Can Neil save an entire species?

Preview

Chapter 1 – Sailboat in a Storm

The single-handed trek had officially hit its low point. After almost four weeks of sailing by himself, eating by himself, talking to himself, and playing solitaire, Neil questioned his decision to make the voyage. He couldn’t remember why it was on his bucket list to sail across a large portion of the Pacific Ocean, solo.

There was one memorable event, back in the first days, when he was still within a hundred miles of the California coast. The East-pacific merfolk spotted his boat and swam alongside for a number of miles. The local merfolk had picked up enough English and Neil had retained enough high school Mermish that they communicated well enough while the five fish-people swam along with him.

They had done him a great favor, in fact, warning him about leviathan activity slightly north of his planned course. Neil adjusted southerly enough to avoid running into the hazardous sea monsters, but not so far as to add more than eight or ten hours to his overall journey. In return, he offered them a metal bowl from the kitchenette. Merfolk loved shiny things made by humans, no matter what it was or how useless it might be underwater.

Now, though, Neil fought with the sails and the rudder simultaneously. Every wave that hammered the port side of his Klausen 450 sailboat beat him more off course. Briefly, he considered pulling down the sails and drifting with the storm in the comfort of the cabin, figuring to make up the difference the next day. But the storm wasn’t that bad. He hadn’t even reported, yet, the setback to his contact at the Honolulu Yacht Club where he was expected to berth in three days’ time.

A rogue wave crashed over the boat, sneaking up on Neil out of the darkness. The Klausen was forced sideways, tipping at a perilous fifty degrees. Neil scrambled to the opposite side of the boat and leaned over the edge as far as he could while holding onto the mainsheet, trying to keep the sail out of the water. The mast slowly returned to vertical, and Neil slid back to sit on the bench near the tiller. He looked behind him, in the direction from which the large wave had come. In the dark, he couldn’t see more than six feet away from the boat. If another rogue wave rolled toward him, he would never see it coming.

Deciding that avoiding capsizing the first time was a gift he didn’t want to squander, he began to haul down the mainsail in preparation for sealing himself inside the waterproof cabin. It took a huge effort to get the large sail tied securely to the boom while the boat pitched back and forth and bobbed up and down. Another big wave hit Neil in the back as he secured the last tie. The boat tipped again. Neil held onto the boom, nearly folded in half over it as the deck shed its load of ocean water, then slowly returned to normal.

Holding on to guywires, he made his way to the front where the jib flapped uselessly in the wind. He gathered the smaller sail and tied it down with two bindings. “Good enough,” he told himself. With one more task to perform, he went to the end of the boom and secured it in the center position. He looked up at the rigging, but rain blinded him. “Good enough!” he said again and headed for the cabin. Neil yanked the hinged door upward and hurried down the short ladder before too much water got inside. Quickly closing the hatch over his head, he sank to the floor, breathing hard. Removing his soaked raincoat and leaving it on the ladder to drip-dry, he went to the small closet for dry clothes, then slid into the tiny dining bench and drank weak, tepid tea.

The Klausen rocked violently to one side again. Neil held his mug up off the table, preventing a spill. As it was designed to do, the boat righted itself and resumed its bobbing and rocking on the more manageable storm waves. Neil sat there, conquered by the storm, questioning his decision to make the trip.

After graduating from college and working for a mechanical engineering company for more than two years, Neil had saved enough vacation time and money to rent a yacht and make the “voyage of a lifetime.” Now he considered it the voyage that took a lifetime. Day after day of endless ocean in every direction, night after night of MREs for dinner, week after week of being isolated with no cell towers sticking up out of the water to give him enough bars to talk to a friend or relative back home: it all added up to not so fun.

Since saying good-bye to the merfolk, Neil had no one to talk to until he was close enough to establish radio communication with Honolulu. But his contacts were brief and technical; no chit-chat, although they did talk about the weather. Honolulu’s NOAA weather station kept Neil apprised of storms that might cross his path, like the one he was now waiting out below deck. He had tried to sail through it because he wanted nothing more than to reach his destination and get off that boat. He longed to get a cell signal and call his girlfriend, Melanie.

He sat there, drinking lousy tea, staring at a picture of her on his phone. She had encouraged him to go for his dream even though it meant he’d come back as broke as a college grad once again, and she would’ve preferred to put his savings together with hers to finance a wedding instead.

He’d promised her a wedding to remember as soon as they could afford it. To prove his sincerity, he had proposed to her officially and offered her a modest engagement ring before leaving San Diego. Without hesitation, she had accepted the proposal. Since then, Neil didn’t know what she had done in terms of window shopping and spreading the news via social media. They had told his family, of course, when they’d met him at the marina at Harbor Island to wish him bon voyage. He thought about that morning often: sailing away from his family and girlfriend, waving to them as he passed Shelter Island, then turning to exit the bay and losing sight of them.

A warning message appeared on his phone; it was down to five percent but he couldn’t recharge it since there was no power coming from the solar panel to charge the boat’s battery. There hadn’t been sufficient sunlight for most of the day. He’d just have to wait out the night in the dark cabin and hope the sky would be sunny in the morning. He polished off the tea and got as comfortable as he could on the narrow bed, lying on his side with his back up against the starboard side of the cabin. Every large wave that tipped the boat pushed Neil against the wall. Feeling secure in his rocking bunk, he fell asleep.

