As I write these words I am two hundred miles offshore, northeast bound for my landfall at Cape Beale at the mouth of the Juan de Fuca Strait. Today is the twenty-fifth day of my single-handed passage aboard my twenty-five foot Vertue class sloop Kainui, from Honolulu to Victoria. This passage concludes a four and a half year, 13,000 mile return voyage to the South Pacific.

This morning I picked up on the AM radio CKDA Victoria. I have been monitoring the weather reports of wind and sea conditions in the Juan de Fuca at the close of Swiftsure race. It is indeed comforting to hear the frivolous chatter of my home port radio station, particularly now. I have taken a beating these last few days and am feeling quite thrashed: a survivor re-emerging form the wasteland.

The gash on my forehead is healing now, although an egg-size lump still remains. The fingers of my frostbitten hands are numb, particularly my right, tiller hand. I have managed to patch together the self-steering and it is functioning now, held together with two C-clamps, two vise grips, and some wire. I am steering a course by a French hand-bearing compass. The main compass was ruined, the glass stove in during the knockdown I encountered in a force 11 storm four days ago.

At least I am not constantly shivering in wet clothes anymore. The sun has shone during the last two days and as well as warming me up it has enabled me to dry things out a bit. However, every corner of the cabin and every object therein remains covered with a slippery thin film of vegetable oil, which was released from a plastic bottle that became airborne at the moment the boat rolled over. This passage seems to have developed into a rather desperate lesson in Heavy Weather Management.

Prior to this passage, during all my travels, I have encountered only two gales while at sea. Having no instruments to calibrate wind speed, I can offer the reader no precise figures. The first gale was during my first offshore passage from Neah Bay to San Francisco. Off Crescent City a gale blew up from the south. I turned and ran before the wind all night. My presence was not required in the cockpit. The self-steering did all the work, steering the boat hour after hour, hard-driven before the wind, under bare pole. I well remember that night, looking astern at row after row of foaming phosphorescent whitehorses advancing towards me in the inky darkness. During this gale three local fishing boats were lost with all hands.

The second gale was in the South Pacific, north of Samoa and southeast of the Phoenix group. This time I hove to with the trysail clew fastened to the windward quarter cleat and the tiller lashed down. Running would have meant threading my way through the Phoenix Islands at night - a fearful prospect. Heaving-to worked admirably, but I did take some heavy thuds as seas crashed over the boat and the noise was a bit unnerving.

As well as the above, I rode out two very severe storms at anchor during the several years I spent in the Vava'u group of the Tongan Islands. The second of these storms was Hurricane Isaac. Out of over 22 boats sheltering there during the hurricane season, only a handful of boats were floating after the storm had passed. Kainui  was one of them.

I have always been a little skeptical of other mariners' "heavy weather" stories. Most people, myself included, get frightened and excited in really severe weather at sea. In retrospect, memories are magnified, just like the angler who over-emphasizes the size of the huge one that got away. I was

convinced that monstrously large breaking seas, which could threaten and physically overwhelm a small yacht could only be experienced in certain conditions: where strong currents conflict with very strong opposing winds, or in the regions of the southern ocean where the waves circle the globe unceasingly and undisturbed by any land mass. I recently discovered that this assumption was wrong. In the following description of my recent experiences I attempt to be accurate, objective and to avoid such magnification.

Four days ago at 45 degrees North and 136 degrees West I encountered a Force 11 storm. The Beaufort Scale describes force 11 as a violent storm with wind speeds of 56-63 knots (67-76 mph) and seas 35 feet high. There were in fact sustained gusts of wind at much higher velocities. The surface of the sea in a Force 11 storm is described as having exceptionally high waves, and these waves are covered in foam. This is an accurate if not slightly understated description of what I experienced.

I approached the onset of the storm with a rather cocksure attitude as "just another damn gale." Anger had replaced that usual little twinge of anxiety in my bowels. WWV was reporting it with a radius of 600 miles, twice that of the previous four gales I had already experienced so far in this passage. At 35 knots, it was moving 10 knots faster than any of these previous gales. The eye of the storm, as it turned out, passed directly over me.

As the storm intensified, the Hasler self-steering did an admirable job as always. During this time the deck was stripped. All sail was bagged and below decks. The main was lashed to the boom. At first it was your standard storm scenario: the crashing thud of waves striking the hull, the high-pitched screaming in the rigging, the approaching whooshing of combers racing past, water intermittently hydraulicing in between the hatch boards.

rigging and Kainui shot off again, surfing wildly on each wave.

