Light on Dark Water
by
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Suddenly the sail’s descent stopped. …
The halyard had jammed somewhere up the mast. And I knew also, from years on the water with my old friend, what would happen next. Jason, the seasoned sailor, would go to the mast and tell Charley to trade places with him. He then would work to free the tangled halyard. … Charley nodded a sign of understanding and then stepped slowly, hesitantly off the cabin deck, gripped a hand rail, and began to inch his way forward. …
I had allowed myself to become focused, too focused, on the foredeck and the halyard problem. I was a veteran sailor in the process of making a rooky mistake. Gilead’s bow had wandered back to port, and both the main sail and the top half of the genny began to fill and stiffen. The force of the wind shoved us hard to port and heeled us over to the point where the port side gunwales were again in the water. … I spun the wheel clockwise as hard and as fast as I could. In an instant, my fear blurred into dread. My heart shivered and sank. Oh god. No. No, please, I thought.
“Mike, put the light on the bow!”
The light revealed the white, wet foresail bunched into the bow’s triangle, held in place by the two-foot-high safety lines. A portion of the sail was hanging over the side and trailing into the sea. Just aft of the draped sail, I saw it. Between two chrome stanchions where a section of the safety line, moments ago, had been, there was an empty space.
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About the Book
Corbett Hale knows the sea is an inscrutable lady—one day calm, the next a fury. But as he sets sail with a crew of three from the bay waters of the Chesapeake, heading to the Bahamas, Corbett cannot know what awaits them as he guides his beloved sloop, Gilead, into the Atlantic.
Sailing south, he confronts haunted memories from a time he spent on another water, in another part of the world. Even as the violence of the sea tests his courage and skill as a sailor, he finds himself both drawn back into the turbulence of the Vietnam War and pulled forward into a struggle for survival.
Light on Dark Water tells the story not only of a battle for survival at sea, but of one man’s fight with his own sense of incompleteness, anger, and remorse, as he attempts to come to terms with the raw interplay of loss and grace that is the essence of life itself.
About the Author
Stephen Hayes grew up sailing on the Chesapeake Bay and served in Vietnam as a naval officer for two years. He lives with his wife in Alexandria, Virginia.