The Wandering Island Factory

by TR Nowry

  Chapter 14

  Jason was working fourteen-hour days when his car finally sold that spring. The family held a yard sale that weekend and sold Gina's Honda a few days later. All the overtime he had been putting in let him put a down payment on the boat months ago and have it paid off before the ad for his Yaris was even placed in the local paper.

  Nobody in her family wanted to leave, but they couldn't afford to stay without his income, and they were all smart enough to know he was right about the waterlogged writing on the wall.

  The 'boat' consisted of one main floating slab, a little bigger than a flatbed tractor-trailer, with a steel shipping sea-box as the living space. Two outriggers prevented it from flipping in bad weather while providing a wide and stable platform for the sail.

  Inside the box were the simplest accommodations, one bathroom, a tiny kitchen, and several crudely cut windows. Above the box was a small closet-sized room that contained all the riggings for steering and controlling the parasail and rudder. It was the simplest of simple, but that didn't mean it was easy. It was all manually controlled, bicycle pedals and gears made wrestling the mammoth sail and large rudder difficult, but possible. It featured an electric assist, but the three car batteries were drained within the first four days, and the propeller-style charger off the stern could only keep up demand when the boat was moving faster than twenty knots, which it rarely did.

  Fortunately, Nathan knew a lot about parasailing, their main method of motion; he just wasn't used to this scale.

  Their first week at sea, Jason couldn't stop smiling. He was on his own mini wandering-island. But that excitement quickly wore off.

  Gina cranked on the fishing line as she wrestled a young shark to the stern where Ava readied the sword-like harpoon. The youngest sister hesitated as it twisted and tried to keep up with the speeding boat, but she plunged the blade into its back like a seasoned pro. Pulled onboard, it flopped briefly before Gina lobbed off its head in a single swing. The head and guts would be kept for bait, but the rest would make a fine dinner. And just in time, too.

  The boat was moving slower than expected, averaging less than ten knots an hour, and they needed to supplement their meager food supplies. Fortunately, ten gallons of kerosene would let them cook every day for a year, if needed, but they planned for only a month, two at the most, and most of their cooking needs were met by a solar oven. They had gone through all their canned meats and soups and were down to their stocks of dried rice, beans, peas, and a few bags of flour. Nobody would starve, but everyone was sick and tired of rice and beans.

  Worst of all, they were down to their last carton of smokes. And unfortunately, everyone in this family smoked.

  GPS put them on course, but far behind schedule. The winds just weren't cooperating, even those hundreds of feet up where the parasail could reach just weren't holding up their end of the bargain.

  Jason ran down from working the sails, "Wow, he's a beaut, girls!"

  Ava held it by the tail and fin as Gina gutted it on the stern.

  Jason moved to the hand crank and started pumping seawater past the desalination filters, yet another one of the boat's features that had to be done manually whenever it was moving under twenty knots.

  Gina glared at him while she sliced deeper into its flesh, liberating the large steaks first, easily another thirty pounds to offer. She had been promised an experience much different than all of this. The weather was hot and salty, the air was always humid, and the breeze from that ever-forward motion offered little to no relief. The only breaks from the misery were in the cool of the night and the relatively bug free nature of living at sea.

  "Ok, ok, I get it," Jason said as he pedaled the pump, "I thought we would be there by now—"

  She pointed the knife at him, "You promised, one month, two at the most."

  Ava scooped the liberated guts into the bait bucket, "Nobody can control the weather, Gina. We all agreed to this."

  "Stay out of this," Gina said, shifting her glare to her little sister.

  "We've been without radio for months," Ava said. "We don't know what's—"

  "Not at night," Gina corrected, "AM fades in and out, you get five minutes of clarity every half hour, and it doesn't sound like Hawaii sank into the ocean or anything. All I've heard is the same old normal talk shows about sports and politics."

  Jason stopped pedaling, "I never said Hawaii was going to sink. The oceans were rising and submerging more of the coasts under water. Very different— Look, I'm not trying to argue with you, and I don't know how me complimenting you on a fine catch turned into—"

  "I never signed on for this, Jason. We were miles inland, we had time. Years. And there's no way that any government, no matter how incompetent and misguided, would let another New Orleans happen to Hawaii. We could have been evacuated in full FEMA style."

  "Yeah, but you wouldn't have gotten anything for all your submerged TVs and computers and stuff—"

  "And just what are we supposed to get for this malfunctioning tub? Huh?" Gina stabbed the shark, then sliced off its fin. "You were had, ain't nobody interested in buying some piece of junk like this. I doubt you'll get a peso, let alone enough for a ticket anywhere."

