When Roy woke up, he had no idea where he was. The last thing he remembered was sailing on a calm sea on his way from Aukland to Guam. He was ready to set the autopilot and turn in for the night when he saw the looming crest of a giant wave blocking out the stars off to his starboard. He spun the wheel to head "The Lucky Sarah" into the giant wave. The sailboat climbed slowly up the wave, reached the top, and then plunged down the other side. As she crashed back down on the water, her bow dipped into the wave and she pitchpoled onto her deck. Roy remembered being thrown clear and hitting the water. Then everything went black.
Roy sat up and found he was sitting on a coral sand beach about ten feet from the waves that lapped at the shore. He still had his life jacket on, so he figured he'd somehow managed to not drown and had been washed up on one of the little islands east and south of Bougainville Island. Judging from the direction from which the wave came, he was probably still in the Solomons. That was pretty unbelievable, but here he was, alive and sitting on the white sand and looking at the coconut palms that lined the shore. Out to sea, he could see the waves breaking over the coral reef about a hundred feet out.
His first thought was to see if The Lucky Sarah had washed up somewhere on the beach. If she had, she'd probably have been beat up pretty badly coming over the reef, but some of his supplies were in waterproof, floating containers, so they'd probably have been washed ashore.
He couldn't see anything on the beach in either direction, so he started walking what he thought was north by the position of the early morning sun. Half an hour later, he rounded a point and saw one of his supply containers floating a few feet off shore. He waded out and pulled the container up on the sand.
The container was marked "COOKING STUFF" in black marker, so Roy knew what it contained. It held his backups for the things he used to cook and eat his food. When sailing the open ocean, it was a good idea to have some spares of things you couldn't do without. In that container were one skillet, a one gallon pot, the two sets of plates, bowls, and tableware he'd never used, and four boxes of kitchen matches he used to light the alcohol stove on The Lucky Sarah.
Roy pulled the container far enough onto the beach that the waves wouldn't take it back out to sea, and started walking again. A few hundred yards up the beach, he saw two other containers.
One container was marked "TOOLS" and the other was marked "SPARE PARTS". Roy knew the first one contained the wrenches and other tools needed to work on the little diesel auxiliary and the boat proper. In the second was a supply of electrical wire in various sizes, a hundred feet of the stainless steel cable and fittings to replace a broken shroud, and three hundred feet of nylon rope to replace a broken or worn halyard.
Roy pulled that container higher on the beach and started walking again. After half an hour, he hadn't found anything else, so he turned around and started back.
He was thinking this was like he'd read in the book "Robinson Crusoe" except Crusoe had found a lot more stuff from his shipwreck. Roy had hoped to find some of his canned goods, but those were probably heavy enough they just sank. Roy only had some cooking equipment, some tools, some rope and wire, and some matches. He could cook food, but he had to find the food first.
As he started back dragging the two containers in tow, Roy was concerned, but not overly so. He'd spent the past ten years sailing around the South Pacific, and he'd learned a lot from the natives on the islands. He also knew there were fishing boats and cruise liners that sailed around these islands. He knew enough to survive until he could signal a passing boat or ship. He'd have to build a shelter because of the rains that came almost every day, and he'd have to catch fish and crabs, but he'd be all right.
After dragging all three containers to the place where he came ashore, Roy started walking down the beach to the south looking for anything that might have washed ashore from The Lucky Sarah. He didn't find any more containers, but he found something better. There, on a higher part of the island and about a hundred feet from the beach was an old US Army Quonset hut.
The red cross in a white square on the arched roof told him it was probably a US field hospital during WWII. He'd seen them on other islands before. The US built field hospitals on some of the smaller islands and they served as the first step in treating wounded soldiers who were well enough to make the trip from an island where the US was fighting the Japanese. From these small hospitals, the wounded who needed more care would be transferred to a hospital ship. The soldiers who had only minor wounds were kept there until they were again fit for battle. Usually these field hospitals were large tents, but he'd seen Quonset hospitals before when the installation was more permanent.
The Quonset hut looked to be in pretty good shape considering it was at least seventy years old. The wooden ends were mostly rotted away, but he walked all around it and didn't see any holes in the corrugated steel roof. When he went inside, he smiled.
Like many US, British, and Australian remote bases in the Solomons after WWII, the personnel were taken off the islands, but a lot of the equipment was left behind. It wasn't worth the cost of transporting it back to civilization. Inside the building were twenty steel cots, ten steel tables, and six steel chairs. In a cabinet on one side of the hut he found some of the deep trays he'd seen doctors using in the movies along with some boxes of bandages. The paper boxes disintegrated when he touched them, but the bandages were sealed in foil, so they would still be in good shape should he need them.
