Shipwrecked 1

Not that it was all that undesirable, mind you, but I’m not all that sure I understand what I did to deserve being in this predicament. I guess this is what happens when you decide to sleep in for a change.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. it was just supposed to be a nice simple outing on a friend’s sailboat with Jesse and Joani. The idea of being alone all day with two beautiful women did not bother me at all. The weather was supposed to be good, so I let the sails out and took off for open ocean. Funny how things can change out on the water. We weren’t more then an hour off Manele Bay when things started to get dark in a hurry and I started to turn in, but the girls insisted that it was going to blow over and they didn’t want to cut a good time short. Against my better judgment (seems like guys always have this issue when women are concerned), I kept going. In fifteen minutes, the first raindrops started to fall. I pulled in the sails, but that was all the time I had before the real wind hit and the waves started crashing. I THINK I got the boat turned around, but who can tell. The girls had their life preservers on and I was doing my best not to get capsized. I sent the girls below deck and cut the waves the best I could. I thought I was doing pretty well until I looked over at the boom and saw the rigging come loose. Then I saw the boom come careening at me and then I didn’t see anything at all for a while.

When I woke up, I was bobbing in calm water, still lashed to what was left of the boat. Roughly, a 4×4 section of the deck I was standing on. There was debris everywhere, but nothing bigger then what I was holding onto. My water logged ears started picking up the sound of yelling coming from a couple swells over. I started paddling with a chunk of broken deck plank, in the direction of the voices. Both girls had managed to land themselves on a similar piece of boat and we lashed them all together and contemplated our next move. We managed a make shift sail out of debris and headed in the direction the wind took us. Luckily, the wind took us to a remote island because I was really getting tired of bobbing up and down. By nightfall, we had found fresh water, some crabs for dinner, and had a fire going.

In the morning, we set about checking out the island for food and shelter. It was during this time that I realized that we only had the clothes we were wearing….and they weren’t to damn comfortable. They were still wet and encrusted with sea brine and getting stiffer as they dried. And the clothes weren’t the only thing getting stiff, as the girls had a lot less for clothes and what they had was stuck tight to their skin. As the day got hotter, we were getting more and more chaffed. I cut my jeans down to shorts and the girls stripped to their swimsuits.

Our little excursion provided us with two surprises. We discovered that the island had wild pigs. Not boars but untamed domestic style and they were running all over. This was explained when we got to the other side of the island and found a small lagoon with a wrecked square-rigger embedded in the beach. With a little effort we got on the deck and started looking around. The exposed decks were dry and bleached, but where the weather didn’t get to the wood it was dry rotted and hazardous. On more then one occasion, I had the pleasure of being latched onto Jessie or JoanI as they stepped through a rotted plank. We found some useful things like eating and cutting utensils, a couple hand saws, a mallet, and a hand drill. There were also plenty of beams that could be salvaged for our shelter. I had suggested that we use the ship as our temporary shelter, but after the first skeleton that we passed, the girls outvoted me.