“I was just paying you back, Larry. We’d all be dead by now if not for you.”
She put her arms around him and pulled him close, and then Larry brought his lips to hers in a long and passionate kiss. They had been rudely interrupted in the middle of a special time alone today, but he knew they would make up for it at the earliest opportunity. That would not be tonight, however, and it would be a challenge if they all had to sail on the same boat, but he knew Jessica wanted him as much as he wanted her. He pulled away with a whispered “good night” and then crossed the cockpit to the other hull, falling to sleep almost as soon as he hit the bunk.
Larry was up at first light, eager to begin making preparations, but everyone else but Scully was apparently still sleeping. Seeing Larry emerge from his cabin from where he was sitting in the cockpit of the Sarah J., Scully pulled himself up on his one good leg to cross over to the other boat.
“Here, take my hand,” Larry whispered. “How are you feeling today?”
“I t’ink a little better.”
Larry helped him to the foredeck of the starboard hull, where he’d been headed to access the storage locker under the hatch there.
“I’m going to get some epoxy mixed up and fix some of the holes in the boat, Scully. Do you want me to make some extra for your leg?”
Scully laughed. “Doc not gonna be happy if he little brother take he job. I t’ink mehbe you and I, we stick to fixin’ de boat. Let Doc patch up de people.”
“Well, I wish we didn’t have to sail before you have more time to heal, but you know how it goes.”
“Not to worry, de ocean air an’ salt healin’ faster. You know dat fo’ true. But tell me, Coptain, do you know where we sailin’ now?”
“I’m thinking Panama, Scully. Not the mainland, and not anywhere near the Canal Zone, but to the San Blas Islands. They’re remote, and there’s a hell of a lot of them, like more than 350 or something crazy like that. I’ve never stopped there because there never was time when I was heading for the Canal, but I’ve always been interested. Charles had some good things to say too, although his information was second hand from some other cruising friends that have been a few times.”
“An’ de people dat live there? What have you heard, mon?”
“That it’s almost like a separate country from Panama itself. They are indigenous to the islands. The Kuna. Panama pretty much gave them the authority to self-govern, although I’m not sure how far that really goes. There’s no way to know the situation there now, of course. It may be no better than the mainland, but it’s the remoteness that makes me think otherwise. That, and the fact that it’s a hell of big archipelago of islands. I supposed if we find trouble in one area there are plenty of options to move around among them. I like the idea of an island group better than the mainland. I thought about the Mosquito Coast region too, but man, anywhere we could get in the boat is going to be swampy, hot and full of malaria and no telling what the hell else. And there are a lot of people living there, along the coast and up the rivers in the interior. I just think the potential for danger is a lot greater in a place like that. At least if we’re in the San Blas Islands, we can haul ass in more than one direction if we have to leave in a hurry. It would be a beat to get back east, but north is an option and so is south to the mainland of Panama, which is pretty wild in those parts too, I think.”
Twenty-two
CASEY WOKE TO THE sound of Larry smoothing the splintered wood around the bullet holes in the starboard hull with a sanding block. She had stayed up half the night talking to Grant, and then the two of them had fallen asleep in the forward bunk of that hull since Jessica and Mindy were asleep in the two bunks in the port hull. Grant had told her Jessica had been hiding down below in Larry’s bunk when the policemen boarded the boat. It was from there that she’d killed the first one, but had nearly been hit herself when the second guy fired into the cabin with a shotgun. Casey had figured out something was different about Jessica ever since she and Larry had encountered the men that stole Tara’s dinghy. Grant said it didn’t mean anything that she happened to be down below with Larry while he was away on the island looking for Thomas and Mindy. They could have been in the Nav station looking at the charts or something when Larry heard the boat approaching. Larry had said he told Jessica to hide and keep quite, after giving her Grant’s .22. Still, Casey had to wonder. Jessica had certainly backed off from Grant lately; that was obvious to both of them.
Casey planned to ask her uncle about it point blank and thought about doing so now, while she had a minute alone with him. But she didn’t want to piss him off any more than Tara already had when she said she and Rebecca weren’t going to sail with them. Larry had that to deal with plus the boat preparations, so Casey decided her curiosity could wait. If it were what she thought it was, it would be obvious soon enough anyway. So she offered to help instead.
“Yeah, that would be great, Casey. If you could get in the kayak and pull it up on the outside of these holes, I’d like to lay a couple of layers of glass cloth over them.”
He handed her a pair of Latex gloves for protection from the epoxy and Casey climbed into the kayak that was already in the water, tied off to the stern.
“These are going to be already saturated with resin when I hand them to you. Just press them onto the hull like tape and smooth them out with your gloves.”
“I know. Squeeze all the air bubbles out, right?”
“Yep. It doesn’t have to be perfect. The boat is looking more and more like crap everyday so there’s no use trying to make it pretty. We’ll do that when we finally get someplace where we can take our time.”
“Do you really think that’s going to happen, Uncle Larry?”
“It’d better. I didn’t build the Casey Nicole to hangout in Dirtbag Harbor with the derelicts. Right now, she’s a poor reflection on my professional image as a professional skipper, not to mention part-time boatbuilder. She’s hardly worthy of her name.”
