by Bear Grylls
This was more like forty-nine per cent better to stay on the island, fifty-one per cent better to head out for Island Alpha. But those extra couple of percentage points were what made the difference.
He went back to the others, his head already full of plans. First they would have to stockpile a heap of coconuts for the journey . . .
‘We’ll do it,’ he said. ‘We’ll leave tonight.’
CHAPTER 29
Beck solemnly tied the scrap of bandage firmly around James’s wrist. The other boy winced slightly. ‘Not too tight?’
James forced a smile. ‘I can still feel my fingers. Just.’
‘You’ll get used to it.’ Beck picked up a pebble and another length of bandage and turned to Abby. She silently held out her wrist.
The seasickness tablets had been lost when the boat was wrecked. This was an alternative method. Beck had heard of it but never tried it out. It was an acupuncture technique. Putting pressure on the centre of the wrist was meant to stimulate the nerves in the arm and help the brain ignore the contradictory messages it was getting from elsewhere. Now each of them had a bandage tied round their wrist, with a small pebble inside it applying the pressure.
It was the last precaution they could take before leaving.
‘Time to go,’ Beck said.
The patched-up boat floated between them while waves gushed around their knees and thighs. It was loaded up with their meagre supplies.
‘. . . two, three,’ said Farrell, ‘and go.’
With Abby and James on one side, Farrell and Beck on the other, they ran the boat out into the surf. They had practised the move several times already. The moment the boat was floating they clambered in over the sides. It was awkward because the canvas cover was stretched tight over the front end as part of the repair, and so there was less space for them. Limbs tangled and banged together as they climbed in.
Abby took the tiller and kept the boat facing away from the island. Beck and Farrell grabbed the oars and dug the blades into the water. They heaved with all their strength, pulling the boat towards the breaking waves. Getting through them was just the first of the challenges that lay ahead.
The sun was setting almost directly behind the island. Red light shone between the silhouettes of dark trees. They had left Steven’s body there, neatly laid out with his hands on his chest and covered with half a foot of wet sand. It was the best they could do, right now. They couldn’t bring him with them and there hadn’t been time to dig him a grave. Beck hoped they would get help and return to the island before the crabs had done too much damage.
‘Here it comes,’ said James from the bow. Beck heard the worry in his voice.
Then the boat shuddered and reared up as it hit the breaker. Spray broke over them and splashed cold against Beck’s back, but the boat rose up with it and came crashing down the other side. The pile of coconuts rolled about under the cover, thudding hollowly against the sides of the boat.
‘The repair?’ Farrell snapped.
There was a pause while James crawled under the cover, dodging the rolling coconuts, and peered at their handiwork. ‘Seems to be holding.’
Beck kept up the rhythm, one, two, one, two, hauling on his oar in sync with Farrell. The boat reached the next wave and began to rise up. But this time the wave didn’t break over them. They were further out and the waves hadn’t reached the critical point where they start to topple over. The third wave, a couple of minutes later, was just a smooth up-and-down.
They were through the surf. The island couldn’t hold onto them any longer.
Farrell asked for another report on the repair.
‘Still holding.’
The captain just grunted as he and Beck kept rowing.
Abby, at the tiller, had Beck’s watch in her hand. She turned in her seat to point the hour hand back at the setting sun and took her reading. Then she pushed the tiller over so that the boat turned onto the course they needed for Island Alpha.
They had used the map on Steven’s piece of paper and Beck’s watch to calculate a course. There are 360 degrees in a circle, and there were sixty minutes marked on the watch face. That meant that each minute on the watch face was six degrees in real life. They had put the watch on the map and worked out that they had to steer a course of eighty degrees – just a little north of due east.
Soon, Beck hoped, they would be out of the island’s shelter and into the Gulf Stream – that would help carry them in the right direction.
Beck felt water sloshing about his ankles. He hoped it came from the waves that had broken over the gunwales, not the leak opening up. ‘We need baling,’ he said.
