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In French Polynesia, winter runs from May through October; the days are balmy, but night falls as abruptly as a trap. Just before 7 p.m. on June 25, 2005, a sailing vessel sliced through the westernmost waters of the archipelago, beneath a black and moonless sky. The Emerald Jane had left Raiatea the day before; she was headed for Tonga, 1,400 nautical miles away, guided by autopilot.The 55-foot catamaran was sleek and elegant, with five cabins tucked into twin hulls and a spacious living area suspended in between. In the cockpit, 16-year-old Ben Silverwood was finishing his watch. In the salon, his younger siblings -- Amelia, 14, Jack, 9, and Camille, 5 -- had just popped Drop Dead Gorgeous into the DVD player. The children's parents, John, 53, and Jean, 46, lounged in their stateroom, discussing the next day's travel plans.
Then they heard it: an insistent scraping, like fingernails along the bottom of a cardboard box. The Emerald Jane had carried the family halfway around the world, on a journey that John, a San Diego real estate developer, had dreamed of for two decades. The Silverwoods were well-versed in their craft's vocabulary of creaks, pings and groans. But this was something different. It was the sound of disaster.
John and Jean were already sprinting up the three steps to the cockpit when Ben cried, "Reef!" An instant later, the hulls rammed into the coral. As water poured through a gash in the starboard bow, house-size waves began crashing down on the pinioned boat. John jammed the engines into reverse, to no avail. He ran to the foredeck, where Ben was trying to loosen the Genoa sail, which was driving the craft farther onto the reef. Ben threw his father a knife so John could slash through the canvas. At that moment, a wave slammed into the Emerald Jane's 14-foot dinghy, ripping it from its stainless-steel hooks and sweeping it away.
The family had practiced emergency procedures, but the emergency they'd imagined was a storm; running aground had seemed unthinkable. Now the unthinkable was upon them.
In the salon, Camille and Jack were sobbing. As their older sister strove to comfort them, Jack kept screaming, "I don't want to die!" Jean tried the satellite phone but couldn't get a signal; her hands were shaking so badly that she dropped it on the flooded floor. John grabbed the main radio. "Mayday, Mayday, Mayday," he shouted. "This is the Emerald Jane. We are sinking." Ben called out more Maydays over the shorter-range VHF rig.
Finally, John threw the switch on the EPIRB (emergency position-indicating radio beacon) -- a device resembling a milk-shake cup, with an antenna for a straw, which is designed to alert emergency crews by bouncing a radio beam off a satellite. The beacon can be picked up only by U.S. facilities, however, and none was near enough to help. The closest search-and-rescue team operated from a French naval base in Papeete, Tahiti, 310 miles away. They weren't responding.
John and Ben raced back to the foredeck and pulled the cord on the inflatable life raft. Then they faced a dilemma: If they threw the raft over the side, it might be shredded by the sharp coral. Instead, they decided to lash it to the deck and wait until they had no other option. Before they finished, the lights shorted out. Ben took a couple of glow sticks that he'd snatched from the supply cabinet, and they went to check on the family. The salon was knee-deep in water. As Jean and Amelia carried the younger children out to the cockpit, John and Ben headed back toward the raft.
By then, both bows were breaking off, and as John reached the foredeck, the 79-foot mast gave way. Suddenly, he was lying on his back beneath more than a ton of aluminum. A thunderbolt of pain shot up his left leg. When he struggled to a sitting position and peered over the mast, he saw that a metal fitting called a spreader had chopped through his shin like a cleaver; his lower leg was dangling by a tendon. It's gone, he thought, and lay back down. He was pinned to the deck of a disintegrating boat. He could not help his family. If he didn't drown first, he knew, his wound would surely kill him.
