Galleon

by CJ Williams

  The question tickled Gus’s ego. He was a shipwright after all, just as Hannah said. He had been building starships all his life, most of them a lot bigger than this one. How many times had critics told him what he was trying to do was impossible? More than he could remember. Had retirement so dulled his competitive spirit?

  He was totally surprised by the ember of excitement that suddenly ignited in his chest. She was right; it was time to stand up once again. In a few brief words, Kyoko had rekindled the self-confidence of his younger days. A grin spread across his face.

  “You kids are all right,” he said. “I guess my expectations got a little out of hand. But we’re not out of the woods. This will take a long time. To do everything necessary could take a year, maybe more.”

  Kyoko spoke to the video screen. “How long have you been here, Alyssa? Can you wait for us?

  “I have waited for over twenty-eight thousand years,” Alyssa replied. “One more is acceptable.”

  Gus smiled at his crew. “Then let’s get started.”

  8 – Extreme Makeover

  “It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.”

  (Confucius)

  Gus looked around the table at his war cabinet. “Two thousand miles is a long voyage. A ship this size running reduced sail might average four knots. For us, let’s call it three. That’s at least a thirty-day crossing. I want to start with enough water for twice that. The rule of thumb is one gallon per person per day. There’s three of us so that means three gallons a day. Hannah, your job is to come up with potable water storage for a hundred and eighty gallons. Can you do that?”

  “Ja.”

  “Kyoko, food supplies are up to you.”

  “I will work hard,” Kyoko promised with her typical Japanese resilience.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s get started. We’ll tackle the problems one step at a time. Once we get everything solved, we’ll set sail.”

  *.*.*.*

  Hannah turned her attention to the problem of water containers. There was no reason to reinvent the wheel. It would be easier to restore the old barrels down in the hold than come up with a different solution. The larger barrels held about fifty gallons each, so she needed to get at least four of them watertight. She gathered up the old staves and metal bands and moved them down onto to the beach.

  Using hand-sized lava stones as scrubbing pads, she sanded the bundle of wooden staves back to bare wood. Holding the top band with one hand, she lined up the staves inside of it one by one. It was tricky to keep them from falling over until she squeezed in the last one; sort of like adding the keystone to an arched bridge. She used a mallet to hammer the remaining rings back into place and then jammed the bottom into a groove that was edged into the end of each stave.

  “Looks good,” she said to herself. This wouldn’t take long, after all. She waded into the lagoon and filled the barrel.

  It leaked like a sieve, but that was expected since it had been dried out for so long. She kept it full to allow the wood to swell, forcing the staves together. By the second day, the leaks had stopped.

  Kyoko stopped by and was totally impressed by the solid cask. “What’s next?” she asked. “Are you going to fill it up?”

  Hannah sighed. “My mistake was putting it together here. Grandfather said to use the water from the spa because it’s already been boiled. I’ll use this one as a rain barrel, but I’m going to put the rest of them together over there.”

  Kyoko pitched in and helped transport all the wood and metal bands to the other side of the island.

  The second barrel took three days to put back together. She followed the exact same procedure, but for some reason nothing fit the right way. The others were even worse. Still, after two weeks she had four sound water casks ready to fill.

  That night the geyser cooked off again. At first light, she hurried over to the spa to find all four barrels shattered, with many of the staves broken in two.

  In frustration, she agreed to help Gus work on the rigging for a few days. For a while, at least, she wanted nothing to do with barrels or water containers.

  *.*.*.*

  After much study, Gus was ready to replace the first sail. He decided it would be safe as long as he did the sails one at a time and left them furled after installation. Under normal conditions, the job would require a half-dozen experienced deckhands.

  Undaunted, he accepted Hannah’s offer of assistance. He asked Alyssa to provide real-time translation, and she reminded him that there were no speakers aloft. They needed to iron out their plan while on the deck.