Immediately James got to work with the tin box, filling it up with water, which he tipped back into the sea.
And so they kept rowing, while the sun went down and the stars came out.
Beck had bandaged wounds and broken limbs in his time – his own and other people’s; until that day, he had never bandaged a boat.
He had heard of the technique, and Farrell had seen it done. The canvas cover was folded to twice its thickness and wrapped the entire way around one end of the boat. They tied it securely in place over the crack with the ropes that had hung around the edges of the life raft.
At first it looked like a joke – as if they had bandaged the boat and hoped it would get better. But once they refloated it, Beck saw the difference immediately. The water pressure outside the boat pushed the cover into the hole and plugged the leak.
The biggest problem was the rope holding the repair in place. Beck had nightmare visions of the cover working loose when they were in the middle of the ocean. He had found some stout, straight sticks and looped the rope around them. By twisting the sticks, he could tighten the rope so that it held. But they would need constant checking and rewinding. Whoever was taking a resting turn, as opposed to rowing or steering, would also have to check the rope and bale out any water that made it through the canvas.
No one was going to get much sleep. But, Beck told himself, it was only twenty-four hours – that was what the captain had said. No one can keep going for ever, but once you’re in a routine it’s very easy to just put your mind into neutral and slog on. Then you can collapse when you reach your destination.
No one spoke much. There were single words, like: ‘Time?’ or ‘Course?’ That was all. Talk just made you thirsty, and no one felt like making conversation. The further they got from the island, the more they knew they were at the mercy of the repair. If the boat chose to sink, there would come a point when they were just too far away to swim back.
For the first hour Abby was in charge of steering, but Beck still kept his own eyes on the stars. He was pleased to see that she maintained the course well. He had to remind himself that she might be a completely different creature to him, with a different world view and different values – but she wasn’t stupid. Far from it.
Once the sun had gone down, they were back to navigating by the North Star. It was the only star that was fixed. All the others moved, eventually. You couldn’t see it happening unless you paid very close attention, but over the course of the night the entire starscape above them would slowly spin round. You couldn’t just pick a star and say ‘Aim the boat at that one.’ The boat would end up going in a huge curve around the ocean as it followed the moving star. The only thing you could do was make sure that the North Star was always above a particular mark on the side of the boat. Even that wouldn’t work over large distances, but the journey to Island Alpha wasn’t that long – not compared to the size of the planet. In an aeroplane it would have been a few minutes’ flight. But in their little boat, crawling across the face of a great sea, it would take at least twenty-four hours.
After an hour, everyone changed position. Beck had been at the left-hand oar, so it was his turn to rest in the bow. James took the right oar, Farrell took the tiller, Abby moved up to the left oar.
To get to the bow, Beck had to duck under the canvas cover. He studied his handiw
ork carefully, though it was too dark to see much. The canvas seemed to be doing its job. He baled for a few minutes, then tried to get some sleep for the rest of his allotted hour.
It seemed like only seconds before the next shift and he was back on an oar again. Then it was an hour on the tiller, fighting to keep his eyes open and make sure that the North Star was in the right position. Then back on an oar, then back to an hour of blissful rest in the bow . . .
The chime from Beck’s watch announced another change of shift. He and Farrell paused in their rowing and stretched. Beck winced as he felt his joints crack, and blood rushed into muscles that had become tired and cramped. It was the end of his third shift on the left-hand oar. That made it eight o’clock in the morning. They had been at sea for over twelve hours.
They were rowing east, so he’d had his back to the sunrise and hadn’t been able to see it easily. He had watched as grey light spread across the ocean and colour returned to the world. The sea slowly turned blue. Abby, at the tiller, slowly materialized as a person rather than just a shape. She was fiddling with the bandage on her wrist. She looked tired and strained.
