Expatriates: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

19 WATER

After just six days at sea, the boat’s reverse osmosis water maker broke. It was a crucial piece of equipment, providing them fresh drinking water. Just a small tear in its membrane made it useless.

After the water maker broke, they prayed for rain so they would be able to harvest rainwater from the awning canvases. They also started scanning the charts, looking for small, uninhabited islands where they’d be able to go ashore to gather coconuts. Tatang said that coconut water had saved many a sailor from dehydration.

They found a suitable island eighteen days after the water maker broke. It was scarcely a quarter mile long, it looked uninhabited, and most importantly, there were no other islands within line of sight. They spent several hours circumnavigating the island reef. There was a large gap on the west side that looked deep enough to accommodate Tiburon, even at low tide. This would be important in case they had to make a quick getaway.

They pulled into shore at just before nine A.M. and did a quick, armed reconnaissance. The island was indeed uninhabited, and the few rusty cans they found strewn on the ground looked as if they’d been there at least five years. They soon set to work. Joseph did most of the climbing. He would shimmy up a palm tree and call, “Look out below!” Their foraged green coconuts quickly grew into a large pile.

At the end of the first day on the island, they pushed Tiburon back offshore, and dropped anchor a quarter mile out to sea. This, they reasoned, was a safer place to spend the night. If nothing else, they didn’t want any rats on the island stowing away.

They took advantage of being anchored and fished for squid that night, using a flashlight. The squid, attracted to the light, could simply be scooped up with a hand net. They caught two buckets full. They had to keep the bucket lids snapped on to keep the slippery squid from escaping. Black ink squid adobo was one of Tatang’s specialties.

At the end of the second day, they had gathered all the green coconuts they could possibly carry. For the sake of expediency they decided to load them onto Tiburon unhusked. The coconuts filled up all of the available space and their weight put Tiburon just as deep in the water as she had been when they first left Samar. This made everyone nervous. They pushed off just before sunset as the tide was coming back in to lift the boat from the beach.

They husked the coconuts as they traveled southward. First they would cut off both ends of the green coconuts with Tatang’s itak machete, and then they would husk them on a large chisel that Tatang attached upright to the transom with a pair of eight-inch C-clamps. It took three days just to work the pile down to the point where three of the passengers had places to sleep. And it took a full week to husk three quarters of the coconuts. They discarded the husks off the stern as they worked. Gradually, Tiburon lightened, bringing the waterline back to a comfortable level. Originally, Peter Jeffords had wanted to husk all of the coconuts, but Tatang insisted that the remainder of the coconut hoard would keep better if the husks were left on.

The coconut water became their water substitute. They even used it for cooking the rice, along with a bit of seawater, for savor. It gave the rice a delicious flavor that was both sweet and salty. It tasted a bit like suman, a traditional Filipino rice sweet cake that was made with coconut milk, usually wrapped in banana leaves.

After a week of eating fresh coconut meat and drinking mostly coconut water, however, Rhiannon and Joseph both developed diarrhea. By eating three large spoonfuls of peanut butter per day, they regained regularity.

Instead of sinking the empty coconut oil and palm oil containers, as they had in the past, they began to save them, refilling the bottles with any sources of fresh water they might find.

Their diet consisted of rice and fresh fish for at least two meals per day. If they had a poor day of trolling, which rarely happened, then they resorted to using some of their supply of dried fish. Jeffords marveled at the amazing variety of fish and sharks they caught. He only recognized a few of them by name, but he was usually happy to eat the daily catch. They did most of their cooking in a greasy fry pan on a propane stove that was cleverly gimbal-mounted, attached to the bulkhead just forward of the pilothouse. They could cook on that in all but the roughest seas.

To conserve their small supply of propane, they cooked their rice each day using a large rectangular pot with flange hooks that pressed against the engine’s exhaust manifold. The engine’s constant heat kept the water in the pot at just below a boil, making it a simple task to cook rice. Tatang had seen this on other fishing boats, so he had a tinker custom-make the pot for him soon after Tiburon was built.

