Survivors – A Novel of the Coming Collapse

They sat in the boat’s saloon area. The surroundings were heavy on teak and stainless steel, which was unfamiliar to Andy but pleasant. Carston Simms and his wife, Angie, seemed nervous and chatty. Before agreeing to take Laine on as crew, they spent a half hour quizzing Andy about his background, education, and experience. Here, Andy’s DD-214 discharge papers came in handy. Finally, Simms wanted to see the SIG pistol. Pointing it upward, Andy deftly unloaded it. He then field-stripped and reassembled it on the saloon table. This particularly impressed Angie.

Then Carston began to open up about the situation on the boat and their plans to sail for Belize. Andy was nearly right about the Carstons’ kitchen knife. Other than a few small knives and an Olin flare pistol, they were unarmed. The skipper habitually called the single-shot 12-gauge flare gun his “Very” pistol, which Andy thought sounded quaintly First World War. Simms conceded that they’d be easy pickings for pirates without Andy and a real gun.

Angie told Laine about the family that planned to travel with them: Alan and Simone Taft were in their late thirties. They had a fourteen-year-old son named Jules and twin eleven-year-old daughters, Yvonne and Yvette. Alan Taft was an investment banker with no boating experience. The Tafts were just casual acquaintances of the Simms before the Crunch, but their large stockpile of food and Taft’s fluency in Spanish made him a logical choice to make the Belize trip.

Simms told Andy that he had sailed to the Caribbean once before and that he had a few “yachtie” acquaintances there. He admitted that none of these were close friends, but Simms considered the voyage worth the gamble. Carston summed up his rationale for the voyage tersely: “It obviously beats waiting here to see if we get eaten.” They planned to sail on a predawn high tide in three days. In the meantime Andy would stay on the boat almost continuously to provide security.

Accommodations would be tight. Although Durobrabis had berths for seven, one of these was already stacked high with boxes of provisions and secured with heavy twine to both the wall behind and the overhead rail. To make up for this lost berth, the Tafts planned to have staggered sleeping shifts or have their daughters share a berth. Durobrabis was a forty-eight-foot Tayana built in Taiwan. It was a 1997 model but still well-maintained. It was a fiberglass monohull measuring fourteen and a half feet across the beam.

As a true blue-water yacht rather than a coastal sailboat, Durobrabis had watertight hatches and a 230-gallon freshwater tank. The sails and sail covers had been replaced just two years before. The boat’s 100-horsepower auxiliary diesel engine was mostly used for getting in and out of harbors. To fuel it, the boat had an internal 120-gallon diesel tank, and Simms had supplemented this with an additional 60 liters for the voyage, held in six plastic fuel cans.

The only available space for Andy to sleep was the forward sail locker. Simms explained why he didn’t empty the seventh berth for Andy: “I’ll still need to get sheets in and out of the sail locker on short notice. And it will be much quicker to get you in and out of there than it will be a pile of grocery boxes. In a storm I won’t want much weight in the bow anyhow, and we’ll run with just a little spitfire jib and a storm trysail. So at those times we’ll need most of that locker’s capacity for the big sheets. You and Jules, perhaps, can take turns in a bunk in foul weather.” Andy agreed to the arrangement without complaint.

The yacht was well equipped for long voyages, with a reverse-osmosis water maker, an inflatable dinghy, and an impressive array of radios and navigation gear.

Andy was disappointed to hear that there would be no room for his bicycle and trailer. He was able to trade them to another yachtsman at the marina for eighteen cans of corned beef, five 12-gauge red meteor flares that could be used in Carston’s flare gun, and a three-year-old Garmin GPS receiver.

Andy’s only other transaction before their departure came after he spotted a teenager at the marina who was wearing a camouflage jacket that had some bright paint stains on it. Andy recognized these as paintball stains. Striking up a conversation with the young man, Laine learned that he was an aficionado of both paintball tactical training and shooting Airsoft pellet guns. The latter shot low-velocity rubber BBs. Laine persuaded him to trade a few of his Airsoft guns, since he had eleven of them.