“Tell me, Uncle Larry. Did you plan on naming her after me all along? Or was that just something you decided at the last minute once you and Dad realized you might not ever see me again?”
“Oh I’d always planned to, Casey, ever since last summer when you and Jessica came and sailed with me in the Virgin Islands. And don’t think for a minute that we ever doubted we would find you. We would have sailed around the Horn if that’s what it took. You ought to know that much about your dad.”
Casey smiled and for a minute considered asking Larry if maybe he should have named the boat after Jessica instead, but once again, she kept her mouth shut. There would be ample opportunities to give him a hard time about his new interest in her former roommate later. She smoothed out the fiberglass patches and then applied two additional layers as he handed them to her. Each patch was slightly larger than the one beneath it, overlapping the edges where the cloth had been cut. When they were all in place she removed the final excess resin with a small plastic squeegee. Casey had seen enough of the process to know that the next step would be to fill the weave with a thickened epoxy mixture applied with a putty knife. Then when it cured it could be sanded smooth, and more putty applied and sanded until the patch was faired in and blended with the rest of the hull surface. Larry and Scully could do this so perfectly that the patch was invisible once it was painted. To Casey, it was tedious and frustrating work, but she was eager to learn.
“We’re not going to take it that far now, Casey,” Larry said when she asked if they were going to sand and fair these new patches before they left. If you want to you can hit them with the sanding block this afternoon and knock down the high spots after the epoxy sets up, but there’s no need to go any further. We’ll slap a coat of primer over it for U.V. protection and call it good.”
The entire boat was already primer gray, and Casey and everyone else had gotten used to seeing it that way. The look had grown on her in a way, as the rakish, streamlined hulls looked businesslike and purposeful without the gleam
of a high gloss finish. It looked like a fitting vessel for a post-apocalyptic world, which was exactly the kind of world they found themselves sailing in. Larry kept insisting they would get it painted though, and he’d told Casey she could choose the color scheme. The more she thought about it, the more she liked the idea of keeping it gray, maybe the flat, battleship gray the Navy favored with a bit of black trim for accents.
By the time the patch job was done, everyone on both boats was up and about, and Charles and his son Brian had arrived in their dinghy, curious about Mindy’s arrival with Larry and his crew the night before. Everyone, including Mindy herself had already agreed to keep quiet about the encounter with the rogue lawmen the day before, but Larry didn’t want to lie to their new friends about the dangers either. He went so far as to tell them that Thomas had been murdered, and added that the boat had been taken too, leaving Mindy marooned. It simplified the story and gave a plausible explanation for why she was now sailing with them, but left out the real reason Larry was in a hurry to leave. As far as he was concerned, the killing of Thomas was enough to prompt it.
“Darby Island is a long way from here,” Charles said. “I knew there would be trouble in the Exumas because that’s where all the cruisers are. We saw it coming early on in Georgetown like I told you before, and that’s why we got out when we did. But just because that stuff is going on there, that doesn’t mean you’ve got to worry about it here. I mean look around, we’ve got this place all to ourselves.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell him,” Tara said. “I like it here. I’m not ready to leave.”
“Yeah there’s no need to hurry,” Brian agreed. “We all just got here and it’s probably as safe as anywhere else in these islands.”
“Larry, I know you’ve been a delivery skipper for years and sailing’s in your blood. I’m sure the trip up to Darby Island and back got you itching to put to sea again, and I know you want to go before hurricane season, but I thought you wanted to get all your repairs done here first.”
“I thought so too at first, Charles. But you’re right. I am ready to sail. Not just because I’m impatient, but because the more I think about it, the more I think it’s better to go ahead and get where we’re going while we’ve still got momentum. It’s easy to get stalled out anytime you stop in a nice place. You know that, Charles, and that’s fine for the kind of pleasure cruising we all did before, but now things are different. We can’t risk lingering where we might be attacked any day, and where we can’t even source a new supply of fresh water other than what rain we can catch. I’m ready to get someplace sustainable, where we can go about the business of figuring out how we’re all going to live now that the switch has been thrown. We don’t have the luxury of having several months worth of supplies on board like you and Brian and Holly do.”
“I understand. We’re trying to fish as much as we can too because even though we have a lot more than most, it will run out eventually.”
“Hopefully not before all this gets resolved though,” Brian said. “I’m still confident that it will. After what you told us about those Navy ships off Florida, I’m even more convinced. It sounds to me like the military is getting ready to take control of the situation and get to work on restoring the power.”
“Maybe the only power they’re concerned about is their own,” Larry said. “I don’t think you ought to count on anything getting better for the majority of civilians on the mainland or anywhere else. Even if they have enough resources to begin rebuilding, it’s going to take years. In the meantime everybody left alive is going to have to continue trying to stay that way on their own. Most can’t do it any other way than by trying to take what they need from others that have it. Don’t kid yourself that you’ll be able to go back there, Brian. Life will probably never be like it was before. Not in our lifetimes. That’s why I want to focus on getting someplace where we can build a sustainable life off the grid. It’s the only option that’s viable anymore.”
