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itself, as it did in calmer weather in the harbor, I would have been sadly disappointed. It did not drop at all and I knew I would have to drag it down. By this time the boat had gone virtually horizontal again and I was lying facedown on top of the mast looking into the water.
    I waited for the next roll and when it came I reached over my head and dragged at the main where the slides met the mast track and pulled three or four feet of sail to me, then waited for the next roll, and when we came up again I pulled another hunk of sail and kept this up until I saw the top of it four feet over my head.
    I did not have lazy jacks (a kind of rope-cradling system to catch the sail when it comes down) and consequently the sail flopped out to the side in the water and seemed as if it would drag the boat under when it filled. But luckily the wind load was gone, and though the loose sail in the water looked terrible, much of the pressure had been reduced and the boat came up closer to an even keel.
    I do not mean to give the impression that there was any semblance of order. The boat was still out of control, pitching wildly, slamming its bow under the waves. The mainsail lay over in the water, lines went everywhere (the tail of the main halyard had gotten away from me and was tangled in the spreaders), the jib was still full and dragging the boat around, which was
not,
as books on sailing would have it, “. . . rounding handily up into the wind.” No, the boat pitched and tossed because one of the loose lines or sheets had fouled the tiller handle over to the side, which kept the bow well off the wind and the foresail filled.
    I was hanging on to the mast with one hand, the gaskets around my neck, trying to snag the sail and get it out of the water, when the boom decided to kill me.
    The main sheet had, of course, long been lost to me, so it was not controlling the boom. With the sail collapsed in the water there was no tension at all on the boom and it started to sweep back and forth, clearing the deck. I was at the mast, out of the way, but to catch the sail I would have to move out away from the mast where the boom could get me, and as soon as I moved it caught me in the middle of the chest and swept me off the boat. I hung on and when it came back I got my feet back on the boat and dragged at the mainsail again, timing my effort to avoid the sweeping boom until at last I had a big enough chunk of the main to tie up with a gasket. It was probably only four or five minutes of intense, painful, impossibly wet effort, but it seemed like a lifetime. This pulled much of the rest of the main out of the water and the next large area came up a bit easier; I tied it off and then I attacked the jib.
    It was a thing possessed. It would fill with a slamming explosion, then slap empty, then refill, and I undid the halyard without really knowing what to expect. I was amazed to see it drop a bit between fill-slams. The piece of rope I had put around my waist was not long enough to allow me to get up to the jib so I found another loose sheet, tied it around my waist and to the mast, untied the first piece of rope, and on my hands and knees crawled out on the tiny foredeck to find that the jib came down surprisingly easily. I wadded it into a bundle and used my remaining gasket to tie it all to the side of the little bow pulpit.
    I crawled back to the mast, untied the second sheet from my waist, retied the first line from the cockpit and crawled back to the cockpit.
    Everything was still on the edge of disaster. Yet the boat, while slamming mightily, had found a way to heave to with the wind pushing her bow while the still-fouled tiller held her off (a good foul-weather maneuver, though I hadn’t known what it was called or how it was done). I could tell that the boat had settled into a mode that somehow took care of her and kept her at least partially sensible, so I decided the best thing I could do was go below and try to straighten her up a bit