Chapter 1

The funny thing is, we never gave the island a name. This title is the first time I know of that anyone tried to come up with one. We have always just called it the island. Anyone who has been there knows precisely what island.

My mother loved to cruise, on relatively small cruise ships, which tended to roll a bit in any kind of a sea. She always felt that the big ones were little more than floating hotels, with no kind of connection to the ocean. From around age ten, I had accompanied her on these trips, after Dad died. I remember her tall, slender body as the wind blew at her long, dumpy dresses while she faced into it, the small smile as happy as she ever seemed to be. My sister started coming along when she turned five, I was fifteen by then, and had fallen into the man of the house role. Ophelia, who quickly became Opie to me, hated it from the start. But Mom insisted.

She was an Associate Professor at a small New England college, with tenure, and her lust for anything beyond that died with Dad. We settled into life in a small town, the rather stuffy social life of the school, and the only athletic thing I could bring my skinny but tall body to do was learn to sail. I would get a job with one of the fishing boats on the Cape, and when it docked, trudge over to the local club and rent a small skiff. I suppose the cruising might have influenced me, but I loved sailing.

I got good enough to compete in the regatta's the local yacht club held, and won several times in my college years. That pissed off the guys who competed, on the theory that only the elite should be allowed to sail well, or at least well enough to beat them. It did, however, impress the rich, spoiled girls, once they found out I was actually a college boy, and thus barely suitable. That was enough to get me laid frequently and enthusiastically, since they embraced the morality of the seventies just as the Reagan years made it passe.

I also managed to crew a couple of big boat ocean races, though Mother put her foot down when I wanted to do an around the world race. Actually, that worked in my favor, because I got to spend a summer with Melissa Hoag, a very well built blond whose former boyfriend took my place. We would take her Dad's big sloop out into the bay, fuck our brains out, and she would scream across the open water.

I was a math major, a subject that came easily to me, but that encouraged a rather dreamy view of day to day reality. Mother was an inhibited soul, a trait which became even more so when she was widowed, and Ophelia and I did what she told us to, because I had no very strong desire to do otherwise, and Opie because she was too young to rebel, though at fifteen, she was starting. I had completed my thesis, and had a little course work to finish in the fall semester to complete my PHD. When Mother read my thesis, on obscure boolean sequences, she gave me one of her rare compliments. Your father would have been so proud, Ham. Not Hamlet, thank God, Hamilton.

Our household was an inhibited, polite refuge from the vagaries and confusion of the outside world. I never really had much porn, I suppose I might have in todays world, but the Internet was just getting started back then. Opie was a chubby, smiling sort, with rather bad acne. She wasn't allowed to date, but she did go out with friends to movies and such, and she admitted to me she had lost her cherry in the back seat of a '69 Chevy one night. I'm sure Mother didn't know.

HMS Duster set out on a twelve day tour of the Caribbean toward the end of the summer. I had been having a good time sailing, and wasn't looking forward to it, and Opie was positively seething. But, of course, we went. Not only because we always had, nor because Mother insisted, but mostly because we both felt it was one of the few happy experiences Mother ever had in life, and we were part of it. She never dated, and so far as I know, hadn't slept with anyone since Dad passed away. It wasn't impossible to me, in my newly sophisticated sexuality, that she had only slept with Dad twice.

Mother always made elaborate preparations for these trips, updating wills, assuring that both Opie and I knew the lawyer's name and phone number, and left careful instructions with him in the event of her death. To me, it was part of the sense of isolation and freedom she got from the cruising. She smiled more in those two weeks than all the rest of the year. At least in the past.

I can't imagine how the Captain of the Duster let the hurricane sneak up on us. I had noticed he tended to tipple rather heavily, but there were several young officers I assumed knew what they were doing. To this day I can't imagine an experienced sailor allowing us to get into the dangerous quadrant, and by the time we foundered, I figured we had been blown out into the deepest part of the Atlantic, right near the equator, around what has become known as the Bermuda Triangle. Maybe the legends are true, though we could see the stars, so navigation wouldn't be a problem. I could have done it myself.

I managed to get Mother and Opie into a lifeboat, along with a couple of the crew, and an older lady whose cabin was right beside ours. It was an old wood boat, but there was a mast and small sail in the bottom, and we luckily blew into the eye, just as the Duster sank. I sailed into the safer, south eastern quadrant just as the storm started to weaken, and was able to stay afloat long enough to finally be blown to safety. There was an enormous amount of luck involved, but damn good sailing too. The older lady and crew didn't survive, but Mother, because of her stoic endurance, and Opie, because of her youth, did.

The island came up on our portside one afternoon when things looked bleak. We had no food, no water, and the sail was badly torn. It was the first day without water, and though we were trying to be brave, at least Mother and I knew that without water, we couldn't last long. So I steered for land, hoping it could sustain life. I knew we were still near the equator, since the North star was barely visible on the horizon, but our longitude was a mystery.

It was terribly hot, so I was down to a ripped tee shirt and shorts, and both the women were in ripped dresses. Mother and I dragged the boat up on the lovely sand beach, while Opie ran into the jungle. She came running out quickly, yelling "Mom. Ham. There's a stream, It tastes super."