‘I’ll get James. You set your watch,’ Farrell said. He turned in his seat and stretched out a leg to prod the other boy. James was fast asleep in the bow, his head resting on a lifejacket.
They were back to navigating by the sun again. They had agreed on how to do this the previous night. Unlike the North Star, the sun did move. So, every quarter of an hour, Beck wanted whoever was at the tiller to take a fresh bearing and keep them on course. With all the ocean to go wrong in, even a little error could result in them missing their destination by many miles.
He was just setting the alarm for fifteen minutes when something bumped into the boat. It didn’t feel like much, just a light thud. Beck assumed the bow had just slapped against a wave at a slightly sharper angle than usual.
But then it happened again, and this time Beck felt the shudder through the boat.
A third thud made him clutch at the side to balance himself. ‘Hey, what . . .?’
James gave a low moan. His mouth hung open and his eyes were wide. Slowly he lifted an arm and pointed. Beck followed the direction of his finger, out to sea.
A triangular, dark grey fin broke the surface of the water a few metres away. Beneath it there was just the suggestion of a dark, sleek body before the whole thing disappeared underwater with barely a ripple.
‘It’s a sh—’ James breathed. His chest began to heave up and down as he fought back panic. ‘It’s a sh— It’s a shark!’
CHAPTER 30
Beck’s mind raced. He had seen what sharks could do.
That time on the raft, off the coast of Colombia, with Chrissy and Marco: just a tiny trail of blood from a spilled can of fish guts had provoked an attack from a tiger shark. A shark at one end of an Olympic-sized swimming pool could smell a single drop of blood at the other. And they moved like torpedoes, accelerating up to forty miles per hour quicker than a car.
But what was attracting this one? No one was bleeding . . .
The boat shook with another thud. This shark was definitely attacking.
‘For some reason we’ve upset it,’ Beck said. They could work out why later. ‘It’s OK,’ he added quickly, to stop James from freaking out altogether. ‘It just needs to know we are in charge. If a shark attacks you when you’re swimming, and you don’t have a knife or a speargun, then you hit it where it’s sensitive – like its nose, or its eyes or gills.’
‘OK.’ Farrell took command. ‘James, Abby, grab your oars. When it comes close, whack it.’
They didn’t need to be told twice, scrambling to their feet and pulling the oars out of the rowlocks. They stood poised, oars at the ready, one on either side of the boat, and waited for the shark to make its next move.
Beck ran through his memories to think of anything they could have done to make the shark think they were edible. What else made sharks attack boats?
Sharks were attracted by electrical fields, and by irregular vibrations. The wrong sort of vibration through the water could make a shark think it was attacking a weak, struggling animal.
He remembered video footage from early 2013 of a great white shark that had attacked a fishing boat off Australia. But that boat had had an engine – a small outboard motor. The experts thought it might have been the electrical impulses that had attracted it. Plus, the fishermen on the boat had been idiots, deliberately trying to wind the shark up.
He still couldn’t think of a reason why the shark should attack this boat.
Bright colours could do it – their tiny brains mistook them for fish scales. Maybe the boat’s white paint was attracting it?
‘There!’ Abby interrupted Beck’s thoughts. The shark’s fin broke the surface right next to them. She tried to lift the oar, and overbalanced. Farrell caught her before she fell over, and then lunged to catch the oar before it disappeared over the side.
‘Mum!’
‘It’s surprisingly heavy,’ Abby told her son through gritted teeth.
‘If you can’t lift the oar, just poke it – hard,’ Beck suggested. ‘Rest it on the side of the boat and use it like a giant billiard cue.’
He ran his brief glimpse of the shark through his memory. Its fin and back were a slick dark grey. Great whites, the world’s largest predator sharks, were that colour. But they were also quite bulky, while this one was slim and streamlined. A great white’s fin was tall and ragged; this one’s was smooth. No, Beck was pretty certain it was another tiger shark, like his old friend from Colombia.
