The light boat was sensitive to the wind’s touch and often swept over the water as if it were under sail. He measured their speed by tossing one of his rubber-soled sneakers in front of the boat that was tied to a five-meter line. Then he counted the seconds it took the boat to pass the shoe, pulling it from the water before it drifted astern. He discovered that they were being pushed along by the westerly wind at a little under three kilometers an hour. By rigging the nylon boat cover as a sail and using the paddle as a short mast, he found they could increase their speed to five kilometers, or an easy pace if they could have stepped out of the boat and walked alongside.
“Here we are drifting rudderless like jetsam and flotsam over the great sea of life,” Giordino muttered through salt-caked lips. “Now all we have to do is figure out a way to steer this thing.”
“Say no more,” said Pitt, using the screwdriver to remove the hinges on a fiberglass seat that covered a storage compartment. In less than a minute, he held up the rectangular lid, which was about the same size and shape as a cupboard door. “Every move a picture.”
“How do you plan to attach it?” asked Maeve, becoming immune to Pitt’s continuing display of inventiveness.
“By using the hinges on the remaining seats and attaching them to the lid, I can screw it to the transom that held the outboard motor so that it can swing back and forth. Then by attaching two ropes to the upper end, we can operate it the same as any rudder on a ship or airplane. It’s called making the world a better place to live.”
“You’ve done it,” Giordino said stoically. “Artistic license, elementary logic, idle living, sex appeal, it’s all there.”
Pitt looked at Maeve and smiled. “The great thing about Al is that he is almost totally theatrical.”
“So now that we’ve got a particle of control, great navigator, what’s our heading?”
“That’s up to the lady,” said Pitt. “She’s more familiar with these waters than we are.”
“If we head straight north,” Maeve answered, “we might make Tasmania.”
Pitt shook his head and gestured at the makeshift sail. “We’re not rigged to sail under a beam wind. Because of our flat bottom, we’d be blown five times as far east as north. Making landfall on the southern tip of New Zealand is a possibility but a remote one. We’ll have to compromise by setting the sail to head slightly north of east, say a heading of seventy-five degrees on my trusty Boy Scout compass.”
“The farther north the better,” she said, holding her arms around her breasts for warmth. “The nights are too cold this far south.”
“Do you know if there are landfalls on that course?” Giordino asked Maeve.
“Not many,” she answered flatly. “The islands that lie south of New Zealand are few and far apart. We could easily pass between them without sighting one, especially at night.”
“They may be our only hope.” Pitt held the compass in his hand and studied the needle. “Do you recall their approximate whereabouts?”
“Stewart Island just below the South Island. Then come the Snares, the Auckland Islands, and nine hundred kilometers farther south are the Macquaries.”
“Stewart is the only one that sounds vaguely familiar,” said Pitt thoughtfully.
“Macquarie, you won’t care for.” Maeve gave an instinctive shiver. “The only inhabitants are penguins, and it often snows.”
“It must be swept by colder currents out of the Antarctic.”
“Miss any one of them and it’s open sea all the way to South America,” Giordino said discouragingly.
Pitt shielded his eyes and scanned the empty sky. “If the cold nights don’t get us, without rain we’ll dehydrate long before we step onto a sandy beach. Our best approach is to keep heading toward the southern islands in hopes of hitting one. You might call it putting all our eggs in several baskets to lower the odds.”
“Then we make a stab for the Macquaries,” said Giordino.
“They’re our best hope,” Pitt agreed.
With Giordino’s able help, Pitt soon set the sail for a slight tack on a magnetic compass bearing of seventy-five degrees. The rudimentary rudder worked so well that they were able to increase their heading to nearly sixty degrees. Buoyed by the realization that they had a tiny grip on their destiny, they felt a slight optimism begin to emerge, heightened by Giordino’s sudden announcement.
“We have a squall heading our way.”
Black clouds had materialized and were sweeping out of the western sky as quickly as if some giant above were unrolling a carpet over the castaways. Within minutes drops of moisture began pelting the boat. Then they came heavier and more concentrated until the rain fell in a torrential downpour.
“Open every locker and anything that resembles a container,” ordered Pitt as he frantically lowered the nylon sail. “Hold the sail on a slant with one end over the side of the boat for a minute to wash away the salt accumulation, before we form it into a trough to funnel the rainwater into the ice chest.”
As the rain continued to pour down, they all tilted their faces toward the clouds, opening wide and filling their mouths, swallowing the precious liquid like greedy young birds demanding a meal from their winged parents. The pure fresh smell and pure taste came as sweet as honey to parched throats. No sensation could have been more pleasing.
The wind rushed over the sea, and for the next twelve minutes they reveled in a blinding deluge. The neoprene flotation tubes rumbled like drums as the raindrops struck their skintight sides. Water soon filled the ice chest and overflowed on the bottom of the boat. The life-giving squall ended as abruptly as it had begun. Hardly a drop was wasted. They removed their clothes and wrung the water from the cloth into their mouths before storing any excess from the bottom of the boat in every receptacle they could devise. With the passing of the squall and the intake of fresh water, their spirits rose to new heights.
“How much do you figure we collected?” Maeve wondered aloud.
“Between ten and twelve liters,” Giordino guessed.
“We can stretch it another three liters by mixing it with seawater,” said Pitt.
Maeve stared at him. “Aren’t you inviting disaster? Drinking water laced with salt isn’t exactly a cure for thirst.”
“On hot, sultry days in the tropics, humans have a tendency to pour a stream of water down their throats until it comes out their ears and still feel thirsty. The body takes in more liquid than it needs. What your system really needs after sweating a river, is salt. Your tongue may retain the unwanted taste of seawater, but trust me, adding it to fresh water will quench your thirst without making you sick.”
After a meal of raw fish and a replacement of their body liquids, they felt almost human again. Maeve found a small amount of grease where the engine controls once attached under the console and mixed it with oil she had squeezed from the caught fish to make a sunburn lotion. She laughingly referred to her concoction as Fletcher’s Flesh Armour and pronounced the Skin Protection Factor a minus six. The only affliction they could not remedy was the sores that were forming on their legs and backs, caused by chafing front the constant motion of the boat. Maeve’s improvised suntan lotion helped but did not correct the growing problem.
A stiff breeze sprang up in the afternoon, which boiled the sea around them as they were flung to the northeast, caught in the whim of the unpredictable waves. The leather jacket sea anchor was thrown out, and Pitt lowered the sail to keep it from blowing away. It was like racing down a snowy hill on a giant inner tube, completely out of control. The blow lasted until ten o’clock the next morning before finally tapering off. As soon as the seas calmed, the fish came back. They were seemingly maddened by the interruption, thrashing the water and butting up against the boat. The more voracious fish, the bullies on the block, had a field day with their smaller cousins. For close to an hour the water around the raft turned to blood as the fish acted out their never-ending life-or-death struggle that the sharks always won.