Back to it.
They say you can smell trouble on the wind, but I was too green to have the nose for it. Too green to ask why the crew kept watching the horizon, too. Or too full of myself: even I could tell there was a storm coming, out there on the Arabian Sea, and I thought me quite the sailor for feeling it ahead of time.
Ha. Any damned fool could have felt that bastard of a blow coming. It rolled in from the south, the black clouds reaching out above us to shoo away the sun, and with it came the howling rains. Smacked the ship like whips, they did, and from every direction. That storm tried to scour us from the water, and it came damn close to succeeding.
It almost scoured me. The Captain called “all hands on deck,” and when I saw where we had to go out into — that Hell of screaming spray and bastard waves, towering over the Paulie Girl — I almost pissed my pants. Or maybe I did. Five minutes out there on the deck, any piss would be sluiced away, and maybe us, too. The work had still to be done, so we did it. Oh, I had my line clipped to my belt, sure enough, and I always kept one hand for the task, and one hand for the ship. I was green and I was dumb, but I wasn’t stupid.
I was unlucky, though. A snapped cable: a single crate busting free and shredding its way down the deck; and a metal splinter as thick as my thumb, neatly slicing through my line and almost my belly. And almost me, lost to the sea.