Page 45 of The Sailor in Polynesia
He allowed me the time to wake up and then gave me a briefing, heading downstairs to nap while I took over.
A few hours into Jonas’s nap, I was reading on the bench, nearly done with my book, when an alarm went off downstairs.
My head snapped up—I knew that alarm. It was the automatic bilge pump, meaning that water was being pumped overboard from inside the boat.Welinawas taking on water. I scrambled down the stairs, just in time for Jonas to come out of the cabin, dressed in briefs and looking bleary-eyed but waking up quickly.
I froze, panicked. Instead of all the things I knew I should be thinking about—what steps I should take to identify the source of the water and clog the leak—I couldn’t stop thinking about that time with Liam. The alarm had gone off, we’d panicked, and everything had spiraled until we were yelling at each other. I couldn’t even remember how we’d stopped the leak, but I did remember that, at the end of the day, I’d slept alone, tossing and turning in the bunk, my wrist throbbing too much to let me sleep.
That day, the way he’d grabbed my arm, was the beginning of the end.
“Mia?” I heard softly. “Mia.” My eyes came back into focus and there was Jonas, eyebrows bunched in concern and his fingers gently brushing my cheek.
“What can I do to help?”
I blinked, trying to scrub Liam’s angry face from my memory. Instead of fear, panic, or anger, I focused on Jonas’s sweet smile and kind eyes.
“It’s the bilge pump,” I said carefully.
“Okay.”
That was the only response I got. No yelling—just a calm and stoic Jonas watching me while pulling his harness on.
“Heave us to.”
Jonas nodded and climbed the stairs to the cockpit. While I opened all the floorboards, I listened to Jonas adjust the sails. With our headsail backwinded,Welina’s speed dropped instantly.
When he came back down, I was looking into the bilges, thinking. The alarm still screeched around us, and it would keep going until the pump died or there was no water left to pump out. “The bilge pump isn’t keeping up with the ingress, but it’s close. There’s a manual pump under the settee. Can you use it and pump the water into the galley sink?”
Jonas started disassembling the salon couch. I dipped a finger into the water of the bilge and brought it to my mouth.
Were we flooding or sinking? The water tasted salty—not good. If the water was fresh water, we would be flooding, the water coming from somewhere in the freshwater system. Instead the boat was sinking, the water coming from outside going in.
Jonas had the manual pump set up and was aggressively pumping water out to the galley sink, where it drained overboard.
“I’m going to close the thru-hulls,” I said. Jonas nodded again, his brow wrinkled in concentration and sweat beading on his temples.
One by one, I quickly went through each valve in the bilge. There were only eight thru-hulls onWelinathat were under the waterline—holes that could be the source of a saltwater leak. Each hole had a hose and a valve to close it.
When I finished the last valve, I sat back on my heels and crossed my fingers, hoping that would solve the problem.
Jonas was still pumping and the automatic bilge pumps were still going. I stared at the water level in my boat. Itshouldbe going down.Please be dropping.
ThoughWelina’s speed was greatly reduced, the boat still rolled around in the open ocean. It took several minutes for me to realize that the water level was indeed going down.
I glanced at Jonas. With one end of the pump in the bilge, and the other end in the sink, Jonas was working the pump one-handed. His body was completely soaked in sweat.
“I think you can stop now.” Jonas halted his movements and sat back, wiping his forehead and pushing his hair out of his face.
We watched the water level. In a few minutes, the automatic bilge pump should have finished the rest of the work for us.
With every swish of the water, I kept changing my mind—it’s rising; no, it’s dropping.The automatic bilge pump still chugged along, the alarm kept ringing.
“I think it is rising,” Jonas remarked.
Damn it. “I think so too.” This was not going to be an easy fix. “I’m sorry to do this to you, but if we can get the water level down as far as possible with the manual pump, we should.”
Jonas got back to work. I grabbed a cup and bailed as much water as I could into the same sink.
The minutes felt like hours, and Jonas and I swapped so I could use the manual pump and give him a break. The water was dropping—slowly but surely.
