Hawtrey's Deputy by Harold Bindloss

Daylight broke on a frothing sea, across which there scudded wisps of smoke-like drift and thin showers of snow, before they hove her to. Then, with two little wet rags of canvas set she lay almost head on to the big combers, and met their onslaught with a hove-up weather bow. Having little way upon her, she lurched over instead of ramming them, and though now and then one curled on board across her rail it was not often that there was much heavy water upon her slanted deck.

All round the narrow circle a leaden sky met the sea. To weather the combers were bitten into it in cleancut serrations, but to leeward the dim horizon was blurred by flying spray, save when the snow whirled down in thicker wisps and blotted it out altogether. It was bitterly cold, and the spray stung the skin like half-spent pellets from a gun. There was, however, only one man exposed to it in turn, and he had little to do but brace himself against the savage buffeting of the wind as he clutched the wheel. The _Selache_, for the most part, steered herself, lifting buoyantly while the froth came sluicing aft from her tilted bows, falling off a little with a vicious leeward roll when a comber bigger than usual smote her to weather, and coming up again streaming to meet the next.