* * *
When Thomas and Mindy saw how firmly the keel of the Sarah J. was buried in the sandbar Rebecca had sailed into, they knew it was beyond their means to get the yacht afloat again. But fortunately, the water at the stern of the bigger boat was just deep enough for the little Montgomery 17 to raft alongside, and once they had their boat secured and exchanged their stories, the next question was what they were going to do for Scully.
“That would be great if we can find him,” Mindy said, when Rebecca told her that Captain Larry’s brother, Artie was a doctor. “He absolutely needs a doctor. That leg is awful and I’m afraid he’s going to lose it.”
Scully was weak from the blood loss and had been in and out of consciousness since he was shot. They had to get him out of the hot sun and keep him well hydrated and immobile. Then, they had to get him some help. He might not survive if they didn’t and Thomas knew he and Mindy owed him their lives, so he was determined to do everything in his power to save Scully’s.
“We need to get him aboard your boat, Rebecca. Intrepida’s cabin is so small there’s no way to make him comfortable in there and he wouldn’t be able to get any rest while we’re underway.”
“We can get him on board with the Lifesling,” Rebecca said, pointing to the rescue device mounted on the stern rail. “We’ve used it before and it works great. All you have to do is crank the halyard winch to hoist him up. We can get him down into the cabin and he can sleep on the starboard bunk. The way the boat’s leaning over, he’ll be on the low side and he can’t roll off.”
All this was easier said than done, but with the three of them working together they accomplished the task and Scully was safely aboard the larger yacht an hour later. There was a decent first aid kit on the Sarah J., and with it Mindy did her best to bandage Scully’s shattered leg. There was nothing she could do about the damage to the bones, but when she was finished wrapping it the bleeding slowed enough to make it safe to remove the tourniquet. Maybe the leg could be saved or maybe not, but there was nothing else she knew to do for him other than try and find the doctor who was the brother of Scully’s best friend. When she was finished Rebecca showed her and Thomas where Green Cay was on the chart.
“Captain Larry had been talking about going to the Jumentos Cays in front of Russell, and I guess that’s where he got the idea to come here. But before that, he wouldn’t shut up about some friend’s house he wanted to go to on Staniel Cay. He tried to talk Captain Larry into taking him there, but that was out of the question with Scully missing in Florida. Russell refused to go there with Captain Larry to look for him, so that’s why he took our boat and me along with it. The catamaran was on the beach and the mast was down, so it was easy for him to get away. I think as soon as they got it ready to sail again, my mom and Captain Larry would go to that Staniel Cay place to look for me before they would come here. They would never think Russell would come here because he wanted to go there.”
“Wow, that’s a long way from here,” Mindy said, tracing her finger over the chart. “They could be almost anywhere in the Exumas.”
“Yeah, especially if they went to Staniel Cay and didn’t see the boat. There’s no telling what they would do then,” Thomas said.
“They would keep looking, that’s what. Captain Larry would never give up trying to help my mom find me and her boat. And after that, he could do what he planned to do and sail his boat to Florida to look for Scully. But now Scully is here and he has no way of knowing that.”
Thomas had never been to the Exumas, but in all their dreaming of sailing to the Bahamas before the collapse, he and Mindy had read and heard a lot about those islands, as they were so popular with cruising sailors. He had thought he would never get to see them, but now sailing there to look for Larry’s brother was the only hope of finding a doctor who would be willing to come here and help Scully. Rebecca’s mother and all the rest of the crew on the catamaran would be immensely relieved to know that Rebecca and the Sarah J. had been found and that she was safe. With the catamaran and all her crew, they might even have a chance of getting the Sarah J. off the ground. There was really no other choice they could make. An hour later, Thomas and Mindy were sailing north, bound for the southern Exumas. They would work their way along the chain, checking every anchorage between their landfall and Staniel Cay, and hopefully intercept the Casey Nicole in her search for the Sarah J.
