Wild Fiction

Once they had passed between the trees the wind disappeared, sucked in by the island’s protective foliage and cliffs. They chugged slowly up the river to a point where it made a wide turn to the left. The water was crystal clear and they could see the white sand covered bottom.
‘Look,’ Rebecca said. ‘A waterfall.’ They had entered a lagoon and at the far end was a waterfall. It cascaded down sets of rocks before it made a vertical drop of about fifty feet straight into the lagoon.
James steered as close to the shore of the lagoon as the depth sounder would allow. He and Conrad stared intensely into the dense coastal jungle.
‘What are you looking for?’ Rebecca asked.
‘On the chart there’s a spot marked. It’s called plaza de descanso,’ Conrad said. ‘It must be around here somewhere.’
They searched the shores of the lagoon for thirty minutes. Rebecca sat on the boom and used the binoculars but they could not find anything.
‘I don’t think this place is inhabited anymore,’ Conrad said. ‘There’s no sign of anybody having been here recently. I want to check the hull so let’s drop the anchor.’
As soon as the anchor was set they put on masks and fins and jumped over the side. The water, lukewarm and transparent, with at least a hundred-foot visibility was an underwater aquarium of tropical fish. Even with the fresh water from the waterfall, the lagoon maintained a brackish buoyancy and taste.
Conrad ran his fingers along the scratches on the bottom and side of the port hull. Where the scratches were deeper, he stuck the edge of his one of his fins, which he had taken off, into the crack and manipulated and examined the hull. All the scrapes appeared to be superficial and he was satisfied that no structural damage had been done. The boat would need to be pulled out of the water and worked on as soon as possible, but for now, she wasn’t going to sink.

Chapter 23

As he was going over the scratches for a last time, he felt a tugging on his shorts. It was Rebecca. She was pointing towards the anchor. With no wind and apparently no current, the boat had drifted directly over the anchor. James had swum to the bottom and was brushing the sand from side to side with his hands.