An alarm blared from somewhere in the cabin. Neil felt around for his phone, intending to turn the alarm off, but the phone was dead. He realized the alarm was one he had not heard before. He sat up and dropped his feet to the floor of the cabin. Cool water instantly soaked his socks and the ends of his pants. “Shit,” he commented on the situation. “Where’s the pump?”

He stumbled around in the dark cabin trying to remember what he had read in the owner’s manual that the actual owner of the boat insisted he read before shoving off. “On deck,” he remembered at last. Opening the hatch, Neil found the rain had stopped and patchy clouds allowed a bit of starlight to shine down on him. He found the pump and tossed the intake hose down into the cabin and set the output hose over the edge of the boat, then flipped the switch.

Nothing happened.

“No battery,” he muttered, feeling around for the manual pump handle. Finally finding it and extending the handle, he knelt next to the machine and started rocking the pump arm back and forth. After a few iterations, water started pouring over the side of the yacht from the output hose. Neil continued to pump, not knowing how severe the leak was, how fast the water came aboard, nor how long he’d have to pump before he could go down and have a proper look at the damage. Within minutes his arm tired, so he switched to his other hand. That arm, too, quickly tired. He cursed his failure to exercise the past few weeks. “What else did I have to do with all that time? Idiot!” he chastised himself.

Switching hands every few minutes and never hearing the pouring water lessen in volume, Neil toiled to keep the boat afloat. He pondered various scenarios. The most hopeful one included the sun charging up the boat’s electrical systems and the motor taking over the pumping duty. The most desperate scenario: Neil would become exhausted, and the boat would sink, leaving him stranded, off course, and alone in the Pacific Ocean.

At length, the sky began to lighten in the east. When Neil noticed it, he rejoiced at the arrival of his savior, the sun. He continued to pump with his aching arms, though much slower than before. He turned his body around to switch from his right hand to his left again and saw for the first time what was on the starboard side of the boat: land. He crawled to the edge and looked down. The boat was caught on a coral reef about twenty yards from the shore.

Abandoning the pump, he hurried into the cabin and grabbed his shoes and as many MREs as he could carry. On deck, he shod his feet and stood to look around the boat. The tie-up line would not reach the shore, so Neil coiled up the mainsheet and tied the end of it to a cleat on the deck. Gathering up the MREs in one hand, he hoisted the coiled rope onto his shoulder and went to the back of the boat, flipped down the little deck, and stepped onto it.

Tilted as the yacht was, the rear deck slanted into the water. Holding onto the boat, Neil carefully slid down the deck and stepped into the shallow ocean water, being cautious on the sharp coral reef. Moving slowly, he let go of the boat in order to proceed toward the beach.

The bumpy and brittle coral broke under his feet; Neil could feel it through the soles of his deck shoes. Steadily letting out the rope, he made his way to shore. A bat ray brushed against Neil’s leg, startling him. He flinched and lost his footing, falling to his knees on the reef, losing hold of his food packets. Ignoring the pain in his knees, Neil scrambled to collect the MREs. Making a basket out of the front of his shirt, he piled the ones he could catch into it. The pain registered once he noticed blood in the water. “Aw, shit.” He struggled to get back to his feet and bent over to have a look at his legs.

His pants were torn, likewise the skin inside. It looked superficial, but the salt water didn’t do him any favors. He continued his efforts to reach the beautiful, sandy shore. Looking warm and soft in the growing daylight, it beckoned him onward.

Without any more mishaps, Neil reached the sand and turned to look back at the boat; it didn’t look damaged from where he stood. He walked on, looking for anything to tie the rope to. There was not a tree in sight, and no boulders to speak of, just scrappy bushes. He pulled on a bush, trying to uproot it, but it stuck fast in the sand. “Hope this works,” he muttered, tying the rope to the base of the bush.

A large bug flew past Neil’s ear. He waved his hand to shoo it away. It darted around him quickly and he changed his initial assumption. “It’s too big to be a bug. It must be a hummingbird.” The bird dashed away when he spoke out loud to himself.

With the boat securely tied to the bush, Neil flopped onto the sand and let his tired arms fall limp. He lay there, staring up at the colorful sky. It didn’t take long for the sunrise hues to give way to clear blue.

The island was flat, and with no trees to create shade, the early sun began to warm Neil. He welcomed the solar heater and kicked off his shoes so they could dry faster.

As he lay there, eyes closed, arms exhausted, knees sore, and feet wet, he heard another hummingbird hovering near his head. He didn’t bother to shoo it away. What would a hummingbird do to him?

“It’s not like it can sting me,” he reasoned. As before, his voice scared the little creature away. “I guess you might mistake my ears for flowers and go looking for nectar…” he suggested to the long-gone bird. Neil laughed to himself, imagining his visit to the doctor’s office: “Well, y’see, this hummingbird went poking around in my ear…”

Neil opened his eyes. He sat up and looked around at the scrubby bushes. “What do you normally poke your little beaks into?” he asked. Not a flower in sight, not even variety of color, the grey-green bushes were consistently drab. “How did hummingbirds get here? And why?”

Then the ultimate question hit him. “Where am I?”