  Jason started pedaling again, "We still have some cash and credit cards, and don't forget the hundreds you got for your Honda—"

  "I can't believe I quit my job and sold my car for this!" Gina stormed into the metal sea-box.

  Ava finished slicing up the meat. "She's just mad, Jason. She doesn't take changes very well. Never has. This flipped her whole world upside down. It'll take a little more than a few months for her to adjust." She started on the little bite-sized slices in the tail. "Hell, I'm not even half as crazy, and I haven't halfway adjusted."

  Jason pedaled faster. . . not that it helped.

  The stern generator fell far short of enough power to filter water or assist in sailing, but it was plenty to run the small array of lights inside, run a CD player, power a laptop for a few hours, keep the GPS charged, and run the small radio.

  Jason took over steering the ship that night.

  The parasail was more complicated to manage than an ordinary sail with a mast, but it was far more efficient too. Especially for something of its size. Not only were the winds stronger up there, but placing the sail hundreds of feet in front of the ship offered a kind of leverage that masts couldn't touch.

  A simple rope with tassels extended down from the sail and was his most trusted guide for wind speeds and directions. This night, they were approaching twenty knots for the first time since they left Hawaii. It wouldn't last and he struggled to keep the sail in the gust manually, hoping that the batteries would fully charge by morning. He watched the gauge on the freshwater tank slowly fill on its own, no pedaling required.

  It was peaceful at night, and the dim lights on the sail made it look like synchronized shooting— no, make that dancing stars. Mastering the figure eight pattern was difficult at first, but once he got the hang of it, it boosted efficiency by thirty percent and finally allowed them to get over twenty knots. It wasn't an eight, he thought, as he maneuvered it through the sky. It was more of a bowtie, or an elongated eight lying on its side. Changing elevations diminished efficiency, but patrolling the horizon let them chase the wind.

  It was hypnotic in a way.

  He tried to keep it as high in the sky as he could, without the guidelines reaching higher than forty-five degrees from the boat. Thirty-five degrees seemed ideal, if winds would comply.

  He had crashed the sail into the ocean only once. It took them four hours to untangle the lines and reel it all back in. They had a tiny mast they used to lift it out of the water enough to get it aloft again, but it proved to be such a time-consuming pain that he vowed to never let it happen again. Figure eights at fifteen to twenty degrees was the fastest they had ever gotten the boat to go, but it was exactly at those low angles that he seemed so crash prone. Between thirty and forty degrees was a golden zone for
him. It offered him several additional seconds to prevent any crashes.

  When and how he turned the figure eights often worked better to steer the boat than using the rudder, but he still relied heavily on the rudder today. Nathan, on the other hand, could keep the sale at ten degrees off the water and go the entire day without touching the rudder. Jason was a bit envious of that boy's talent. Lost in thought, he was startled when the door opened.

  "Look, I'm sorry I lost my temper," Gina said in the tiny room. She flipped on the radio and started playing with the dial. "Why is it so quiet up here?"

  He slowed the figure eight and tried to park the sail up high where it was far less efficient, but easier to manage, especially while talking. "I don't know. I turned it off an hour or more ago. Kept fading in and out and, that gets a little distracting after a while."

  She flipped it to AM and tuned in a late night broadcast from the west coast. "I thought you liked this guy?"

  "I do, or, uh, I did. I think they were talking about ghosts and alien abductions tonight— not one of my favorites. I like listening to the crazy conspiracy theories and the weird NASA scientists."

  She twisted the dial and brightened the lights on the sail as she peered out the window. "Seen any planes or other boats?"

  "No, but I wasn't exactly trying to." He dimmed them back down and lowered the lights in the room. "Caught a little snippet about pirates on the high seas and didn't want to take a chance." He laughed, "I know, it's silly to take such things so seriously. It's a huge ocean and we're just a tiny dot. But, I figured we should dim the lights as much as possible. You know, just bright enough to prevent collisions, but not bright enough to attract attention."

  She stuck her head out the window and enjoyed the strong, cool breeze flowing through her hair before pulling back inside. Checking the GPS, then noticing their gradually slowing speed, she turned the radio down. "Don't let me distract you." She checked the battery status, then the nearly full fresh water tank. "Jason, I uh, the past is the past. What's done is done." She sat beside him in the cramped little room, barely big enough for two. "I hope you didn't take the last few days personally. It wasn't, you know. Personally," she smiled in her shy little way, "you're the only guy I would leave Hawaii for."