Rowboat in a Hurricane by Julie Angus

cascaded over me and the open cooking pot.
    With delusional optimism, Colin stuck his spoon into the stew-turned-soup and brought it to his lips. His face scrunched up in disgust and he spit the contents of his mouth over the side. Sputtering more words of disdain, he tossed the stew overboard, and we postponed our hot meal to another day.
    The ocean’s mineral concentration includes 3 . 5 per cent salt, which offends more than our taste buds. In large quantities, salt becomes a toxin; twelve grams is enough to kill a human being. The daily recommended limit is five hundred milligrams, which means a single teaspoon of seawater contains enough salt for the whole day.
    Salt toxicity is not a problem in civilization, where even the most ardent enthusiast of pretzels and bar nuts could not come close to consuming a lethal amount. On the ocean, however, sodium chloride has claimed countless souls. Lost sailors on a desert of brine often give in to temptation and greedily gulp at the sea beneath them. These fleeting moments of pleasure—filling their bellies with cool water—are soon replaced with their final wretched moments of agony and despair. When salt enters the body, it is absorbed quickly into the bloodstream. If there’s too much sodium chloride, our cells and organs give up their water to dilute it, becoming dehydrated and eventually dying. Meanwhile, the kidneys try to filter out the salt, but they shut down when the accumulated salt levels are too high. Finally, the salt-poisoned become delusional as their brains swell, and they are racked with seizures until death from kidney failure or multiple organ collapse.
    Instead of salty stew, we dined on peanut butter sandwiches made with heavily processed white bread. The expiration date for the bread was still three weeks away, and it contained enough preservatives to sink a small rowboat.
    “If we eat any more of this bread, we’re going to have multiple organ failure anyway,” I said. But unless the weather improved, we would not be cooking anything; really, we were lucky to have brought such a large supply of bread to see us through.
    SHORTLY BEFORE 9:00 PM , darkness enveloped the boat. Colin was rowing, and I peered outside through the hatch door, grateful to be inside and wrapped in a blanket. The overcast sky shed little light, and the moon had not yet risen. I could still see the surface of the water, but barely.
    “Can you turn the boat lights on?” Colin asked. I flipped the switch for the compass light, and a faint glow illuminated the dial. The button for the strobe light was in our electrical panel, and I searched before locating the right one. Bright, pulsating light washed over the boat and into the darkness. It would be hard for other boats not to spot us; I just hoped they wouldn’t misinterpret our flashing light for a distress signal.
    “How is it out there?” I asked.
    “The waves are building, but we’re making good speed. We’re doing between 2 . 8 and 3 knots.”
    “I’ll plot our position if you can tell me what our coordinates are,” I said.
    I turned on the cabin light and unclipped the rolled-up chart from its hold on the ceiling. We had several charts with us, including those of Portugal, Lisbon Harbour, the Canary Islands, and Miami Harbour. I unrolled a large-scale depiction of Portugal’s coastal waters. The chart took up most of the room in the cabin, so I balanced awkwardly above it and used the straight edge of a book to find the intersection point of our latitude and longitude coordinates. I marked it with a tiny X.
    “Our direction is perfect. We’ve travelled forty-six kilometres southwest of Lisbon,” I announced.
    “That’s great. Let’s hope these winds keep coming from this direction.”
    We were angling our boat so that we could get away from the Portuguese coastline as quickly as possible. As long as we were near land, we were in danger. Since we had no motor or sails, we relied on the relatively feeble power