Fisherboys---part 2.

They laid there huffing and coughing, two of them were cigarette smokers, so they were hacking up seawater and green phlegm. The dark and empty beach with the cool night air seemed to eerily echo the hacking noise they projected very loudly into the darkness as if it were eating every noise made.

They could barely see the white of their boat being beaten by the waves as the water rose with the tide. It was the man with the broken arm first who propped himself up on the sand, and looked around cradling his crooked arm with his normal one.

“I’m not sure where we are, but we’ve got to get help.” He said with a heavy sigh, clearly in pain.

“How? The boat rental place won’t notice we’re missing for almost another 30 hours! Our wives will just think we’re drunk, and not calling.”

“Fuck, he’s right, you’re the only one not hurt, and you’ll have to walk to get help.”

“What? I have no idea where I am, do you?” Where would I go?” The uninjured man asked.

“Well before I hit, I think I saw Atlantic City’s lights, and possibly Brigantine. In the distance, I feel like we’re further north than that though. Brigantine has almost two miles of uninhabited beach, but so does LBI.” He sighed with defeat, “You’re going to have to walk north, and we are probably on the tip of LBI.” After he spoke both men stared at him and there was a pause.

“I don’t even know which way north is?” the uninjured man said, his voice filled with annoyed anger.

“You don’t know which way is North?” He screamed so loud, it took a good 5 seconds to clear the air, and when it was done they all stood there quiet staring at one another, until the man with the broken ankle pointed in the direction of North, and the un injured man walked off up the beach.

He couldn’t say it seemed obvious to him which way was what, as he’d never been to Atlantic City before. He’d grown up in a generic Midwest town where the most boating ever done was on a river or in a lake. The ocean existed, but his only time experiencing it was in an area of waves and beach that was cordoned off by two orange flags.

Just as the injured man walked away still soaking wet, it was only 4 steps before the black surroundings enveloped the back of his wet white tee-shirt. Then just one minute of silence and it was as if he was never there, the two injured men became frightened by the darkness, and they both fidgeted in the sand a little looking around to see if there was anything to be seen.

They heard nothing other than the crashing of the waves on the beach, and they realized they were two injured men, alone. The man with the broken arm contemplated screaming out some more common sense instructions just to have him come back, but the thought faded.

“We should move away from the wet sand, I’m freezing” the man with a crooked ankle said as he put his hands in the sand and pushed himself up to a standing position. He put his hand out to help up his friend with one good arm and one good leg, but he couldn’t pull his gaze away from the barely visible boat slowly being over taken by the ocean.

He looked up at the outstretched hand and said, “this is very bad”, not taking the hand the friend bent down and tried to pull the man up by he elbow, and he yelped in pain. Even in the dark, it was hard not to notice the swelling and crooked arm below his elbow.

After a small struggle to gain some stability with his one good arm over the other man’s shoulder, they hobbled slowly up the inclining beach towards some trees and brush.

“We should get out of the wind, it’s very cold.” The man said laying the other man down in some brush. He made some noises indicating the true pain he was in.

“I don’t think you understand what trouble we’re really in.” He said in a low tone, almost as if he didn’t want the standing man to hear.

“What?”

In a now low panicked tone he said, “we are in a lot of trouble”, and the other man stared out into the darkness, and laughed a little.

“It’s not that bad, this is New Jersey! We’re not lost, we’re just hurt. He’ll be back in no time with a rescue helicopter, and the coast guard. It’s not as if we were stuck on a deserted island.”

“Brad’s dead, we have no fresh water, I am the only one who knows where we are, but I can’t walk or move, we owe the boat rental place a large 40 foot boat, and some navigation equipment we didn’t use.” Ignoring the other man’s comments as if he were talking to himself, “we’re fucked”.

He felt a lump in his throat like he wanted to cry, but as he stared at the remains of their fishing trip away from their wives, and had never felt so thirsty in his life. He scooted himself in the soft dry sand, and cradled his arm laying his head back. He looked up into the blackness, and began to shiver. It was a cool summer night, there was a little wind, he shouldn’t have been shivering, but his body was going into shock.