  Gus began with an explanation of how sails worked. He spent half an hour discussing the general theory of airfoils and lift. Each time Hannah pushed him to a different topic he started with a “That reminds me” example taken from his younger days on his own sailboat.

  After the third war story, Hannah had enough.

  “Ich werde es herausfinden, okay?” I’ll figure it out, okay? She stomped off in a snit.

  Gus called after her, but she went to her room and closed the door. He sighed heavily but kept his temper in check. To give her credit, she had already cleaned all the spare blocks. That in itself was a commendable achievement.

  More importantly, once they were in the rigging, he wanted her in a good mood. He needed a partner in a good frame of mind since his plan would not be easy even under ideal conditions.

  The next morning was clear and calm, so with unrealistic optimism they climbed the shrouds. The first step was to remove the old sails and their associated lines. Fortunately, Alyssa had a full set of diagrams about the rigging for every sail. Gus studied each one the night before working on it aloft.

  After two weeks the old canvas was down, all the blocks cleaned and reinstalled, and the cordage thoroughly inspected. The next task was to get the new sails aloft and secured to the yard. Frankly, Gus was not looking forward to it.

  The work aloft was exhausting. Balancing on the footrope was more difficult than it seemed, and he spent most of his time trying not to fall. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the third week, they climbed up the mainmast once more, this time with their arms full of the new mainsail. Almost immediately the wind picked up.

  Alyssa explained the proper way to mount the sail was to lower the yard, attach the sail to it, and then haul the combination back up the mast to its normal position. The catch was that the yard and sail together weighed practically two thousand pounds and normally took an entire crew to hoist. There was no way the three castaways could lift that much weight.

  Instead, Gus rolled the sail into a long bundle and hauled it up with a block and tackle so he could “bend the sail”, or in other words, attach the sail to the top of the yard.

  Once balanced on the footrope, Gus struggled with the thick roll of canvas. Each gust of wind made it balloon into his face. They managed to pile the sail on top of the yard and securing it with ties, called gaskets, around the sail and the yard. That stabilized it enough so Gus could feed other lengths of rope, the robands, through grommets along the top of the sail, and then tie them to the metal jackstays that were bolted to the top of the spar.

  With the sail secured, he was ready to run the rigging through the necessary tackles so they could manage them while sailing. He found the clew line and ran it through the appropriate block and out to the end of the yard where Hannah could tie it to the leech through the clew cringle, another grommet in the outer edge of the sail. Next was the buntline. He ran the middle line up to the yard block then down to the reef cringle, making sure nothing overlapped.

  But something was wrong.

  He looked over at Hannah at the far end of the yardarm. She had run the clew line down to the spectacle clew. That would never work. It was one of the issues they’d talked about the night before.

  “You’ve got it backward!” he shouted above the wind.

  “Nein, tue ich nicht. Du tust.” No, I don’t. You do.

  The wind made Gu
s wobble on the footrope, and part of the sail got away from him. He pulled it back up and saw the roband had pulled free from the jackstay because he had tied the hitch incorrectly. He wrapped his arm around the fluttering canvas, and he looked back at Hannah.

  “I’m telling you not to reverse it like that,” he yelled. “We just got through talking about this. Put it through the yard block first.” He pointed at the block in question.

  “Nein, das ist falsch!” No, that’s wrong. She reeled off a long stream of German while pointing at half a dozen lines and pulley blocks. The wind muffled what she was saying, and he couldn’t understand anyway without Alyssa’s translation.

  He jerked on the sail angrily. “Look! It won’t hold that way. Put it through the yard block first.” Another gust of wind rocked him, making him steady himself against the top.

  “Nein!” she shouted and tried again to explain.

  “Hannah, I’ve been over this thing—”

  The wind slapped the end of the buntline around, and it popped him in the ribs, stinging like hot metal. He lost his temper and jerked on the sail again, this time pulling it from Hannah’s grip. It banged the block violently against the yard.

