The Raft

The patch kit is still in the bag. After worrying about sharks and checking the water around her, Robie climbs up on the raft, identifies the pinprick hole that was causing the leak, and patches it. Max praises her work. Robie uses the emergency inflation valve to top off the air in the raft and is now ready to flip it over and get back in. 

Just as she flips the raft upright, a gust of wind catches it, and carries it fifty yards away. Robie realizes that Max isn't strong enough to go fetch the raft, and that she will have to be the one to go get it. 

Robie swims for the raft. Max, following behind her, encourages her, coaching her through her pursuit of the raft. She is not a very strong swimmer, but he convinces her not to do a slower stroke that she is more comfortable with, emphasizing the emergency nature of the situation. She puts her head down and swims as hard as she can, until she has no strength left, and when she lifts her head she can only hope that the raft is close by because she can barely go any farther. 

Luckily, the raft is only a few yards away from Robie. She hauls herself on board, and checks for the patch, to see if it has held, and it has. Not only that, but Max has also managed to board the raft while she was examining the old leak. 

Having fixed the leak, Robie can turn her attention to other, smaller problems. She attempts to disinfect her nose piercing, and while she does, she reflects that "It seemed like weeks had passed since that day I'd gotten my nose pierced […] I had been a different person just thinking about stupid stuff like diamonds in my nose" (100).

After another nap, Robie checks herself for dehydration by pinching the skin on the back of her hand. The skin does not spring back into place immediately, indicating dehydration. When she checks Max's hand, she finds it much worse. 

Robie, curious about Max, asks him where he comes from. Although he does not seem shy, he does not respond. While he is silent, Robie speculates about him. She infers that he does not have a wife, because he has no wedding band, but wonders whether he might have a girlfriend. She thinks back to the silver pendant she found him wearing when she lowered him into the water.

He seems to be sleeping, and she considers reading his red notebook, the one she saw in his ditty bag. When she moves towards it, he stops her, saying, "That's mine" (102). Though he is possessive about the bag, he soon starts opening up about himself.

Max is from a small town in eastern Oregon. Robie draws parallels between Max’s small-town life and her isolated island upbringing. Max wrestled in high school. He was asked to wrestle at a weight class below his natural weight, so he had to go on an extreme diet. Here, Robie draws parallels how Max must have felt skipping meals, and how she felt, having skipped several meals on the raft. Max tells her an anecdote about how he was very disciplined for weeks of the season, until one night, when he binged uncontrollably on multiple batches of his mother’s Christmas cookies. Privately, Robie compares Max’s binge-eating to her loss of control with his Skittles.

After the Christmas-cookie story, Max falls asleep, and Robie, happy to learn that much about Max, has to curb her instinct to ask him many more questions right away. 

She looks at the stars and reflects on the fact that she has survived for almost 48 hours on the open ocean. She does not feel elated; rather, she feels, "Numb. Blurred. Fuzzy. Dulled. Like none of it was real. Except for the hunger pangs in my stomach" (105). She eats some more of the Skittles. 

The stars come out and Robie wishes she could use them to navigate, like ancient Polynesian sailors did. She wonders whether she was anywhere near the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. She is desperate for drinkable water. 

Robie catches a lucky break: it rains, and she is able to collect and drink some water. She initially can't keep it down, but eventually manages to drink some more without vomiting. The rain, however:

didn't stop, and soon [she] was not only drenched but shivering, regretting [her] prayer for the rain not to stop. How quickly things went from one extreme to the other. I just wanted a happy medium but wasn't even sure what that would be (116).

When Max wakes up from his sleep, he tells Robie more of his story. This time, he recounts his experience going to the state championship meet with his wrestling teamand losing the title. He felt helpless when he lost, and like he wanted to cry, but he didn't. 

Robie settles in to the raft, saying, "I wasn't feeling the fear I'd felt the first day or two. Anxiety had transitioned to boredom. Just sitting there, watching the same sky, the same water, same colors. I longed for something to break the monotony" (121).

Just then, she spots an albatross, which, while not necessarily a sign of land (because albatrosses can travel hundreds of miles from shore), still raises Robie's mood, because it was, "A little piece of home" (122).

Shortly thereafter, she sees a much larger group of birds of different varieties: "An agitated, chaotic, screeching cloud of birds […] They sifted and dove and flew. Below them the surface of the water showed just as much, if not more, commotion" (124).

Robie and the raft have come across what fishermen call a bait ball: a massive school of fish near the surface of the water. She tries to pull in some of the smallest fish jumping at the surface of the water; she succeeds and is elated. She puts a little fish onto a makeshift hook, attached to a line made of a sweatshirt string, and lowers it into the water, near the bait ball. Just as she is celebrating a tug on the line, and starting to reel in a fish, something bumps the bottom of the raft, "Something big" (126).

Robie quickly assesses the situation and determines that there is a shark under her raft. She continues to pull in her fish on the line. Her belief that the big creature under her raft is a shark is confirmed when, just as she pulls her fish out of the water, the shark rears its head, and snaps off the back half of her fish, before disappearing again below the surface of the water.

Robie is terrified, but eventually settles down, and then realizes that the shark actually did her a favor: its bite saved her from figuring out how to gut the fish. She talks herself through eating the fish flesh by comparing it to sashimi. Max sleeps through her meal but wakes up after she is done eatingand starts to tell her some more of his personal history.