The first fact that came to mind, for both sorts of shark, was that they didn’t usually attack humans. He scanned the sea for any further sign of the big fish. How much damage could it do? The boat was reasonably sturdy – he doubted the creature could bite a hole in it. And, on its own, it probably couldn’t overturn the boat. But if it got two or three friends in, then it might be another matter. Beck had seen the ocean churned up by a school of sharks in a feeding frenzy: a storm of razor-sharp teeth, and jaws that could bite through boats.
No – the humans in the boat needed to persuade the shark to be somewhere else, right now.
‘There!’ Farrell called.
It had returned. Unfortunately it was now coming straight towards the bow. James and Abby were in the middle of the boat and they couldn’t swing the oars round to hit it. Then the fin vanished as the shark dived. There was another shudder, and this time a ripping sound too. The canvas cover shifted and a gush of water squirted through the crack.
‘It’s attacking the cover!’ Beck shouted. That was what was doing it. Something like a loose end of canvas must have been flapping about underwater. The shark maybe thought it was a dying fish. Then, every time it tried to snatch the fish in its jaws, it bumped into something solid and heavy. So the shark was getting angrier and angrier, and it was taking it out on the boat.
Another rip, and the canvas came away completely. It vanished over the side before Beck could lunge to catch it. Water surged up through the crack. Within seconds it was washing around his feet.
The shark thrashed around in the water a few metres away. The cover must have got caught in its teeth and the shark was trying to get rid of it. Beck only processed this with part of his mind. He was concentrating on baling for his life, using the tin box to throw the water out as soon as it came in.
It was a losing battle. The water just came in too fast.
And now the shark had got rid of the cover and its fin was heading back towards the boat.
James balanced his oar on the gunwale, aimed carefully, and thrust. ‘Got it!’ he shouted with glee. ‘Right on the nose!’
The shark turned away and vanished underwater. James had given it a good thwack. What with that, and the unexpected taste of the canvas, it had suddenly lost interest in the strange big white fish-that-wasn’t-a-fish.
It was a temporary triumph.
‘We’re abandoning ship. Everyon
e, lifejackets on,’ Farrell ordered. ‘You too, Beck.’
‘But . . .’ Beck protested, though he knew the captain was right. The boat was a goner. He just hated to give up. He hated being forced to swim in a shark-infested sea even more.
There were a few moments of fumbling with lifejackets and their straps. Beck felt for the mouthpiece on the end of the dangling tube and began to blow. With each breath he felt the lifejacket swelling around his body until the sleek plastic was rigid, like shiny, yellow body armour.
It wasn’t really abandoning ship. It was more like the ship abandoning them. It went down bow first. The sea came in and took them. Beck kept his eyes peeled for fins.
Abby and James both stared at the water advancing up their bodies, as if a shark might leap out at any moment from between their knees and attack them. Farrell’s face was unreadable.
‘James, grab the water!’ Beck snapped. The silver water bag was floating past and James quickly took hold of it. Farrell grasped the first-aid box. Beck took one last look around for something – anything – that might come in useful. If you hadn’t planned for a disaster and disaster struck anyway, then you took what you could. You worked out what to do with it later.
He wished he’d known disaster was coming earlier so he could have taken some things from the ship – but wishing gets you nowhere, so he stopped wasting the brainpower on it.
A length of bandage from the first-aid kit curled and twisted in the water. He grabbed hold of it and wrapped it securely around one arm.
The water had felt comfortably warm when they were in the surf back on the island. Now the cold chill quickly ate into Beck’s body – legs, thighs, waist, chest. Then he felt the lifejacket take over. The straps were taking his weight. He was no longer standing on the boat, he was floating in the ocean with his head only centimetres above the sea.
The bow tilted further and further down until the boat was hanging vertical in the water and just the stern bobbed above the waves. And then it stopped sinking. There was an airtight barrel tied beneath the helmsman’s bench that gave it buoyancy. The boat would never completely sink while it was there.