  “Damn it!” he yelled at her. “Just do what you’re told!”

  Hannah looked at him, stunned, and her face flushed red. With a tight jaw, she did exactly what he said. She yanked the lines around, slamming the blocks back and forth with ill-concealed fury.

  With a violent tug, she finished reversing the lines and screamed back at him. “Da!” There!

  She let go of the canvas, letting it dangle precariously from the yard, and climbed down the ratlines, leaving a startled Gus scrambling to re-secure the sail to the yard, his argument forgotten.

  Three hours later he showed up at the spa where she had gone back to working on the barrels. He was bearing hot cocoa and an abashed but hopeful grin.

  “Ah... Well... I, ah... I guess the clew line doesn’t go through the yard block first after all. Could you, ah...could you come help me fix it back?”

  The answer was a cold shoulder, and for two days she didn’t show up for breakfast. She wouldn’t speak to him at dinner either, and during the evening she avoided his company completely. Gus let her sulk and went back into the ballast and lifted out ingots.

  After three more days of silence, Kyoko finally intervened. “Grandfather,” she said one evening when the two of them sat at the table. “Please don’t go up in the rigging anymore. Your vision is not that good, and Hannah has better balance. She would rather do the work aloft so just let her. She promised that if she has a question, she will come ask.”

  He didn’t like it when they called him old and blind.

  *.*.*.*

  Gus thought the hull would never get finished. Day after day, he heaved the metal ingots out of their individual positions and carefully stacked them in order so he could replace them in the right sequence. He learned the hard way that each one was individually cast to fit only in its own spot along the ship’s curved hull.

  Alyssa directed him to the areas that needed repair. After removing the ballast from a designated section, he would mix up a batch of the metal paste and force it into every cracked weld both inside and out.

  The work seemed never-ending. At night he would dream of lifting the iron weights and wake up with his back, arms, and shoulders in agony.

  When the effort became too much, he worked on other parts of the ship. Replacing the cables between the ship’s wheel and the tiller sweep was relatively easy compared to the hull. That job only took two weeks. When finished, the long vertical rudder still wouldn’t move. He was incensed to find a metal pin that had been holding the tiller in place the entire time. All he’d ever had to do was remove it.

  *.*.*.*

  The one bright spot in Gus’s life was dinner. Kyoko had turned out to be quite the chef. She fed everyone three meals a day and prepared dried food for the voyage. One morning she stopped to chat with Gus when he was glaring angrily at the dry-dock. At least once a day he walked around the ship, trying to come up with a way to move it into the water.

  The bottom of the vessel was more or less flat. Running down the length of the ship, the center of the hull came to a very shallow V shape called a hard chine. The hull’s outer edges, where the sides of the ship curved underneath, were more rounded into soft chines. The three chines effectively gave the hull three longitudinal skids to rest on.

  “How is it going, Grandfather?” Kyoko asked cheerfully.

  “It’s not,” he muttered.

  He took her around the base of the hull and showed her how the original crew had used tree trunks as rollers to pull the ship out of the lagoon. Over the years, Alyssa’s great weight had flattened them into thick wooden planks. He’d spent months trying to come up with a way to put new rollers under the ship but had not found the answer. The ship was too heavy to lift, even a fraction of an inch.

  He had even used a telephone-pole-size tree trunk as a lever in an attempt to raise the hull at the corner, but it was useless. He concluded Archimedes’s old saying about a long enough lever was total bullshit. Without a hydraulic jack or an industrial lift, Gus was stymied. There was no way to remove the old planks and replace them with new rollers.

  Kyoko examined the situation for about sixty seconds. “You actually have two problems,” she said. “First is how to get the existing boards out of the way. Fortunately, that’s easy. Since they’re made of wood and the hull is metal, you can just burn them out.”

  Gus felt like she had hit him with a baseball bat. Once she said it, the answer was obvious. He gave her a nonplussed look. “Yeah. I guess that would be the smart way to go, wouldn’t it?”

