Landfall: Islands in the Aftermath (The Pulse Series Book 4) Read Free Page B

the darkness doing the best they could to secure the 36-foot catamaran so that it wouldn’t be swept to sea or bashed to pieces against the rocks. Thankfully, the tide was falling, so that made their job easier. It would not have been feasible to try and get her back out through the surf in the dark and the rain, and the next high tide cycle would be in full daylight. Once he’d been reasonably sure the boat would still be there in the morning, Larry had turned in below, his first night aboard the catamaran he’d built in nearly two weeks. His brother, Artie gladly relinquished his bunk and followed his daughter, Casey back to Tara’s Sarah J., anchored across the island on the sheltered side. Jessica and Grant stayed aboard with Larry, like everyone else, too exhausted to move and in need of at least a couple hours of sleep.  
    Larry knew Grant felt terrible, because he’d been the one at the helm when the Casey Nicole went aground. But Grant had never set foot on a sailboat before the voyage that brought them here, and Larry hadn’t expected him to learn the intricacies of seamanship overnight. His brother didn’t have much more experience than Grant, but Larry had trusted that the Casey Nicole was in good hands, because he’d left Scully, his first mate of many years in command. But Scully was missing. That thought hit Larry hard as he stepped on deck and had a look around. Scully had been left behind in Florida, and from what Artie and Grant and Jessica told him, it was not going be easy to go back and get him, even if they knew where to start looking.
    Larry already knew about the presence of the navy at the Dry Tortugas, as they too had been turned away as they tried to approach what had been their destination for the first leg of the voyage. He’d sailed on because there was little else he could do, but he’d expected to reach the Jumentos Cays and find Scully and the others on the faster catamaran already waiting there. Instead, they’d made this unplanned rendezvous on a seldom-visited cay at the edge of the Tongue of the Ocean. Though it would seem an unlikely coincidence to those unfamiliar with the islands that both boats could end up in the same remote place, to Larry it wasn’t surprising at all that it had happened that way. Sailing routes through the islands were determined by navigable channels through the banks and the prevailing winds. Both boats had left Florida to sail around the north end of Andros Island before turning south, and Green Cay just happened to lie near the logical route from there to the Jumentos. If not for the water pump failure on the Sarah J., Larry would not have bothered to stop there, but because of that he did, and then his brother and the rest of the crew on the catamaran had chanced upon Green Cay simply because their navigation was off track enough that they literally ran into it!
    As best he could tell in the dark when he’d first checked, the Casey Nicole hadn’t suffered any major damage, but her hulls had been cracked in two or three places and she was taking on water into some of the lower compartments that were sealed by watertight bulkheads. It would take a lot more than a few minor breeches to completely flood her two hulls, but still, the cracks had to be taken care of before she could sail again. Larry knew they had their work cut out for them—probably days and possibly nearly a week of it. At least Green Cay was off the beaten path, and from what he’d seen of it since they’d been here, they had it all to themselves.  
    He went back below to light the stove for a pot of coffee—a luxury they would be running out of soon, but one that he needed to face a day like the one before him. When the others were awake, they would start working. The first job was to offload as much gear and other stuff from the catamaran as possible to lighten the hulls, so they could winch her high and dry onto the beach. That alone would take half a day, and by then Larry