Chapter 27

Hurriedly dressing in my bright, almost neon red, immersion suit, I directed crew and owners to unbox the rafts and get ready for the worst.

“Don’t inflate them yet, they’re hell to put back in the box if we don’t need them,” I said.

Turning into the wind ... sideways could be dire ... I started turning our sails into tiny storm canvas ... thank the gods for buttons and power winches. I fired up the engines. I’d never seen what waterspouts could do to a boat but I was fairly certain I wouldn’t like it. I’d estimated 5 miles and maybe 10 minutes before the black ... okay ... extremely dark gray storm wall hit us.

Mostly, I forgot about storms and what they do to the wind. Okay ... so I was worried about other things ... the closer the storm got ... Yikes! The wind went from dead ahead to dead astern ... I was no longer steering into the wind... Flint was pushed into the storm wall. The waterspouts (tornados) were lashing back and forth like a passel of rattlers in a snake-ball and two of the three were directly in front of us. Water twisters slinging hips like belly-dancers and one slung right, the other slung left and we sailed between and it was raining like nobody’s business.