The uninjured man was very frustrated for being yelled at and as he thought over how much money they would have to fork over for the demolished boat, he stomped through the soft, un-trodden sand. He did this for so long that the muscles in his thighs began to hurt, and as he realized this, he also realized that he was now almost completely dry, warm, and sort of sweating.

****He’d been walking for almost an hour in the soft wet sand, he hadn’t taken care in the beginning of the walk, when the two men made him so angry he didn’t notice, he wouldn’t be so tired if he was walking on the hard sand.****

He looked around; he’d been walking for almost an hour. All he knew is that he was tired, sore, salty, and whatever adrenaline rush he’d received from his brush with death was long gone.

“Fuck….” He said quietly to himself and stopped dead in his tracks. Staring to his left, he could see dark looking brush at the top of the beach. Still foggy, he could not be to sure what he was really looking at. The longer he stared at it, the more it slightly changed shape. It wasn’t occurring to him that it may be the wind making the shrubbery sway.

He was not the sort of man to be scared of the dark. He was also not the type to stare into the blackness and hallucinate indefinable shapes that frightened him. Afraid of the unknown, he looked forward and kept walking along the edge of the wave breaking point just to stay further from the brush.

The man with the broken arm lay in the sand on his good side cradling his other arm shivering so badly he woke up the man next to him with his chattering teeth alone. He sat up right and stared at the violently shaking man, and grabbed the shoulder of his broken arm.

He moaned loudly as if he were in great pain and stirred.

“Are you ok?”

“I caaaaannnn’tttttt ggggeeeetttt wwwarmmmmmmm,” he said, and tensed up a little tighter into his fetal position. The man looked a little closer at the side of his face and saw he was pale and almost blue.

He knew the man was cold, but he was afraid of what to do. He shouldn’t move an injured man for fear of further spinal injury. Should he be spooning him to make him warm again, or give him his damp clothes, would that help? If he didn’t do anything, this man might die, but there was also a chance that he could do something wrong to him.

His fear of possible internal bleeding or spinal injury for possible paralization Well, at least that was what he remembered from his short stint in swimming lessons in a large pool.

He laid with his eyes closed for a long time just thinking about inching closer to the violently shaking man. However, the more his brain told him to do it, the faster he fell asleep. He passed into a deep dark nightmarish sleep, periodically rolling over barely waking to wipe the sand away from his dry mouth.

When he woke up less than 4 hours later, the pale orange and gray sky hardly shed enough light to see clearly down the beach to the water. His headache was overwhelming and while he wallowed in his hung over thirst, and pain, he temporarily forgot about he friend just a foot from him, still in the fetal position.

“Get up” he said in a scratchy hung-over voice, he reached out again grabbing the broken arm, and quickly pulled back remembering the pain it had caused him before. The man didn’t move or make a sound. He crawled over, and the man’s face was blue, and his mouth was opened slightly.

His purple lips said it all, Al was dead.

To be continued:

Fisherboys--- part 1.

It was a fishing trip with some friends on a rented boat in Atlantic City. The beer, food, the large boat with a 2 day rental, bait, and all the fishing equipment made it a very expensive trip.

They left from Gardner’s Basin, and took the inboard 40 footer out about 6 nautical miles. While they sat out in the mid afternoon sun, they drank heavily and fished poorly. They decided they would drive the boat to LBI to a bar on the water where they could meet women while away from their wives, seeing the boat as a pickup method.

The wind had taken them a little south of Atlantic City, and they were all very tired, and drunk from beer and the sun. Two settled down below for a nap after all was taken care of above deck.

It was close to dusk around quarter to 8 when they pulled up anchor and started heading northwest with the wind behind them. There was a heavy haze in the sky with the sun shining through it beautiful hues of orange and red.

The man driving was the only one with previous experience on the water, and the only one that was from the region.

Two of the men were asleep in the cabin, and the third was passed out in the captain’s chair next to the driver. No one else was awake to enjoy this beautiful sunset.

His mind wandered and he finished three more beers before it became clear that the sunlit haze was turning into dark fog much faster than he realized. The pitch black of a starless cloudy night enveloped him, and the scared he felt wasn’t pushed away by the premature confidence that alcohol provides.

