,” called “Faith, Fear and Fate,” about how fate ruled the day on March 6, 1873, when two young women were murdered on Smuttynose Island, all because a train coming into Portsmouth was a day late. “Just a seemingly little thing, a train being late, allowed for a chain of events that led to murder,” I said, shaking my head after finishing the story.  “Fate’s funny.”

“Or not so funny,” Spencer added.

A few minutes later, feeling sure we’d get kicked off the mooring soon, I said “Maybe we should just try to set my big anchor, try to get some good holding ground while we still have the energy.”

Just then came a knock on Elsa’s hull. “See,” I said as I popped up, “we’re getting thrown off already.” But it was Mike, a friend from way back when I led a Points East Flotilla, coming over in his inflatable to say hello. We traded sea stories, and just as he was leaving I said, “Too bad there aren’t any moorings left, Mike. This one’s private.”

“Oh, you’re fine,” he replied, looking at the mooring ball. “You’re on my friend’s mooring. He won’t be coming back tonight, and that’s a good strong one.”

It was that last-minute short comment of mine about moorings that probably saved Elsa (and maybe us!) that evening, allowing us to stay put and not try to anchor. No anchor would have held in what was to come.

Fate was on our side – this time, anyway – when it did come an hour later. It came as a wind that I never imagined possible. It came as a ghoulish howling wind that gusted to over 70 and came up from the west in under five seconds, turning into a screeching banshee that first emanated from a very strange, tubular cloud within a cloud (see picture and look closely); it came as a wind so strong it laid my six-ton sailboat on her side while it attacked a fleet of perhaps 30 boats. It grabbed a handful of them, heavy chain moorings and all, sweeping them down the quarter-mile open-to-the-west-facing harbor like some crazed Zeus hurtling down a mighty sneeze.

In the midst of it all, the air turned a strange brown color, and the wind sounded like a cross between an ambulance and a freight train. I couldn’t see forward, able only to look astern at the giant boulders and the now crashing five-foot seas licking their chops at us. Sometimes I got a partial sight to my port and starboard despite the intense rain and hail. Then, to port, came a two-boat raft of cabin cruisers, still tied together, the broken mooring gear hanging limply off the bow of one of them.

They blew by, headed for the seawall behind me, their passengers helpless in the cabin. But instead, they crashed into my friend Mike’s 36-foot sailboat, and the three bashed together amidst the maelstrom.

Next came a tremendous bang, bang, bang, whack, whack, whack, like machine gun fire. A 45-foot sloop’s roller-furling mainsail had rolled itself out in the hurricane-strength winds. I watched it thrash itself to death. Then came a sight that will never leave my memory: As I squinted through the forward-facing dodger window, trying to look upwind, I could just make out a huge, looming shape coming at us: It was a blue-striped hull of a 44-foot sailboat, its big white mooring ball and chain dragging impotently off the bow, as the vessel came at us at eight knots. Somehow, the captain steered clear and rounded up just ahead of the breakwater.

Then the storm stopped.

I drank a half-bottle of wine, bailed my dinghy, and rowed around and took these pictures. The last is a captain’s chair, minus its captain. But Zeus claimed no one that evening. All were safe.

Perhaps that was fate as well.