Wild Fiction

James appeared with two plates of pancakes smothered in syrup and each speared with a fork. Conrad switched on the auto-pilot, took a plate, and ravenously shovelled the pancakes into his mouth. Rebecca sat down on the bench next to him and picked at hers more slowly while watching him eat.
The island appeared sooner than Conrad had predicted. The rain had stopped but low clouds obscured the bottom half of the island. It loomed out of the white blanket like a green domed mosque.
They had switched off the radar in the morning. Partly because it wasn’t working very well with the low clouds and also to conserve battery power. Directly above the boat blue holes appeared among the cumuli nimbus. Rebecca had taken over the driver’s chair but the auto pilot was doing all the work. All she had to do was sit there and watch for other boats that might collide with them. They had not seen another vessel since they had left Belize City, although every now and then they would hear a brief one-sided conversation on the VHF radio. That meant that someone was probably within ten miles of them but they must have been over the five mile visual horizon.
Rebecca was so excited when she saw the green hill of the island sticking out of the clouds that she could not speak. All she could do was wave her arms around in its direction. James and Conrad were inside working at the computer. Finally she found her voice and shouted.
‘Hi ho,’ she shouted. ‘Hi ho, hi ho.’
Conrad and James came running out. They laughed at her and Conrad ruffled her hair.
‘“Land ho,” darling, not “hi ho”,’ Conrad said.
James grinned and took the binoculars and fixed them on the island, bracing himself against the steering column. ‘Bearing oh three five magnetic,’ he said.
Conrad disappeared into the saloon and soon reappeared. ‘That’s it. We weren’t paying attention to the GPS position of the boat James. We’re only thirteen miles away.’
They watched over the next hour as it grew bigger in front of them and became more real.
‘Shouldn’t we change course to head straight for it?’ Rebecca asked them.
‘No, not yet. We want to enter from the north. This island’s surrounded by a reef. The reef has four points of entry and the one we want to use is on the north side near the river mouth. We want to sail up and around so we have to keep on this bearing for while before we can turn towards it,’ James said.