Chapter 1

Well, it promised to be yet another 'fun filled adventure'. Mom and Dad decided for my sister and me, that our summer vacation would be spent on a sailboat.

Wow. You can just hear my excitement from here. I mean, come on, now. Every 13 your old boy wants to spend 3 months sailing around the Caribbean. And this is supposed to be fun, right?

And yes, that was meant to be sarcastic.

After all, what is a 13-year-old boy suppose to do on a sailboat for 3 months? I mean no internet? For 3 whole months? No Cable TV? Oh, hell! I would be cooped up with my parents and my horrible older sister Waunetta for the whole summer! I want a divorce from my family!

Well, at least for the summer that is. I mean why couldn't I spend my summer with Grandma and Grandpa? At least there would be a town near to the old farm. I even knew some of the local kids around there. As you can guess, my protests fell on deaf ears. So I found myself on a boat, in the middle of the ocean, for the whole summer.

Oh! I almost forgot. My name is Tom Adams. Ok, technically, it's Tomas; but not even my parents call me that, unless mom is mad about something. Then she uses my full name. When she does that, you just know it's going to be bad. At least it doesn't happen very often. When it does happen, my older sister is usually the one pointing the finger at me.

If you're getting the idea that I don't like my sister, then I must be doing a good job telling you about her. Just so you understand completely, here, she is a class "A" jerk to me. So... No, I do not like her.

You see the picture, now? My family has been sailing around the Caribbean for almost two months. About the only thing good about it, is that no one was wearing any clothing. Yes, we are nudists. I really don't want you thinking there is anything strange about us. Well, at least my sister had something worth looking at. Not that it mattered all that much. It could have been worse. I mean she was my sister, after all. To tell the truth, I would much rather have spent my summer at a nudist resort. At least there was variety there.

I would have loved to have something more to look at. That or wireless Internet access would have made this summer much better. At least we had a portable DVD player. Not that I hadn't seen every movie we had with us, a dozen times or more by now. In other words there just weren't that many movies. Most of the ones we had, were chick flicks. That's what we get when Mom and my sister pick out the movies we take along. I know Dad has some other movies hidden in their cabin. I think they are called 'adult educational videos'. Not that I am allowed to see any of them.

Anyway, here we are on the high seas, on this sixty-two foot sailboat, when my parents announce that we are going to head for Bermuda. Why anyone would want to go there, is beyond me. But hey, I did enjoy the snorkeling we had done at the Cayman Islands.

Maybe this trip wasn't all bad. Maybe there was hope after all. When Dad announced we were now in the Bermuda triangle, it was my 16-year-old sister that started to tease me that we were going to get sucked in, and never get out.

I mean she is just ragging on me but that didn't stop me from worrying about it. After all once I got it in my head that something bad was going to happen. Well let's just say I was never disappointed. You know the other bad thing about being trapped on a ship with your parents and sister is the lack of privacy. I mean come on when was I suppose to get a chance to relive myself. Mom and dad had their own room for god sake. As for me, well I had to share a room with my sister. To say I spent a lot of time in the head would be accurate. I bet you know just what I was doing in there all by myself.

So when we were a day out from Bermuda we ran into a storm. And yes it was a strange storm. Defiantly the type of bad storm one would expect to find in the area we were now in. Okay I am just pulling your leg here. I mean it was just an average daily squall. Well that is what dad called it. Since there was more wind than rain we had to put on our life vests. It was mom and dad's rule for the summer. It didn't even matter if we were in the cabin below. I mean that is where we always went that time of day. You know it rains for about thirty to forty minutes a day here. And that's every day it does that.

You did not want to be naked on the deck, in the rain. It hurt when some of those large drops hit you on certain parts of your anatomy. So there is no way I wanted to be on deck in a storm. Wauneta just complained that she couldn't work on her tan. Well that and she keep teasing me that we would be sucked up in the triangle. Never to be seen again. Great, just what I need! To be stuck with her harassing me, forever. It sounded like father Gillespie's sermons on hell to me. Then again, living with my sister was like living in hell, most of the time.

Dad called to us down below. He said he needed help with securing the sails. He was going to switch on the engines until the storm passed. So all of us had to go out in the wind and rain. It really sucked because the rain was cold. A lot colder than we had encountered so far.

We were all on deck, wearing nothing but life vests and 'water shoes'. We always wore water shoes on the boat. They keep you from slipping. Anyway the wind is whipping us around as we get the main sail lashed in its cover. It was my sister and mines job to hold the sail in place and move down the pole. Mom and dad were the ones that actually were lashing the sail up in it cover. That's when two things happened at the same time.