A Galwayman is at the helm of a ship in a storm off the east China coastline. He and his crew of mixed nationality have had little sleep, tossed about in a deep depression that has lasted almost three days. No one dare venture out. Every "dog" or doorlock is bolted tight, writes Lorna Siggins.
However, someone does have to, as angry seas constantly flooding the deck cannot escape through rusted outlets. The captain seizes a hammer, and a terrified crew barely draw a breath as they watch him crawl out to smash the scupper doors. Within minutes, he releases what seems like the entire Pacific overboard.
Capt Brendan O'Donnell returns to the wheel, the wind eventually eases, and the ship is able to head for port. Exhausted, he has berthed his vessel, and is about to hit the bunk when his first officer informs him that he is guest of honour at a meal.
One can only imagine the expletives in response, but first officer Lu won't take a refusal. His crew believe they owe their lives to the Galway master. . . but there's more. "When you were out on deck, you were also at the helm," Mr Lu tells him. "We all saw you. You were in both places at one time."
Not a man who had much truck with organised religion, Brendan O'Donnell didn't quite know how to explain this bilocation - but had many such stories to tell of his experiences at sea.
Born on Galway's docks 73 years ago with, as close friend Arthur Reynolds says, the "smell of Stockholm tar in his nostrils", he trained as a typesetter before opting for a seagoing career that took him to South Africa, south America, the Caribbean, Asia and beyond.
Fellow Irishman Michael Whelan remembers one particular encounter with O'Donnell while working in the oil industry in the Middle East. At the time, US president Richard Nixon and the White House bugging scandal were dominating international news reports. Whelan, a Cork diver, was returning with O'Donnell on a service vessel into Dubai when a small barge which they were towing collided with an Arab dhow.
The dhow was bearing bags of cement and some animals trussed to the mast. Fortunately, the Irishmen rescued the traumatised crew. The following day, Whelan and O'Donnell returned to lift the wreck, as it was in the middle of a navigation channel and the harbour police were asking awkward questions.
As the vessel broke the surface, there was an unfortunate goat hanging from its mast. "I think,"O'Donnell whispers, "we'll have to call this the Watergoat affair. . ." Even to attempt to recount some of O'Donnell's experiences isn't to do him justice. One had to hear the first-hand versions in his Galway "office", Freeneys of High Street, or one might be the very fortunate recipient of his marvellous letters.
Written in wonderful pen and ink script which no internet blog could reproduce, O'Donnell's missives were replete with the rhythm of the sea and the spice and crackle of traveller's tales.
Augustinian priest Fr Dick Lyng notes in his parish newsletter this week that O'Donnell knew how to hold court "in the manner of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner". As with the experience of the wedding guest in that poem, the skipper's enthusiasm was that of the natural storyteller: "He holds him with his glittering eye/- The wedding-guest stood still,/And listens like a three years' child:/The Mariner hath his will."
His ability to remember most precise details, his love of the sea, and his enthusiasm for photography are also reflected in a book which was the sole offertory gift at his funeral last week. The fatal crash of a KLM airliner off the west coast in August, 1958, the damage wreaked by Hurricane Debbie in 1961, the forgotten fleets of fishing pucans and gleoiteogs owned by College Road families, and his own experiences of hunting sharks in Galway Bay are among the many events recalled in the publication, Galway: A Maritime Tradition.
Among the many photographs which O'Donnell collated over years are shots of 440 passengers and crew rescued from a liner, Athenia, which was torpedoed some 250 miles west of Inishtrahull on September 4th, 1939. "For the hundreds of people waiting on the quayside [ in Galway], the grim truth was driven home that the war was really on," the author noted. There are images of boats, and their builders, records of sail and steam, and stories of the many people around the bay who left their "footprints in the sand".
There was standing room only on a winter's night in 2001 when O'Donnell launched the publication, and messages of congratulation were sent from colleagues abroad. These close friends, near but far, were remembered by Brendan's family at last week's Mass and cremation.
His brother-in-law, Bill Scanlan, recalled that the crew in that storm off China never forgot their skipper. Decades later, O'Donnell would receive midnight calls from first officer Mr Lu, who could no longer take any decision in his life without consulting him first.
The Galway mariner might joke about his ability to walk on water, but in a small pocket of Asia he had been placed on a permanent pedestal. . . with its own unsinkable float.