Tied to the stern of Intrepida was the two-seater kayak, just as it had been since Scully first joined them in Florida. They were bringing it for good reason. As they were discussing their plans in the cabin of the Sarah J. with Rebecca and Scully, Mindy had voiced her concern that Larry and the others on the catamaran would have no interest in a little 17-foot sailboat like Intrepida. What if they saw them somewhere in the Exumas and tried to flag them down? They could not possibly catch up to the much faster catamaran, and Larry and the crew would be wary of strangers and too busy looking for the Sarah J. to be inclined to stop for a smaller boat. Hearing this, Scully said the solution was to take the kayak in tow. He said Larry would recognize it anywhere because it was not a make and type that was commonly seen in the islands. If he saw it behind their boat, they wouldn’t have to try and flag down the Casey Nicole, because Larry would run them down to find out why they had it when Scully was last seen in it off the coast of Florida.
Thomas hated to leave Scully and Rebecca stranded on a grounded boat with no way off, but Scully insisted they take it, so they did. He said they would be fine. There was food and water and Rebecca had already proven she could use the SKS if Scully was unable to get to the deck in the event of an attack of some kind. But he wasn’t worried about that in such a remote place and he also insisted that Thomas take the AK and leave the old hunting rifle with him. This was a suggestion Thomas had no hesitation about. Sailing to the Exumas would put them in contact with a lot of other boaters, all of them on larger, faster vessels, and he felt much better having the firepower of the semi-automatic. He also had a newfound respect and admiration for Mindy, who had saved them all with her willingness to use the handgun despite her inexperience with firearms. There were eight rounds remaining for the pistol, so with it and the AK, he felt they were as prepared as they could be given the circumstances.
Thirty-four
“IT LOOKS LIKE YOU got the bad end of the deal in your dinghy trade,” Artie said, as the Casey Nicole drifted alongside Larry and Jessica so they could catch hold and climb aboard. Artie was so happy to see him he couldn’t resist this little attempt at humor with his brother, but he made sure to keep his voice low enough that Tara didn’t overhear. He was absolutely thrilled to find Larry and Jessica alive and unhurt. Truthfully, it was not what he’d expected after seeing those two men sail away in the dinghy. But here they were, bobbing along in a tiny fiberglass boat that had certainly seen better days but was never much to begin with.
“We thought we were going to have to build another catamaran with driftwood on the beach after we got back to Bitter Guana Cay and found you guys already gone. What’s the deal? Did you see Russell go by in the Sarah J. or something?”
Artie told him they had not, but instead had seen the men who stole the dinghy and tried to catch them.
“I’m not surprised the bastards got away. We’ll never get it back, but hey, it could have been a lot worse. They got the drop on me and they didn’t have to leave us alive, but they did.”
“I take it you haven’t seen any sign of my boat or my daughter,” Tara said, as Larry climbed aboard the Casey Nicole behind Jessica.
“Unfortunately, no. And none of the folks we talked to in the anchorage have either. So either he hasn’t made it here yet because he stopped somewhere along the way, or he decided to go elsewhere.”
Tara sank back onto a seat in the cockpit, her face buried in her hands. “That’s just what I was afraid of. And just what I tried to tell all of you!”
“Well you didn’t have a better idea of where to look, did you? I don’t
recall you telling us if you did, but I’m all ears if you do now. Look, I’m sorry, and I know this is rough on you. We’re going to do all that we can and my boat is at your disposal. So you tell me. Where do you want to look, because that’s where we’ll go.”
“I don’t know! I’ve never been to these islands before. I just have to find my daughter. I still can’t believe this has happened.”
The tears were streaming down Tara’s face now, and Artie sat down beside her and put his arm around her shoulders as Larry stood there not really knowing what else to say, other than to assure her that they would leave immediately to continue their search. Larry asked Grant to help him and the two of them pulled the junky little dinghy up onto the forward deck.
“I hate to put this thing on my boat, but unfortunately, it’s all we have now.”
As they were lashing it down, Artie heard Larry ask Grant where his primary anchor was, and why it was missing from the bow roller where it was always stored when the boat was underway. When Grant told him they had cut the rode in order to try and catch the men in the dinghy, Larry said they had to go back to Bitter Guana Cay and find it.
“That Rocna is worth its weight in gold, especially now. I don’t know where I’d ever get another one, and we’re sure to get in a situation where nothing else will do. I don’t suppose you put a float on the rode?”