“Everywhere is off the grid right now anyway,” Tara said. “You don’t know for sure that anyplace you’re thinking of going is better than right here.”
“As far as who might be there, and what they might be doing, no Tara, I don’t. But I know which places have consistent rainfall, which ones are outside of the strike zone for hurricanes, and which ones are sufficiently remote that almost no one can get there unless they have a good boat. These cays right here fit the last requirement, but not the first two, as we’ve discussed too many times already.”
“So what do you have in mind, Larry?” Charles asked.
“The San Blas Islands. Given where we are now in relation to everywhere else that might work, I think that’s the logical choice.”
“I’ve never even heard of those islands until you brought it up before,” Tara said. “You said it would be too hard to get there back when we were getting ready to cross the Gulf.”
“From there, yes. What I said was that crossing the Gulf due south from the northern coast is difficult. That’s because of the currents and prevailing winds. Even if you get to the Yucatan, you have to fight the current to go south and beat into the wind to get around Cabo Gracias a Dios, the big point that sticks out to the east into the Western Caribbean. I said then that getting there was easier done by way of the southern Bahamas, which is where we are now. From here you sail for the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti, and then you have favorable winds to cross the Caribbean to any point north or south of Gracias a Dios.”
“And how far is that? All the way to nearly the coast of South America, right? You’re talking about sailing farther than we’ve already come since we left Cat Island!”
“So? What difference does it make if it’s a safe refuge? If I had my way, we’d sail all the way to the South Pacific! The only thing stopping me is I doubt we could get through the Panama Canal.”
“You’re probably right,” Charles said. “If it’s not closed to all traffic, probably the only ships using it are Navy. Maybe that’s where the ones you saw came from.”
“Maybe. Or maybe they came from across the Atlantic. Either way, it doesn’t matter. The Pacific is out of reach for now and not really on my radar. But the Western Caribbean is a big area, even if we don’t find what we’re looking for in the San Blas.”
Larry went to pull out his charts of that part of the Caribbean, laying out the proposed route so they all could see. Tara was still adamantly opposed to the idea, but Casey knew Larry wasn’t going to change his mind. He said the total distance to the San Blas Archipelago from Flamingo Cay was just under a thousand nautical miles. That meant that under ideal conditions, sailing non-stop, they could be there in as little as six or seven days, even allowing for the slower average speed of the Sarah J. Larry did admit however that the first part of the voyage would not be ideal as they still had to make headway to windward to reach the point where they could turn south between Cuba and Haiti. Beating to windward on that first leg would take them close to the place off Acklins that Charles had recommended, and to make it more appealing to Tara, Larry said they could possibly stopover there for a night and maybe again at Great Inagua, farther south.
Casey was also surprised to see that there were other options for stopping in the Caribbean that she never knew existed. Larry didn’t have detailed charts for all of them, but he pointed to a surprising number of small islands and island groups scattered out across that part of the Caribbean, some between Jamaica and the Central American mainland and others not far off his proposed route south to Panama. Some of these remote islands were inhabited and others were not. They would provide options if either of the two boats had trouble and those options made the voyage look easier than Casey had first envisioned. At no point would they be any farther from land than they had been while in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, so it definitely wasn’t like crossing the entire Atlantic or something of that nature.
Twenty-three
TARA HAD EXCUSED HERSELF from the co
nversation shortly after Larry showed everyone the charts. When Charles and Brian said they were going back to their boat Tara asked if they would drop her and Rebecca off on the beach. She said she wanted to go for a walk and have some time alone with her daughter. Watching them when they landed though, Larry was surprised to see Brian stay behind when Charles motored back to Pocket Change.”
“So much for her wanting time alone, huh Doc?”
“She’s just upset because she wasn’t expecting this. She’s tired, Larry, but I think she’ll probably come around. Just give her some time.”
“Time is the one thing I can’t give her; not much anyway. This wouldn’t be an issue if it weren’t for them,” Larry nodded at Pocket Change. It seems like she latched onto the idea of going to Crooked or Acklins as soon as she heard them talk about it. Now, I’m wondering if they’re trying to convince her because they want the company. They know damned well they can’t go all the way to the San Blas, and I think they’re missing the social aspects of hanging out with other cruisers. And now look at Brian, stuck here due to circumstances on Mom and Dad’s fancy yacht. He must be bored as shit and missing his life and friends his own age, because an indefinite cruise isn’t what he signed up for, you know. But then along comes this hot, unattached blonde with her own boat. He’s not that much older than her you know, and he probably thinks he has a chance. Maybe he thinks all the money in the family will impress her, maybe he’s right! I’m thinking he’s working on her right now, telling whatever he has to say to keep her around.”
“Just like another fellow I know that did the same thing when he met her not so long ago, eh little brother?”
“Only with her best interest in mind, Doc! I couldn’t just leave her there at the mercy of whoever came along after what happened to the folks on that other boat. What was I supposed to do?”
Horizons Beyond the Darkness Page 15
