The Wandering Island Factory

by TR Nowry

  Chapter 18

  The category one was their only real storm in the boat. It was scary and left no stomach unturned, but other than some minor damage, it did nothing to the boat. The tarp that had provided shade to the new deck had ripped into thirds and was half down, but easily repaired. Some nails had worked up, but were easily hammered down. The good news was they got lobsters again, and the heavily churned sea dislodged a fortune in kelp, not that they would ever run short, and a flood of new 2x4s.

  Jason and Nathan paddled out in the canoe to grab the passing debris.

  "Faster!" Nathan said.

  "I see it," he paddled faster anyway.

  The nose of the canoe clanked as it impacted the floating block, but Nathan vaulted over it to land on their prize. He roped the twisted metal frame as it pushed the canoe over and Jason fell into the water.

  Jason swam his fastest toward the canoe, but the current wouldn't let him catch it. The current was strong this morning, but fortunately they, and the canoe, were all tied to the boat by over a thousand feet of nylon rope.

  Jason floated in the preserver as they arced behind the boat and the rope grew taut. The current eventually made everything accumulate at Nathan's end, where he climbed onto the salvaged blocks and the two of them proceeded to pull themselves back to the boat, four feet at a time. It took two exhausting hours.

  The blocks were a part of a destroyed tidal array, no doubt one of the smaller ones. The pistons and most of the mounting hardware were complete enough to be integrated into their boat's system. Gina's night-class education came in handy when she managed to compensate for the massive voltage differences between the two designs.

  Even an array of six 'small' blocks nearly doubled the amount of power they had available. And by the end of the third day, all the batteries had reached a full charge.

  Fully charged batteries meant they didn't have to wrestle the steering when flying the sail anymore. It meant a level of freedom that wasn't an option, before. It was grounds for rejoicing.

  Gina sat at the table as the two watched the sun fall across the horizon, the light breeze slapping the tears in the tarp. It sounded like a flag on a pole, but just briefly.

  "Nathan sure has calmed down, recently," Jason said as he held her hand.

  "He's my brother, but, he can be a bit much to take, 24/7."

  "Anybody can. I think something like half the submarine recruits scrub out because they go nuts when confined for long periods of time."

  She looked him in the face, then laughed. "You're making that up—"

  "Well, google me if you want, then. But it sounds right, doesn't it? One of us was sure to flip out. Eventually." He lowered his voice, "I'm just glad it wasn't your mom."

  "I sure wish we could google something. I'd like to know how to make soap. We have all that bitter tasting algae, and, if I remember right, most algae has some degree of oils in it. I think you just mix that with ash or something. I mean, just taking a swim to get clean is. . . well, getting old entirely too fast."

  He hadn't thought about that. "I remember something on that late night show about using algae for bio fuel, so that sounds right to me. Should be some kind of oils in it. It's worth a try. We've got plenty of the stuff, and plenty of time to experiment with."

  "Those golf-cart batteries aren't going to last more than a few years either. I think the maximum life is five years, and that's if they were new to begin with."

  "You think we should disconnect some of them—"

  "No, their life is pretty much the same whether we use them or they sit on the shelf. We just have to come up with something, a decision on what to do here, and the clock is ticking."

  "I checked the GPS last night. We drifted south about five miles in the storm. We're probably going to keep drifting south until. . . " something just occurred to him. "Hey, I wonder what winter will be like in Alaska?"

  "Cold, I suspect."

  "If it's cold enough, maybe not cold enough to snow, but just cold enough to slow the melting, that might just be enough to slow this riptide thing so we can put ashore. Maybe even in one piece!" He leaned across the table and kissed her. "I don't know why I didn't think of it before."

  She smiled, "Makes sense. Alaska goes for months without seeing the sun. No matter what the solar winds are doing, if they're in the shade, snow should stop melting. It's worth giving a try, I think."

  They had a plan. Not a very good one, but they had one. That was a vast improvement over sitting and waiting. Ok, technically they were still sitting and waiting and acquiring junk as it floated by. And they had some projects to work on. Algae soap for one.

  Crushing then boiling fresh algae, the bitter variety, was time consuming. But it did leach out a thin layer of oil that, when mixed with ashes from scraps of 2x4s, eventually hardened into chunks of soap. Not bad for a first attempt. The smell was a long way from 'winter fresh', but that wasn't the point. It cleaned.

  Nor was the reality that the reverse osmosis filters would eventually clog. Freshwater showers with soap felt like a moral victory. Laundered, clean clothes that had been washed with soap instead of simply left out in the rain felt like the difference between cavemen and civilization.

  Sitting stationary for weeks and months at a time wasn't entirely useless either. Charting the ship's speedometer gave them some indications that the melting up north was beginning to slow, along the margins. Two knots an hour was barely a drop, but it was measurable and they weren't even a week into fall.

  Ava seemed the hardest to gauge. Nathan had his tantrum early, then, once he had something to keep him busy (that wasn't too frustrating), he was fine. But Ava kept to herself, perhaps a little too much.

  She stuck to Gina a lot, which seemed perfectly natural for a younger sister to do. But, he worried. He worried about the quiet ones.