She was fair into it then, making wild work of it, with Oddie himself to the wheel, and all his great strength needed to hold her. He called one of his men to help him once, and he, feeling the full force of it, now and again would start to ease her up a little, but the moment a spoke went down so much as a hair’s breadth Patsie Oddie’s big arms would work the other way. “Maybe you think this is a place to tack ship,” Oddie said once, and the wheel stayed up and she took it full force.
How Oddie ever expected to save the _Delia_ nobody ever knew, beyond trying to lift her across with the sheer weight of the wind to her sails. And that would be sheer luck, such luck as had never befallen a vessel in their plight before. Other men of courage with stout vessels must have tried that, they knew, and none of them had ever got over, nor come back to tell how close they came to it.
And that was all there was to it--sheer luck, Oddie would have told them, had they asked him. And yet it was not luck altogether. True, he knew no channel across--there was no channel across--and yet he knew there were little gullies scooped out here and there on the sand-ridges. And if a man could make one now and one again, jumping over the almost dry beach, as it were, between them--who knows?--it might be done. On a black night like this nobody could see the gullies, or on any kind of a night, for that matter; but then there was that something--he did not know what to call it--inside of him that told him the things he could not hear nor see nor feel. And then again, let a vessel alone, and she will naturally shy for the deep water. Force her with the rudder, and she will go where the rudder sends her. Oddie forced her, but only to make her take the full weight of the wind. It was necessary to drive her over if ever she was to get over at all. That same something inside told him when her nose was nearing the high shoals--it came to him as if her quivering planks carried the message; there it was, put her off now, and now again, now hold her that the wind may have its lifting effect, now let her go and she’ll find the way. That was the way of it--bang, bang, bang, on her side mostly, with her planks smashing against the bare bottom as she drove over the sand-ridges--her stem rushing through at an awful clip when she found a gully a little deeper than usual.