The mattresses on the cots had rotted away long ago, but he'd have a bed at night now too. Roy went back for his containers and dragged them to the Quonset hut, then walked around outside the hut to see if there was anything else left.
He found some squares made of rotted wood. Those would be the wood floors of the tents for the doctors and nurses. Like the mattresses for the cots, the tents were gone now. One of the tent floors was larger than most, and when Roy pulled aside some vines that had grown up through the rotting floor, he discovered the tent had been a mess hall. There was a stove that probably had used diesel fuel so that was of no use to him. What would be useful were the large steel pots he found stacked in a corner. A couple had holes rusted through the bottom where they'd sat on the rotting floor, but the ones above were rusty but still intact.
As he moved deeper into the jungle around the camp, he found a small stream. After tasting the water, Roy grinned. It was fresh, probably from a spring somewhere in the interior. It was likely that's why the field hospital had been located here. He'd have water to drink and cook with now.
Roy's stomach reminded him he hadn't eaten in a while, so he went back and walked the beach in search of food.
Roy settled for two coconuts he found under the palms and took them back to the Quonset hut. Using a screwdriver and a hammer from his tool kit, he husked the coconuts and then broke them open. The white flesh inside the shell was still fresh, though he lost most of the coconut milk from the first. Before opening the second, he used his screwdriver to punch holes in the three eyes of the coconut, drained the liquid into a cup from his container, and then broke it in half with his hammer. The coconut meat wasn't especially tasty, but it was filling, and Roy knew coconuts were a staple food on most of the islands in the South Pacific.
After eating, Roy arranged his cooking stuff on a table he found at one end of the hut, picked up his gallon pot, and then went back to the beach. He wanted more to eat than coconuts, and as he walked, he watched the tidal pools for fish and crabs. Fish would be trapped in these tidal pools when the tide ebbed and would be easier to catch since he had no fishing equipment. Crabs seemed to be everywhere, skittering sideways in their search for food among the flotsam of seaweed and other materials left by the outgoing tide. Roy recognized some of them as the same blue crabs he'd had at restaurants in Aukland.
Roy had seen several fish swimming in the tidal pools. Most looked like some sort of grouper, or at least they looked like the groupers he'd caught when fishing from the deck of The Lucky Sarah. They were good eating, so he put making a way to catch them one of his priorities.
After catching his dinner, Roy's next task was to gather enough wood to make a fire so he could cook that dinner. He found a lot of driftwood on the shore. It would burn, but it was thick and would be hard to light. Then Roy remembered the coconut husks. He'd seen natives burning coconut husks in New Guinea. Half an hour and a dozen coconuts later, he had a fire and was slowly adding driftwood to it.
Roy dumped the crabs from his cooking pot into one of the pots from the mess hall, filled his cooking pot with water from the stream, and then sat the pot on the coals of his fire. When it was boiling, he dropped in the crabs and waited until the crabs changed color to red.
Roy ate the crabs like he'd eaten them in Aukland. He used his hammer to break open their shells and used pliers to crack the legs. When he finished eating all of them, he reflected that they'd have been better with a little butter, but were still pretty good.
Roy then sat in front of the Quonset hut until the light faded and the stars began showing themselves in the darkening sky. The familiar constellations appeared, the constellations he'd used to double-check the GPS on The Lucky Sarah. When the last light faded, he went inside the hut, stretched out on a cot, and was soon asleep.
The next morning, Roy woke to the sun streaming through the open end of the hut. He swung his legs off the cot, sat up, and stretched. His plan for today was to walk the beach again. It might be that more of The Lucky Sarah had washed ashore, and the more he could get, the better off he'd be. After a breakfast of coconut meat washed down with coconut milk, he started south again.
He'd walked about a hundred yards when he spotted something just at the water's edge. As he got closer, he realized it was a smashed native canoe and beside it was a man dressed in blue jeans and a light blue shirt. He ran the rest of the way and knelt down to roll the man from his front to his back. When he looked down then, he saw this was no man. This was a woman and she didn't look like most of the islanders he'd seen. Her long hair was coal black and her skin was a pale tan in color, but her features were finer and she was slender.
The woman gasped then, and opened her eyes.
"Where am I?"
Roy smiled.
"I don't have a clue except I think it's an island somewhere in the Solomons."
The woman frowned.
