Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Ask the Readers: Raft To Boat

Okay, so I'm working on a story - you all know that, right? Well, I've run into some logistical trouble. I'm not sure how to move the characters through their current situation so I can get on to the interesting stuff. I think I have a solution, but I thought I'd throw the scenario out here and see if there's anything that I missed.

Part of the problem is that I'm writing a character who's supposed to be reasonably clever, and I'm not feeling particularly clever myself just now. Anyway...

Here's the scenario: We have a young man (Gabbin) removing a young woman (Amarie) from a desert island. The primary difficulty is that Amarie is highly dehydrated, and therefore unconscious. (The obvious solution would be to treat her on the island, but there are reasons Gabbin cannot do that.) So Gabbin has pulled her onto an inflatable boat and rowed her out to his sailboat, which is an antique forty-footer (the CS 40, produced by Canadian Sailcraft - if you put it in Google, you can find pics and stuff). So, the problem: how does Gabbin get Amarie off the raft, and onto the boat, without hurting her in the process?

4 comments:

  1. Jerry-rigs a stretcher on the Sailcraft and hoist her up?

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  2. It's the hoisting part that seems to be the problem - she weighs just about exactly what he does. And the sailboat doesn't have any sort of crane that I can see. (I'm working from pictures and floorplan drawings; I've never been aboard one.)

    I suspect that I could manage to pull someone of my own weight up using the BFMI method (Brute Force and Massive Ignorance) and even get them over the railing, but I'm not at all sure that Gabbin could. He's supposed to be a wiry little guy.

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  3. Secure ropes to the raft, rig some sort of pulley system, and hoist one end of the raft up to the edge of the deck, turning the raft into a ramp.

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  4. Oh, I like that. If she didn't slide off the ramp into the water in the process... that has possibilities.

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