  Kyoko nodded and said, “The second problem is how to move the ship down the ramp into the water. For that, you can put smaller rollers under the ship before you burn out the old ones. You might also want to prepare the surface ahead of the ship with a slurry to make the slope more slippery. The new rollers might go askew, but the slurry will keep the vessel moving once it gets started.”

  It all made sense now that she laid it out. “Thanks, Kyoko,” he said in an even voice.

  He waited until she was out of earshot before groaning in embarrassment. Here he was, the only one who was actually a shipwright, and it had taken the cook about fifteen seconds to come up with the solution he had struggled with for months.

  *.*.*.*

  From then on, whenever Gus took a break from the ballast he harvested tree trunks. He decided to make three dozen rollers for the boat, enough to have one in place every five feet along the boat ramp. After cutting them to the right length, he set them on top of the warm lava beds for drying. Three months later he laid them out next to the hull in preparation for launching the ship.

  In a flush of optimism, he also built a floating dock. He used the leftover trunks that were too big for the rollers by lashing them together and planking it over with split logs. It wasn’t pretty, but it would do the job. Lastly, he made a modest ramp from the bank to the pier.

  *.*.*.*

  Hannah eventually came down from the rigging, ready to have another try at making barrels.

  The second time she had a better idea of what she was doing and it went a bit easier. She spoke to Alyssa frequently to pick up tips in the art of cooperage, the process of making barrels. After assembling the barrels, she put them on top of small fires to toast them for about forty-five minutes. Since she had the wood available, she kept at it until she had six fully prepared water casks and one extra rain barrel.

  “How do I keep the water from going bad?” she asked Kyoko.

  “Water by itself doesn’t go bad,” Kyoko explained. “It’s contamination that causes problems. Your casks will keep the water potable for two months while we are at sea. I’d wait to fill them until right before we ship out. Clean water in clean barrels should not be a problem.”

  “What about these?” Hannah held out a handful of silver coins. S
he had found a single coin inside several of the barrels.

  “That’s up to you. In Japan, people believe that putting a silver coin in water will kill any microbes. Obviously, the Acevedos followed that practice. If you’re worried about it, Nineteen’s survival supplies included a case of water purification tablets. Grandfather never used them because the spa is good water.”

  “I want to use both.”

  “Okay,” Kyoko agreed. “I don’t see how it will hurt. Why don’t you fill one cask now and let it sit for a couple of months? After that, we can test it, and if the water is good you’re ready to go. What about the still? Are you going to make one? I’d really like to have some alcohol disinfectant just in case.”

  Hannah nodded. “Already done. Yeast production for fermentation is working now, and I did a couple of test runs with coconut water and your sugar beans. It’s not bad. I’m going to rejuvenate the smaller barrels to store the booze in. I don’t think we’ll go blind from drinking the stuff.”

  “We agreed this is for medicinal purposes,” Kyoko warned.

  “You agreed,” Hannah replied with a shrug. “I’m German. We make schnapps for drinking.”

  “Keep it away from Grandfather then,” Kyoko urged. “He’s already blind enough.”

  *.*.*.*

  It had been a particularly difficult day in the ballast, and Gus was more than relieved when the sun had set and it was time for bed. He was sound asleep when Kyoko came into his cabin and woke him up.

  “What is it?” he asked, trying to orient himself.

  “We can’t leave Nineteen behind,” she said, all teary eyed.

  Gus had long-ago accepted that Kyoko was overly sentimental, but it was the middle of the night. “Kyoko, trust me. Nineteen will understand. Now, I’m exhausted. Let’s talk in the morning.”

  “Alyssa can’t call home,” Kyoko persisted.

  The import of what she was saying struck home. Gus sat up and let the problem sink in. The one thing he would not do was break his link to Carol. There was no way. Kyoko was right; they couldn’t leave Nineteen behind.