Somewhere along the way, Mother and I had both read a lot about survival in circumstances like that, and once we tasted the lovely clear stream, and awoke the next morning feeling fine, we set about the tasks necessary. We built a rudimentary shelter on the edge of the jungle, searched and found several kinds of fruit, and saw tracks for some animals, one of which left a trail like a small pig. By the third day, we had trapped a rabbit, fashioned a bow and several arrows. and were building a floor to allow a larger dwelling. Mother was trying to repair the sail, while I used the knife to hack out long posts. We were all feeling secure in the hope for survival.

But something strange was happening to each of us. I had noticed a glow in the skin of both Mother and Opie, whose acne was gone. They each seemed to smile with contentment as we went about our chores. The frowns from concern about what to do were gone. I found I had both tremendous energy and strength as I hacked with the rather dull knife through the tough wood of the mostly bamboo foliage. That night, as we sat beside a fire, the night clear, the sound of the knife rasping across a stone as I tried to sharpen it was almost a drum beat. At about the time we had been falling asleep. Opie got up and said I'm going down to the ocean for a little while. There was a breathlessness to her words that struck me as odd.

I had the knife about as sharp as it was going to get, so I put it aside, and relaxed beside Mother. She turned toward me, and smiled. "I must say I feel awfully good, Ham. I suppose all this physical effort is having its effect. That rabbit tasted like haute cuisine. I feel... so content." I looked at her carefully. Those words may not have sounded like much to you, but between us it was like a shock of intimacy. We had never talked about feelings. About physical well being. That night, in the flickering firelight, with a gentle breeze off the ocean, and with a crystal clear sky above, I noticed that Mother was changing.

Not too much. Not very obviously. But her face was a little fuller, her eyes seemed larger, and her hair seemed to halo her face, it's color a richer tan than I was used to. It seemed to me she had gained a little weight too, her body fuller, and for the first time in my life, I noticed her breasts. Nowhere near Melissa's, but there, with nipples, pushing gently against the cotton of her ragged dress. And there was a prettiness, even a sexiness in her smiling face as she looked at me. I felt my cock spasm, and realized it suddenly felt bigger.

She looked away, stood, raised her arms and stretched. It was an action that strained the rags that covered her, and I noticed a new tone in her legs, I think I'll go in and bathe in the stream dear. I won't be long. As she walked away, the weak light illuminated a swing in her hips that was nothing like Mother. Before I even had a chance to think about what I had noticed, Opie came strutting up the beach. Suddenly, I noticed differences in her body too. She seemed slimmer, more fit, and her breasts were bouncing rather luridly under the material of her tattered dress. Opie had always been embarrassed about her body, but she almost preened as she got nearer.

As she plumped down beside me, she leaned over and kissed my cheek. Again, that was an intimacy that was entirely unfamiliar. As I sat there, and felt my cock spasm again, she said "Geez. I feel good. I had to go down there and jack off, Ham. And it was the best ever. All this work must be good for us. I notice you're looking buffed. Where's Mom?" I told her she had gone to the stream to bathe, and she decided to do the same.

They were gone a longer time than I expected. I was about to go check on them when they both came out of the jungle, Opie with her arm around Mom, and giggling. Mom had a smile on her face. I asked "Hey, you were a while. I was about to come rescue you." They both looked at me. Opie smirked and said "Next time, you should Ham." Mother blushed and slapped Opie's arm. As we settled down, I wondered about it all, but fell asleep too quickly to get anywhere.

The next morning, after some fruit for breakfast, we started again on our chores. But Mother told me she wanted to try to spear a fish or two. Can you make me a spear, Ham? We do have to be careful about our diet. I whittled a small tree into about a five foot spear that was fairly straight, and Mother headed down to the ocean, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. As I watched, she wriggled out of the ragged dress, and waded into the ocean.

You have to know several things about her, that crashed into my mind. First, it was totally uncharacteristic for her to voluntarily go swimming, much less try to fish. Second, to reveal her nude body so casually was a shock. And third, though I had never seen her naked, only in a baggy, one piece bathing suit, I was pretty sure she was developing a lovely body that had never been there before. And fourth, though I couldn't be sure, her tits were definitely bigger than they had been the night before. That was, by the way, the first time I ever thought of her breasts as tits. My cock leaped to attention, sticking out through the leg of my shorts, and I looked down to see a member a good two inches longer than it had been, and a bit thicker.

I watched her dive into the surf, her taut ass jumping up and then slipping into the water. And it wasn't a skinny, nearly straight set of hips, but a fleshy, curvaceous bum. I stared, my heart beating, my cock jumping, waiting for her to surface. It seemed like a long time, and a large speared fish broke the water first, followed by a smiling, excited face, full of pride, and then a set of floppy tits. But then as she waded to the shore, her hips wiggling in that sexy way of women in surf, seeming to stare right at me, I noticed she held the fish to the side, letting her dripping, wet body gleam in the late morning sun. Seeming to display herself to me. I felt a sudden, powerful urge to pull out my cock and beat off.