49. Spinning. In Sophie’s next two journal entries, she describes her and the crew’s encounter with a nearly fatal wave. Sophie says she was stationed on lookout, with Uncle Dock in the cockpit and Cody at the wheel, when she noticed a wave approaching that was about fifty feet high, with a distinctively high curl. She shouts to Cody and Dock, warning them (Mo and Stew are below deck), and she sees the wave hit Cody hard. Suddenly, Sophie is inside the wave. Sophie goes overboard (thankfully, she’s wearing her safety harness) and, in her head, she hears a little child’s voice shouting “Mommy! Daddy!”
The sea finally makes a vicious attack on The Wanderer. Perhaps the most important element of this scene is when Sophie hears the child’s voice. As we learn later that Sophie’s parents drowned at sea in a similar situation, we can infer that the voice Sophie hears is her own from long ago, when she was with her parents during the accident. As she re-experiences a similar encounter with the sea, the memory of her parent’s death partly resurfaces in her mind.