A glance around revealed the damage. The nylon-reinforced plastic leeboards had ripped their stainless eye-fasteners and screws bodily right out of the teak bulwark, leaving gaping splintered craters in the solid wood. Aft, the wind vane was split almost in two pieces. I disengaged the worm gear on the vane with a tug on the line and began steering, hunkering down and checking again the two safety lines of my harness where they were secured to cleats on each side of the cockpit. I could see almost nothing, only a vague shadow of the silhouette of each approaching wave. Squinting through the salt water stinging my eyes, I attempted to line the stern up perpendicular to each successive silhouette. I also used as a guide the flag flogging in the wind - a British Ensign, already ripped half-away from its bolt rope. This required absolute concentration.

The hull was surfing on almost every wave now, and any minor movement of the tiller would effect a large misalignment of the hull in the wind, which would take precious seconds to correct. Another half hour or two hour passed; I don't know - every minute was like an hour. I was freezing. My insulated seaboots were full of water. Water had gotten inside my survival suit. I was shivering uncontrollably. My fingers and toes were numb. My legs were cramped. I wiggled my toes constantly and periodically adjusted the position of my legs.

Gusts of wind above the steady onslaught scoured and flayed the broken and foam-covered surface of the sea. Later, when daybreak came, I was able to look down from the crests onto the enormous valleys between each racing hill of water. Near the flailed crest of each wave there were many racing combers. As they raced past my already hard-driven little yacht, they presented themselves time after time as seemingly vertical walls of water ten feet or more above the stern, crumbling in a fury of foam at the crest. The stern lifted to a dizzying angle with each successive wave.

And then it happened. One wave, a particularly sheer wall of water, reared up above and astern. As the stern lifted to a near vertical angle the wave broke and cascaded over the entire cockpit. It happened very quickly. All I remember is the tiller going loose in my grip as the hull passed completely out of the water onto the backside of this wave. A cascading tumult of green water struck my back. I glimpsed down at the now downward-sloping, partially upside-down cockpit coaming. This was a moment that filled me with shock, horror and awe all at once, that endured only as long as it took to shudder from the cold water engulfing me. Then as she righted herself the tiller suddenly came alive in my grip. Off the boat went again, wildly driven. Still gasping from the shock of the cold water, I glued my eyes astern to negotiate whatever was next. I cautioned a split second glance up behind me to look at the rig, and miraculously it was still there. I remember finding these words whispered on my lips: "I'm O.K., the mast is still there."

I looked around. Only splinters were left of what was once a wind vane. The dodgers were swept away, the urinal bucket gone. The Walker's log was over the side, knocked off its taffrail mounting but still secured to the boat by its safety line. Blood from a gash on my forehead was all over my face. I became aware of this injury only by the taste of blood on my lips. The cold numbed all. After a few moments I chanced a quick look below to assure myself that: a) the oil lamps had not upset and started a fire, b) water wasn't rising above the floorboards.

My mind was reeling. What in God's name was I going to do? I needed rope, anchors, anything to trail astern. These were below, and I couldn't release the tiller for more than a second or two. In a futile act of panic, I cast all the loose main and foresail sheets over the side. Before I had completed this task I saw it for the hopeless gesture it was. The hull speed of my five ton yacht is six knots, and at that moment these five tons were hurling before the wind at a speed well above that.

It was in the next half hour that I discovered how to maneuver Kainui  on those monstrous seas. It was obvious that I must not again permit further loss of steerage by allowing the rudder to pass into free air on the back side of a wave. This was the crucial moment of either losing or maintaining control in the passing of each potentially destructive wave.

It was not long before I found Kainui  again under the crest of a particularly sheer wall of water that was beginning to catapult the hull forward. When I felt this momentum under me, just at that second when, in passing, the crest plundered down on the cockpit all around me, I thrust the tiller hard over. The boat then slewed over onto the flat surface of bow section. The rudder remained under water and at the same time the forward momentum diminished like applying a brake. Furthermore, as the hull reeled over onto one side, I just as firmly pulled the tiller back the other way. This dual motion effectively slowed the boat. The wave quickly passed on. Kainui found herself slipping down the backside of the wave, quickly picking up speed again as the wind caught her rigging.

After the first few attempts at this maneuver I thought I had only been lucky. As wave after wave passed, I tried to remember the Lord's Prayer, reciting what snatches I could remember. A desperate sadness overcame me, faced as I was with the very real possibility of never seeing my wife's and son's smiling faces again.