“No,” Artie said with a bit of embarrassment for the oversight. “I didn’t even think about it, to tell you the truth. We were in such a hurry to try and catch those guys and I was so worried about you and Jessica. I wasn’t expecting to ever have to go back and look for it, really.”
“That’s all right. I’ll find it. I know about where I dropped it and the water is clear.”
Larry did find the anchor after just a few minutes of searching with mask and snorkel after they returned to Bitter Guana Cay. He brought up the severed end of the nylon rode and Grant hauled it aboard. When he was back in the cockpit, Larry spread out the chart for the Exumas and pointed out the likely spots he thought Russell might have gone since he did come to Staniel Cay. All of them were to the south.
“I just think it’s highly unlikely that he’s north of here. To go farther north from where he started, he would just about have to come here first to miss the banks that stretch out to Green Cay. He would have passed close enough to Staniel that someone on one of those boats would have seen him. I think the folks we spoke to would have told us if they had. They had no reason not to, because it was a strange boat passing through that none of them could have known anything about. He may have been trying to come here and failed to make landfall where he planned. I have no idea how much he knew about navigation, but since I know he was full of shit about most things, I doubt it was much.
“The wind would have likely been too much on the nose for him to go straight down to Georgetown, on Great Exuma, but he may have ended up at one of the other cays between here and there. There are lots of anchorages that way, as you can see,” Larry pointed out at least a dozen on the chart.
“The best thing we can do is hit all of them one-by-one and hope we get lucky. If we don’t find him between here and Georgetown, I’ll think of another plan then.”
* * *
Their systematic search of Exumas anchorages had taken them to Darby Island by late the next afternoon. Larry was disappointed and a bit surprised they did not find the Sarah J. among any of those islands. He didn’t let Tara know it, but he felt the odds of finding it farther down the chain on the other side of Great Exuma were slim. Sure, Georgetown was a popular anchorage, but did Russell really have the ability to sail there without the use of the engine? Larry figured he might have used it anyway, without the water pump, but he would have had to motor quite a bit to work his way in there. It would have been so much easier for him to sail to one of these anchorages on the west side of the middle Exumas and Larry had really expected to find him there. But if he had come here he was gone now, and if they didn’t find him in Georgetown tomorrow, Larry wasn’t quite sure where to look next. He had more questions than answers but then everything changed and the answers all came in the most unexpected way possible. Artie spotted a sail coming in from the horizon to the southwest shortly after they dropped anchor to spend the night and wait for daylight to head to Georgetown.
The boat was apparently arriving at the Exumas from the open sea, and Larry was curious because of the direction from which it sailed. There was nothing to the south but the Jumentos Cays and Ragged Islands, where he’d been planning to go all along. If this boat was coming from there to the Exumas, he wondered if things might not be better there after all. It would be interesting to ask them, but he doubted he would get the chance. As it got closer to landfall, the boat began angling off a bit to the northwest. On that course it would pass fairly close by Darby Island and probably stop at one of the anchorages they had already searched. Larry had already dismissed it from his mind when Artie called out to him again:
“That’s weird. They’re towing something that looks longer than their boat.”
Larry had little interest really, but if he still had his binoculars, he might take a look out of curiosity. But like the shotgun, his expensive Steiners had been in the dinghy when it was stolen. He was ready to forget about the other boat as long as it kept enough distance from them, but that was not to be. When he looked out at it again, he saw the sails luff as the crew apparently spotted them anchored there, and then it tacked and turned directly towards them.
“Crap!” Larry was tired and aggravated and the last thing he needed now was another confrontation. He went below to get a rifle, getting mad all over again at being reminded he’d lost the binoculars and the shotgun along with the dinghy. And that was the second lost shotgun. Scully had already lost his personal Mossberg back in the Pearl River swamps of Mississippi.
As he stood there on the deck of the Casey Nicole with the rest of his crew and watched the boat approach, Larry soon realized that it was a really small vessel—a tiny pocket cruiser just a fraction of the size of a typical cruising boat. The crew must have seen that he was armed, because whoever was steering put the helm hard over to turn away when they were within a couple hundred yards. Larry saw a woman step up the cabin top, waving her arms back and forth and shouting something he could not quite make out, and that’s when he also saw and recognized what the little boat was towing.
