Page 50 of Pull Me Under

Cal brings us alongside with precision that makes it look easy. It’s not easy. The Jenny B’s rolling badly, her hull grinding against ours with each wave, and I can see water pouring through a split in her planking near the waterline. Osmotic blistering – a type of progressive hull failure I used to write about in my marine biology notebooks, back when I thought understanding the sea meant studying it rather than just surviving on it.

‘She’s going down,’ Cal says, voice flat. ‘Get them off. Now.’

Bill and I move in tandem – him on the lines, me on recovery. The first man’s easy, a middle-aged bloke with terror written across his face but enough sense to follow instructions. Bill hauls him across the gap, I catch him, shove him towards the deck seating.

‘Stay down,’ I bark. ‘Don’t move.’

The second man’s younger, panicking, and he nearly takes Bill into the water with him when he lunges for our boat. I grab Bill’s harness, brace my legs – bad knee screaming – and haul them both back from the edge while Cal fights to keep us steady against the Jenny B’s death roll.

‘Calm down!’ I shout at the younger man. ‘You’re safe. Just sit down and stay put.’

The third man’s older – the skipper, probably – and he’s white-knuckled around the Jenny B’s railing, staring at his sinking boat like he’s watching his whole life go under.

Because he probably is.

‘Sir,’ I call across the gap. ‘We need to go. Now.’

He doesn’t move.

‘Sir!’ Louder this time, cutting through the wind and the slap of waves. ‘She’s going. You need to come across.’

He looks at me then, and I nearly lose my nerve. But he nods. Lets go of the railing. Reaches for the hand I’m extending across the gap between boats.

The Jenny B lurches. Hard.

The skipper loses his footing, stumbles, and for one heart-stopping moment I think he’s going over the side. Bill’s there before I can even process it – lunging across, grabbing the man’s life jacket, hauling him bodily across the gap with strength that shouldn’t exist in a sixty-year-old’s frame.

They tumble onto our deck in a tangle of limbs and curses.

‘Go!’ Bill shouts at Cal. ‘Get us out of here!’

Cal doesn’t need to be told twice. The engine roars. We pull away as the Jenny B gives her last death shudder and starts to slip beneath the surface, stern first, her bow pointing at the sky like a prayer before she disappears.

Gone.

Just like that.

The three men watch in silence as their boat vanishes into the grey-green Atlantic. The older one – the skipper – has his face in his hands.

The trip back to harbour takes fifteen minutes that feel like hours. No one speaks. The rescued men are wrapped in foil blankets, shivering despite the thermal layers we’ve bundled them into. Cal radios ahead to the coastguard. Bill does the post-rescue safety checks with methodical precision.

I stand at the stern and try not to think about how close that was.

How if the Jenny B had gone under thirty seconds earlier, we’d have had men in the water. How three of us isn’t enough for that scenario. How we’d have had to choose who to pull first.

And we don’t even have a mechanic on board anymore. If our engine had failed out there – if the fuel line had gone, the way it went the night Peter died – there’d be nobody to fix it. Nobody with their hands in the guts of the machine, keeping it alive while the rest of us kept people alive. Peter did that. Nobody’s done it since.

How Peter would’ve been the one to make that call.

By the time we dock, there’s an ambulance waiting and the coastguard’s already taking statements. The three fishermen are handed off to the paramedics – cold and shocked but alive, which is all that matters.

Cal secures the boat with grim silence.

We were lucky today.

Luck doesn’t last for ever.

The debrief happens in the station locker room over cups of tea that no one really wants but everyone holds anyway because holding a mug is easier than standing still.