It was the middle of the night, and Jessi Baker was making fantastic time on the Single-Handed Atlantic Cross-The-Pond Race, from Plymouth in England, all the way to Newport, Rhode Island. It was a solo sailing competition, which means she was allowed to use nothing but wind, wits, and her trusty yacht. She knew that first place was impossible, as radio chatter had Mark Halford reaching the finish line earlier today, but she was still hoping for second, third, or fourth place, since she was only at 19 days out, and had about a day left of travel left, if her calculations were right. Mark’s first place run was 18.5 days long. It wasn’t a record, but it was a good time.
It was her first ever solo race, so she tried to give herself a break if she didn’t place high. Just finishing was an accomplishment for someone soloing for the first time. It was weeks at sea alone. It was personally fulfilling like nothing else, to go so far for so long, alone, but it was also grueling.
The sky cracked with lightning, right as Jessi thought of this, like the fates had been listening to her self-satisfaction, and wanted to remind her who’s really in charge of what happens to a mortal human on a tiny white sailboat, surrounded by nothing but the elements.
The stars disappeared from the sky as a sudden stormcloud poured rain down. The waves swelled. The boat rocked every way.
A rogue wave several times taller than the rest smacked into the side of her boat, sending it reeling starboard. She feared for a capsize, but she barely evaded the edge of the water by making a hard turn, before another wave knocked her boat the other way. Righting herself back to safety, her heart pumping, she felt truly alive.
These swells were bigger than she expected based on the weather forecast. She opened her satellite phone and looked at the weather radar again. A dark orange and red squall had appeared out of nowhere, and was pushing her towards an uninhabited island to the west.
She opened her SONAR and saw the rocks of the island getting closer, even though she saw nothing but dark ocean in front of her between the lightning flashes. She tried to steer herself between the squall and the island, and noticed a small light source to her right, what looked like a small house on top of a seaside cliff. That was a nature preserve, not a light house, according to her maps, but she focused on the boat’s path ahead of her. She had to avoid hitting the rocks that surrounded it.
She found what looked like a passage out towards open water and past the squall, and steered the boat towards it. She heard a horrible scraping sound, and her hull hit a rock. Jessi ran to below deck to see the damage, and saw a sharp ridge of granite the length of her leg poking through the hull.
Her heart sank. There goes the race.
Now, race taken care of, she just had to worry about not dying in her first shipwreck. She secured her life vest, grabbed her go-bag, and tried to unlodge the boat from the rock, to see if her trusty boat could stay afloat for just long enough to get closer to the shore while protecting her from personally smashing against the sharp rocks. She managed to shove the craft off by some miracle, and it stayed buoyant for just long enough to smack spectacularly into two distinct pieces right next to a rocky beach. Jessi crawled off the back half of the boat, and scuttered, crab-like, across the slick rocks, stunned, but alive.
She was alive, but she had lost her satellite phone and radio on the boat. Only her regular cell phone was in her go-bag. As soon as she was on solid ground, she turned it on. It had no signal. She considered looking in shallow water for the satellite phone in the morning, if it could survive that long sitting in seawater.
Lightning crashed again, and the thunder rumbled, right on top of it. That squall was right on top of her.
Jessi sat down on a flat rock, just out of the waves’ reach, feeling like a beached whale. The exhaustion of the last 20 days of high-adrenaline racing, topped off with her boat being destroyed, and her being marooned, all hit her at once. She moaned in frustration, and put her head in her hands.
“Are you all right?” a male voice asked from behind her.
Jessi startled, and stood up, turning around, and trying to step backwards. Jessi had been going on 10 hours of sleep over the last 3 days due to the tricky navigation, and hadn’t eaten anything solid in 20 hours, on top of the adrenaline from almost dying, and the equilibrium mess from being in a boat for the last 20 days straight. Her sense of balance reflected all of this. She fell flat on her ass on the wet sand, legs splayed out like a newborn colt, in front of this stranger.
“Oh, my, let me help-“ the stranger said, and walked forward, reaching out his hand. Her manners took over her fear, and she accepted his help automatically, as though it was a perfectly normal thing to run into a man with a New York accent on an uninhabited island off the coast of Newfoundland. His hand was warm, and soft-skinned.
“Thank you,” she said.
“No, thank you!” the man said.
“You’re welcome? For crashing my boat?”
“Of course not! No! You crashed?” he asked, in alarm.
Jessi could only see his outline, with the cloudy sky covering the moonlight, and the only light on the island coming from behind him. But lightning flashed behind her, and for an instant, she could see a bearded man in his late thirties, wearing glasses, with wavy, dark hair going down to his wide shoulders, in a dark duster raincoat. Despite the eerie lighting and musty outfit, an honest compassion shone through his facial expression.
“Yes, it’s over there-“ she pointed behind her, and he turned the beam from his old-fashioned, large metal flashlight that way. A yellowish patch of light illuminated the two halves of her beloved “Albatross.” It was 30 foot long, and it was now a pile of firewood and fiberglass.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
“No, I’m fine,” she said automatically, but she was only now beginning to feel the rising panic attack from the brush with death occupy her mind. She hadn’t had a real anxiety attack in months, she remembered her breathing, and concentrated on what her body felt. A sore leg, a sore arm. Nothing bad. She walked forward, testing her body’s condition, stepping just past the man. She seemed okay.
“This storm won’t get better tonight. Come to my place, you can stay ‘til the morning,” he offered. “I can carry your bag,” he added, stooping down for her heavy go-bag.
This would be a strange place for a bag thief to live, she thought. She allowed the slightly embarrassing act of chivalry without a word. She got weirdly uncomfortable when men held the door for her, it always made her feel a tiny obligation that she didn’t want to owe them, but the act was always done from too polite an intention for her to ever actually bring it up with anyone.
She just wanted to be treated like an equal, instead of like a delicate flower.
“You live here? Is it a lighthouse?” she asked, as they started walking up the cliff towards what she now knew was the same out-of-place house light on a cliff that she had seen from her boat.
“No, though I’ve thought about building a mini one. That’s just my house,” he said, gesturing forward.
His voice had a smooth quality that drifted into the air like incense smoke. Her tongue-tied boyfriend back home would be extremely jealous of it. She loved her boyfriend beside his stutter but… it had been 30 days since she had seen him. He hadn’t even come to the race on launch day, which was a serious disappointment for her.
“You live with your… family?” she guessed wildly.
They had walked a few minutes through the storm, and were now a dozen feet from the seaside home’s side door. The path leading up to the door was lined with some solar-powered LED tiki lights, which cast a faint flickering glow on the man’s face as he turned around, and looked her over, top to bottom, taking her in for what seemed like the first time.
“No, it’s just me. I live alone,” he said, turning around again with a half-sigh.
He opened the door, and put her bag on a side table as soon as he entered, keeping it off the ground. She entered after him, closing the door behind her, and stomped rain off of her sailing boots, both of the people surrounded by wet puddles from outside.
“The name’s Adam Macy, by the way. It is lovely to meet you,” the island man said, half-blushing, shaking her hand.
“Jessi Baker,” she responded, shaking his hand back, smiling while swallowing her fear.
After he showed her to a guest room with an extremely comfortable king-sized bed and light-blocking curtains, they parted ways for the night. Between the exhaustion and the 1000-threadcount-sheets, she slept like a baby, in the cozy house of a complete stranger, on an island that the whole world believed to be uninhabited.