Larry had his kayak back aboard the Casey Nicole and the anchor up and sails set within a half hour of meeting Thomas and Mindy at Darby Island. It would be dark within an hour but he wasn’t going to wait, even though a night passage would put them at the cays where the Sarah J. was grounded well before daylight. It was a clear night and Larry expected there would be enough moonlight at the time of their landfall to find it. If not, they would stop and wait for dawn, but he sure wasn’t going to wait here with Scully in need of Artie’s care. And learning that Rebecca was safe and Russell was gone, Tara wasn’t about to wait either.
He felt bad about leaving Thomas and Mindy behind after the risks they’d taken to come here and find them. But they were exhausted from all the sailing they’d done and their little boat couldn’t possibly keep up with the Casey Nicole anyway. They would stay in the anchorage at Darby Island and set out for the return trip to the Jumentos in the morning. Larry told Thomas to keep the AK until they got there and he gave him a couple more full magazines for it when he learned that they only had one. Casey and Jessica put together a small package of food from the galley stores to share with them as well.
* * *
Rebecca was awakened from a sound sleep in her sharply tilted bunk by what sounded like shouting from outside the boat. She was sure it was a dream, because that would be impossible for the voices to be real unless for some reason Thomas and Mindy had already returned aboard Intrepida. But the shouting was persistent and when she climbed out of the bunk she saw that Scully was awake too.
“Do you hear that? I thought I was dreaming?”
“I t’ink it’s a dream too. Sound like Larry, calling my name, an’ de woman, callin’ for you.”
Rebecca climbed the companionway and slid the hatch open. Right off the stern of the Sarah J. illuminated in the moonlight, was the most incredible sight she could have imagined. The Casey Nicole’s twin bows were pulled up around the stern of the Sarah J. so close that the front beam of the catamaran was almost touching her rail. Her mom was standing there on the beam and as soon as she saw Rebecca emerge from the cabin she leapt aboard into the cockpit and crushed her close in a frantic hug. As her mom held her, Rebecca was vaguely aware of Artie and Larry rushing past her and down into the cabin where Scully was still sitting up in his bunk.
Casey and the rest of the crew all joined them in the cockpit, but everyone stayed out of the way until Artie was finished with whatever he was doing for Scully. Daylight was breaking by then and when Artie finally came back on deck, everyone wanted to know about Scully’s leg.
“The good news is that I don’t think he’ll lose it. The bullet went all the way through, but it did a lot of damage on the way. Thomas and Mindy did the right thing to use the tourniquet and also to remove it when they did. I’m going to have to keep a close watch on it for infection, and he’ll probably always walk with a limp, but he’ll get through it. Scully’s a pretty tough hombre.”
Rebecca had been telling her mom over and over how sorry she was that she made such a mistake and ran the Sarah J. aground. And she had replied that they did the same exact thing in the catamaran, even though it draws even less water.
“I still feel stupid. I don’t know how we’ll ever get it off. Scully said it would be really hard.”
But when Captain Larry heard all this talk he had a different perspective. “Hey Rebecca, people have been running aground all over the Bahamas since the first ships ever sailed here. Cruising folk did it all the time before the blackout, and it was a lot easier to navigate then with the help of GPS and depth sounders and all that other fancy stuff. You did a great job keeping the Sarah J. safe. The main thing is that you got Russell off the boat before he hurt you or completely wrecked it in his stupidity. And, we’re right where we wanted to be, in the Jumentos Cays. Scully is here now, so everyone is accounted for and we have both boats. Now I don’t have to sail to Florida to look for him, so I have nothing better to do than figure out how to get the Sarah J. floating again. So don’t worry about it. I’ve got some ideas and I’ve seen far worse. We’ve got plenty of anchors between us and when Thomas and Mindy get back we’ll have even more help. I know a great little cay with a good anchorage not far from here where we can take all three boats once we’re sailing again. It will be the perfect place to hang out while we make a plan and figure out what we’re gonna do next.”
Landfall: Islands in the Aftermath Page 21