SALT WATER LOVE (PART II)
(CLICK FOR PART ONE)
The sun beat down on the smooth glass-like ocean. Hardly
a wave rustled the smoothness and it was hard to tell where the sea ended and the sky began. The morning heat haze
was just starting to leave the sea. I did not move, nor want to move.Everything
was so peaceful and I just did not feel like stirring from where he lay.
My mind was going back many years to one of my earliest sailing days. The day,
in fact, I first met my Wendy. What a time that had been, rescuing my Wendy
after her boat had been hit by the wash of a tanker, leaving her in such pain
from a sprained ankle, and yet still she was able to sail the boat until I
rescued her.
That had been the start. We had fallen
in love and sailed the seas together, first as lovers and then after a
beautiful ceremony on a Jamaican island, as man and wife.
My Wendy had been with me ever since; our lives had been full of happiness. We
managed to work and sail, splitting the year into equal halves. We both
worked so hard, knowing that the money we made would enable us to sail into the
sunset for six months of heaven. We had been to most places on the seven seas
and had many adventures, some of which my Wendy had written about in a book,
which even now, as I lay here under the sun, was being published.
We had, with the money that we hoped the book would bring us, planned our most
ambitious trip, even selling our house, and just about everything else, to pay
for the new boat we needed for this adventure from England to Australia.
It was some journey, and unlike most
other people tackling the trip, we were doing it for fun. We aimed to stop wherever we wanted,
whenever we wanted, and to enjoy every mile. All the planning was completed and
on a windy, normal, dull English day, we set sail on our adventure.
The journey had been fantastic. We were, as on that first journey we made,
together so in love. We shared the tasks, the chores and the pleasure. Every
day had seen something new, something different. The sites, the sounds, small
fishing ports full of friendly fishermen, big bustling cities. But at the end
of the day, there was just Wendy and I on our boat, our own island in the huge
ocean.
Things went well until we arrive at the Indian Ocean, where we had been hit by
a typhoon that came at us from nowhere.
Our brave boat battled for days against the pounding seas. My Wendy and I
fought the seas days and nights, with little food or sleep. Working as a team,
we had seen the sun disappear and not seen it again for several days. Then just
as the worst was over, just as we thought we were finally going to get some
rest, at the darkest time of the night, something hit the boat. Whether it was
a whale or a container washed over the side of a boat we never knew. Water
flooded in through the hole in the side of the boat and we grabbed what we
could and started to prepare to abandon ship.
The sea however had one final trick up its sleeve.
Just as we were ready to leave the boat a fresh wave must have hit us. One
moment we were slowly sinking, the next I was in the water with no sign of the
boat, or my Wendy.
I do not know how long I swam around that spot. The seas, as if satisfied
now they had sunk the boat, became calm. I called and yelled until my throat became raw with the effort
and the salt water. My heart died in that instant and I think I did to. Eventually
I swam across a large piece of our boat now all smashed and pulled myself on
board.
The sun came out and lit the sea, plenty of flotsam from the wrecked boat
floated around me in the now still waters, but of my Wendy there was no sign.
Days came and went, until now here I was laying on my wreckage raft under the
hot sun, remembering the woman I loved with all my heart and who had now been
taken from me.
As the sun created the haze over the sea, I looked deep into the water and saw
the face of my Wendy. She was smiling up at me, reaching her hand out to me.
Telling me to come home to her, our home, where we had first met, the sea.
Without thinking and not able to stand, I rolled off the raft and with a smile
on my face as bright as the sun that beat down on me; I slipped into the arms
of my love. As the waves closed over my head, I was once more with my Wendy,
this time forever….
Barry Eva 2000 
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