John Silverwood was a ninth-grader in suburban Philadelphia when a schoolmate's family took him sailing for the first time. He never recovered. One of four sons of an industrial engineer, John was a smart, headstrong and restless boy, and the sport fulfilled his deepest cravings -- for freedom, for independence, for physical and mental challenges. In college at Colgate, he took two years off to sail a battered yawl from Marblehead, Massachusetts, to the Caribbean and back. After graduating, he worked construction; he spent his spare time assembling a trimaran in a barn, then piloted it to the Bahamas. Hired as a project manager for a builder in St. Thomas, he cruised the Virgin Islands in the 30-foot Dufour Arpège.
Along the way he met Jean, a striking blonde from Pleasantville, New York, who was crewing in St. Croix. Like John, she'd grown up in a big, upwardly mobile Catholic family, where hard work and strenuous fun were equally prized. She'd spent summers camping in the Adirondacks and sailing in the waters off the Hamptons. She was earthy and unpretentious; her wry reserve made a nice foil for John's excitability. They married in 1986 at a yacht club on Long Island.
The couple settled in San Diego, where John joined a real estate development firm owned by his younger brothers. He set his sights on an ambitious goal: to start a family, save his money and -- someday -- spend a year or so at sea with the people he loved most. Jean embraced the dream but insisted that they first attend to practicalities. Early on, there was too little cash; then new babies kept arriving. But John eventually started his own business, and as he entered his 50s, the timing seemed right. The housing boom had made him wealthy. Ben would soon be in high school, and if they waited too long, he'd be tied down with college applications. "It's now or never," John told his wife.
In February 2003, they found their dream boat in Miami: the Emerald Wave, a French-built Lagoon 55, offered by its owner at a modest $400,000 (comparable models cost $1 million when new). The catamaran seemed ideal in terms of safety as well as comfort. Unlike a single-hulled vessel, it would sail flat and smooth under most conditions; it would be tough to capsize even in the fiercest storm. Its hulls were made of Kevlar, the material used in bulletproof vests. It had a bathroom for each cabin, there was a gourmet kitchen, and the dining table seated eight.
The couple rechristened the boat the Emerald Jane after Jean's late mother. Then John began retrofitting it to make it even safer. He installed childproof netting around the perimeter. He bought a top-of-the-line life raft. He stuffed a cupboard with splints, syringes and medications. And at Jean's urging, he bought a state-of-the-art EPIRB, capable of broadcasting a vessel's position to within 300 feet.
That July, John sailed the Emerald Jane from Florida to Long Island. The family flew out to meet him, and spent a month near Jean's sister in Mamaroneck, New York, getting used to life on-board. In September, they headed down the coast, spending a month each moored in Baltimore, Maryland, and Norfolk, Virginia.
John and Jean were looking for more out of the trip than an extended vacation. They wanted to get to know their children in a way few modern parents ever do. They wanted to escape the routines of affluent suburbia: Dad's long workdays; Mom's shuffle between supermarket and tennis club and carpool; the kids' round of school, sports, lessons and play dates; the Saturdays at the mall. They wanted everyone to spend less time focused on video screens -- "to be immersed in nature," as John put it, "instead of virtual reality."
The younger kids quickly adjusted to life on the catamaran. For the teenagers, though, the transition was harder. Both missed their social life. Amelia, a serious dancer, pined for her ballet classes. Ben -- a big-boned, athletic boy who hoped one day to become a military officer -- had inherited his father's lust for freedom and hard challenges, but this outing seemed to offer little of either. His idea of excitement was a Boy Scout survival trek in New Mexico, where he once hauled an 85-pound pack up 10,000-foot peaks. He yearned for his surf team competitions, paintball matches and Xbox tournaments.
Jean had enrolled Jack and Amelia in a homeschooling program run by the San Diego school system, and Ben in a private program for high school students. Even preschooler Camille had lessons. Every weekday, the pupils were at their desks from 8 a.m. to noon, doing work that was supervised via e-mail by teachers hundreds of miles away. After that, their activities might consist of chores, meals and a James Bond DVD. "I'm bored" was a frequent refrain, especially during days at sea or in a nondescript port. Sometimes the surfeit of togetherness set everyone to squabbling.
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