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Updated: August 20, 2024
But the southeaster abated, and the usual northwest wind came out again, and we sailed steadily down into the roadstead of Monterey Bay. This is shaped somewhat like a fish hook, the barb being the harbor, the point being Point Pinos, the southern headland.
Things happen so quickly, and there are always so few to do the work and hard work, too, as the small-boat sailor knows. I have toiled all night, both watches on deck, in a typhoon off the coast of Japan, and been less exhausted than by two hours' work at reefing down a thirty-foot sloop and heaving up two anchors on a lee shore in a screaming southeaster. Hard work and excitement?
Between Welcome Pass and Cape Coburn the southeaster loosed its full fury on him. The seas rose steeper at the turn of the tide, broke with a wicked curl. He put the Cape on his lee after a wild fifteen minutes among dangerous tiderips, and then prudence drove him to shelter.
The swell that runs far before a Gulf southeaster began to roll the sloop, abandoned to all the aimless movements of a vessel uncontrolled. She came up into the wind and went off before it again, her sails bellying strongly, racing as if to outrun the swells which now here and there lifted and broke.
Tom was the only man who dared run the bar in the dark, and that last time, between nightfall and the dawn, with a southeaster breezing up, he had sailed his schooner in and out again. There had been no warning of his coming a clatter of hoofs at midnight, a lathered horse in the stable, and Tom had appeared, the salt of the sea on his face as his mother attested.
For the first hour she reiterated, between vast sobs, that Captain Bean was a soulless wretch, that she would never set foot on Sculpin Point, and that she would die there on the sofa rather than ride in such an outlandish rig. Many a time had Captain Bean weathered Hatteras in a southeaster, but never had he met such a storm of feminine fury as this.
For a long time he watched, keen with excitement; listened patiently; started at every sound. But nothing more unusual did he hear that night than the roar of the wind, the dash of the brawling southeaster against the panes, and the groans of the old house, shaken by the storm. Toward morning he crept back to bed and fell instantly into a deep and dreamless sleep.
We beat up against a strong head wind, under reefed topsails, as far as San Juan, where we came to anchor nearly three miles from the shore, with slip-ropes on our cables, in the old southeaster style of last winter. On the passage up, we had an old sea-captain on board, who had married and settled in California, and had not been on salt water for more than fifteen years.
Gower put down the glasses, seated himself in a grass chair, lighted a cigar and leaned back, looking impersonally down on Point Old and the Rock. A big, slow swell rolled up off the Gulf, breaking with a precisely spaced boom along the cliffs. For forty-eight hours a southeaster had swept the sea, that rare phenomenon of a summer gale which did not blow itself out between suns.
On the fourth, we took a stiff southeaster, which obliged us to reef our topsails. While on the yard, we saw a sail on the weather bow, and in about half an hour passed the Ayacucho, under double-reefed topsails, beating down to San Diego.
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