While they ate some of the rice seasoned with only salt or seawater, for the sake of variety some batches contained adobo, ginger, bagoong, patis, or teriyaki sauce. The array of fish species and the various rice seasonings broke up the monotony of their diet. The seasonings, they discovered, were part of what made the discomfort of the cramped quarters of Tiburon bearable. Once every three or four days, Joseph would prepare an extra batch of rice at dawn and stir-fry it with different seasonings, tossing in a few bits of fish, a can of peas, and a can of water chestnuts. This special meal always lifted everyone’s spirits.

They tried to keep a good sense of humor, often joking, singing songs and hymns, and telling stories. They also looked forward to sunset each night. Not only were the tropical sunsets beautiful, but the darkness meant greater protection from observation.

The three men and little Sarah did well adjusting to being at sea and to the change in diet. But Rhiannon suffered regularly from seasickness, and the change in diet caused her to alternate between diarrhea and constipation. She began to lose weight rapidly, though, thankfully, her extra weight gave her some reserves from which she could draw.

Sarah adjusted remarkably well to the sea voyage. Always curious about all the workings of Tatang’s boat, she was constantly asking questions about everything from its engine to the weather to what fish she ate. She spent many early evening hours at the edge of the coaming near the wheel—the boat had few proper grab rails—asking endless questions. Tatang smiled and answered as many questions as he could with the enduring patience that grandpas are famous for having with children. Sarah was still at the “sponge” age of brain development, so she began to pick up some Tagalog phrases. Rhiannon and Peter had both spent months in language classes, but did not pick it up nearly so quickly.

The weather varied, but was generally fair. Most afternoons would cloud up, as was the norm for the tropics, but there wasn’t much rain. Each rain shower was cause for celebration. The canvas awnings were carefully held in a V shape to capture as much of the rainwater as possible, in every available container. Then, once the containers had all been filled, everyone on board took turns washing their hair and showering half-clothed in the runoff from the canvas.

There was an hour or two of quiet time in the early evening of most days after their “breakfast” but before it got dark enough to safely start the engine and get under way. Tatang took advantage of this time to teach everyone the Filipino Martial Art called Pekiti-Tirsia Kali. This art emphasized fighting with sticks, knives, or any object that could be pressed into service from baseball bats to hand tools.

There was just enough room on the aft deck for Tatang and one student at a time to spar. The others sat farther forward to watch and learn. They did most of their knife-fighting practice using a pair of ten-inch-long tubes of tightly rolled scrap cardboard. These proved to be effective training tools. The bruises they left were reminders that this training was in deadly earnest. Even little Sarah got some training, particularly about pressure points and bone joint anatomy.

The engine stopped running unexpectedly, twice. Both times, it turned out to be a clogged fuel filter. Until these repairs were completed, everyone was quite anxious. Unlike many other small boats in the region, they had no way to revert to sailing, and being in hostile waters, they couldn’t radio for help. And because of the outriggers, Tiburon could not easily be adapted to rowing. Without a functional engine, the boat would be nothing more than a piece of driftwood at the mercy of the currents, winds, and tides.

The only other problem with the boat on the journey was that the propeller drive shaft seals began to loosen, emitting a trickle of water whenever the drive shaft was spinning. This was more of an annoyance than cause for alarm, however, since the automatic bilge pump easily kept up with the leak.

When they first discovered the leak, Tatang told Peter and Rhiannon: “You know, back in the nineties I had a friend on Samar who had a twenty-five-footer. He had a drive shaft seal totally blow out because the bearing seized and the shaft started to spin, all wobbly. They were looking forward so they didn’t notice the flooding, at first. They tried stuffing rags around the shaft, but by then, the boat she was half flooded, and they only had a puny bilge pump. She sunk only five miles off of Samar. They barely made it back to the island. Good thing they were strong swimmers.”

In the days that followed, Rhiannon seemed obsessed with the seals. She would get up from her sleeping mat several times each night to inspect them, using a flashlight. After a few nights of this, she became convinced that the leak was not worsening further and started to get more sleep. But for the rest of their voyage she still inspected the seals more frequently than was probably needed.