He looked around, and realized he wasn’t even sure where he was in relation to the shore as he hadn’t been paying attention to its disappearance into the fog. He heaved to, slowing the boat down almost to a stop as he yelled for the guy next to him to wake up, and he ran down the stairs, and into the hull to wake the other men.

As he emerged from the hull with the two sleepy hung-over men, he looked up, and the last thing lit he saw besides the boat, was the tiny fingernail moon that passed over the slow moving boat through a tiny hole in the clouds.

They were alone for as far as they could see. While the other men inquired why they were stopped, and what was wrong, he didn’t have the heart to tell them what kind of a situation they were really in.

“Where are we?”

“Are we lost?” one asked, while another took out a cigarette, and stared at him impatiently.

“You said you knew what you were doing?”

“I do know what I’m fucking doing, it is foggy need you guys to keep an eye out so we don’t run a ground.”

“He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” The man in the captain’s chair said, staring right at the driver, while talking to the other men.

“Forget it, go back to sleep, I’ll get us there.” Said the now challenged weary drunk sailor, as he returned to his post, and gunned it in the same direction he’d been heading initially.

The other two men wandered back down the stairs into the hull.

After gunning it for so long, still in pitch blackness, he slowed a little as the night turned blacker and blacker. There was one small speck of light to the south of him that he thought he could almost make out as Atlantic City. He took this as a direction to head further inward east, and he felt as if he was on the right track, and soon would see the shore line in the distance. He was quite unaware exactly how close he was to the Island of Little Beach. Not did he know that there even was an island called Little Beach.

However it does exist and they still didn’t know that as the boat smashed into sandbar about 200 yards off the shore.

The force of the impact threw the driver back into the steering wheel breaking his arm in two places, and damaging his knee. The screams from inside the hull were minor compared to the cracking noise that was clearly irreversible damage to the boat as it took on water through the buoy sized hole in the starboard side of the stern.

This was not the trip they expected, while the driver writhed in pain with his broken arm, his first priority was not to get off the boat that was in 4 feet of water, with no shore in sight.

When the two other men climbed the ladder to the top of the boat, it was only then that the driver realized they were missing one person. He yelled his name first and ran to stare over the side into the dark green water, and it was then he first noticed the blood trail on stern the lead off the boat.

The driver screamed his name, but there was no answer. One of the men in the hull found a flashlight, and ran around the front of the boat to the stern where they saw his body floating face down in the water.

As they all leaned over one side staring at the body the boat capsized in the four feet of water, and they were all thrown in as it leaned to the port side. One of them landed on top of the body, while the other two scrambled out of the way.

It teetered in the water, and they all ran/swam splashed into deeper water. The man with the broken arm screamed and yelped he couldn’t swim with his arm to the non injured man the closest to him, as their third friend jumped up gasping for air.

“My leg was stuck between Brad and the boat.” He said as he swam closer to them. “I think it broke my ankle, the whole boat came done hard on it.”

“Is Brad really dead?” the uninjured man asked.

“I don’t know, I couldn’t tell, he’s probably still pinned down there.”

“We have to get on to the shore, or back on the boat, there’s blood in the water, and it’s nighttime, we’re going to get eaten alive!” yelled the man with the broken arm.

“We can’t just leave him here, he has a family!” said the uninjured man as he let go of the man he was helping and swam towards the boat.

“No, he’s right, there are sharks out here, and if he wasn’t dead when we first saw him face down, he defiantly is now.”

“Look around you, the water is red! We have to swim in, I’m going.” the injured ankle man said, and turned his back on them and started swimming.

“WAIT! Don’t leave me, I can’t swim, I think my arm is broken!”

The third uninjured man swam back in defeat, looking around for a body he saw none and pulled the third man slowly as they swam close together.

They huffed out of breath, and the leader yelled back, to them, that he could see the beach. There was loud splashing noise behind them, and they all turned around. It was a series of un mistakable chomping sounds that made them all swim in much faster.

“Shit, those are defiantly sharks eating Brad.”

“No, they’re not….” Said the uninjured man as he swam faster, and the hurt man looked back and saw the unmistakable dorsal fins and tails swarming around something that looked like a fat dead man being eaten.

“YES THEY ARE!! Brad’s being eaten by sharks!” He screamed, and they all swam faster and didn’t speak until they pulled themselves up onto the beach.

To be continued: