“Yah!” Roolo agreed. “You direct repairs while I raise a new crew—then we go after our mates with the Dream and carry them off!”
Having agreed to their daring plan, the two seabeasts wrapped pieces of cloth around the oarlocks to deaden the sound and rowed off into the night. Things began going badly immediately. One of the oarlocks broke off completely, forcing the seabeasts to paddle the stout boat. The heavy, eight-foot long oars, designed to give maximum power with the leverage provided by oarlocks, were nearly useless as paddles. After struggling for nearly an hour to break the iron-hard wood of the oars, they managed to shorten each oar. The handle of one of the oars completely shattered, however, leaving only the flattened end of the oar and one foot of handle. In such circumstances, paddling was an exhausting enterprise—especially as the wind increased and kicked up larger and larger waves.
The stout-hearted seabeasts battled the waves and current for several hours before finally succumbing to a bone-tiredness that steadily robbed them of their strength. Giving up the struggle for the time being, Roolo and Bomper slumped in the keelboat and feel asleep. Drifting on the current, the keelboat carried the seabeasts far down the coast. After several hours of peacefully drifting on the current, the violent pitching and rolling of their boat awakened the seabeasts. Large waves, driving their boat toward the shore, had turned their craft parallel to the waves, making it roll dangerously.
The sorry state of their oars left Roolo and Bomper ill-prepared to deal with the emergency. “Broadside to the waves, we don’t stand a chance!” Roolo cried. With no way to change that situation, the sea soon proved him correct. Their wildly pitching boat capsized, tossing Roolo and Bomper into the water.
Dodging the keelboat tossing on the waves, the seabeasts struggled to shore as best they could. Slogging up on a wide sandy beach, the seabeasts dropped to the sand, panting. Surveying their situation, they noticed they had landed on an extremely wide beach extending most of the way around a small cove.
As they caught their breath, their keelboat was also being tossed toward the beach, and soon they had landed it securely on the sand.
“What now?” Bomper sighed, feeling clueless about what to do.
“Don’t know,” Roolo replied, “don’t rightly know where we are, which makes it hard to know where to go.”
“We were pushed to shore from that direction,” Bomper said, tracing the path that had landed them on the beach. “My guess is that we rode the current down the coast from the same direction.”
“Makes sense to me,” Roolo agreed, “but that still doesn’t tell us what to do now.”
“Well,” Bomper said, grinning sheepishly, “I think we’ve shown that we’re not very good sailors with our current vessel! I’d recommend we try our luck walking for a while.”
Roolo agreed that the prospects of success with their keelboat were not promising. “I say we stick with our original plan to seek help with repairing Dream,” he suggested. “If we find beasts as can help us with that, we may also get help with finding our mates.”
“Let’s pull our boat up on the beach beyond the high-tide line,” Bomper added. “That way, it will be here if we decide we need to come back this way—we don’t know what lies ahead, and we may think that ’ol slug of a boat looks pretty good sometime.” Working hard, they succeeded in pulling the heavy keelboat far across the sand to a point where it was safe from being washed back to sea by the tide. Then, deciding that the best likelihood of finding help was to go inland, they traveled away from the beach along what appeared to be the easiest route upward through the steep, rocky hills rising away from the beach.