And then they run into a delay, a big one.

John and Kira were underway, and hugging the coastline of England as the weather started to turn, and as the water started to get angry around them.

A 42' boat is no small boat, but it can be tiny in an open ocean, and that was now what they were starting to experience. They pushed along to the port town of Wick, and finally got their boat tied down at a dock behind their sea wall.

A storm kept them in an inn, stuck in Wick for a few days while things calmed down. When they got back out, they hired a maintenance company in the port to make sure their boat was seaworthy.

They met a grizzled old man named Ralph, and both of them found him to be gruff and crude, but near-perfectly honest. Their boat was in need of some repair, nothing serious, but Ralph pushed them hard for where they were going.

Kira finally told him they were going to Lerwick, and his eyes narrowed. He replied in a thick Scottish accent, "You should not be going up there, hardly a dock left to tie off on, with the sea rising."

He then pushed hard for their next stop, not taking no for an answer. They tried to be evasive, but he persisted, and hard. "Listen good lass, if you are going up that way, you would be making way to Faroe, and on to Iceland, probably to Canada, or you are heading to Norway."

There really wasn't a way he would not know that John supposed, so he told him.

"Norway, we are headed over to Norway," John replied softly.

"That isn't good, but it is better than heading father North, that way is closed now," Ralph said defiantly. "Too much ice up there now, and a sea so violent you can't really see it or dodge it."

"Too much ice?" Kira replied, in a questioning tone. "The icecaps are gone, how is there ice?"

The old man laughed gruffly, "what do you two kids know about icecaps? Book learning I suppose. They have been gone longer than I have been alive, this isn't the ancient ice caps, this is something new, something we don't know a lot about."

John and Kira shared a knowing glance at being called kids, but both were interested. "What is up there?" John asked politely.

"Waves far taller than your boat, high winds, rain, hail and ice storms, and floating shards of ice bigger than houses," Ralph replied, in a sort of intentional spooky voice. "When it started to get a little cooler, we started losing boats. Eventually, we lost all the boats that went up that way."

"So that way is closed, the only way across is down South, and it is very dangerous," the old man continued. "Crooked governments in Europe, pirates off of Africa, the Caribbean and off of Mexico, and the hell hole that the yanks have made for themselves. Canada is pretty much closed to us right now. Unless it is a big enough boat to just steam straight across, and few of those are left anymore."

"So Norway, that isn't easy either, and harder the farther North you start out," he continued. "Going East from Lerwick is hard, really hard kids. The ocean current and the prevailing wind is to the North now, and hard. It pushes boats up into the ice."

"Could we make it? Is there a chance? Kira asked, mentioning the advancements on their boat.

"Fancy radios and solar arrays aren't the problems. The boat breaking up is why you go into the water fast, or taking on too much water and going down more slowly." Ralph looked carefully at their boat, "This boat, that sea, and you two at the helm? I am sorry kids, you won't make it. Why did you come this far North? The crossing is easy back at the channel, this tub looks French, it was on that side of the channel to start with."

John and Kira looked at each other, and then at the old man, this was digging too deep.

He got the point, "Ok, no reason to trouble me with your problems, but there is no reason to go up to Lerwick, no port there anymore, and terrible sea. Going from here is not much better. If your boat was in better nick you could try it from Aberdeen or so, but even then that is a lot of open sea for a couple of green sailors."

They then spoke of improvements to the boat, and Ralph brought them into his shop and showed them what could be done. They had a few things they could do.

Ralph suggested that his team install a carbon fiber exoskeleton around the boat, and link it up through interior surfaces. Advances in this had made it like a liquid epoxy, that could be laid in a thin strip, but which would harden under a special curing lamp, and be harder than steel but very light. This would build a far stronger frame for the boat.

He also suggested a newer polymer laminate coating to go over all of that, to ensure the boat was well sealed, more resistant to separation, and to give additional strength to the exoskeleton.

Ralph also wanted to install some superlightweight foam into some empty spaces to help with buoyancy and to have fewer places to take on water, and then lastly he wanted to add another heavy-duty pump to get rid of any water they took on and improved weather radar. A newer radar might help them to miss the worst parts of the storm.

"And you should also try to find an experienced sea captain to take you across, and you should at very least head down to Aberdeen and start from there, give yourselves a chance against the current."

They looked at him with a questioning gaze, backtracking was not something they wanted to do.

"Don't worry yourselves too much kids, I can put you up in the loft above our barn while we work, it will take a couple of weeks, but the weather should calm a bit," Ralph continued, trying to put them at ease. "And your boat will look very different when we are done, new exterior coating, new paint job, and I can fit you with a clean registry on it, a clean name and number."

"How do you do that?" Kira asked, "And why would you help us like this?"

Ralph laughed, "I own a boat that went down in the water out there ten miles or so twelve years ago, in your weight class, you can use her registration. And you look like good kids, sometimes people need a break."

And then he stopped and smiled, "and because you can pay me for it, we are running a business after all."

John could not think of how to pay the man, he had not had time to prepare for this, they didn't carry that kind of cash around, nobody really did. Kira had taken some money with her from the house they had escaped, and it had paid their way thus far, even being from France and the old EU, but it was not nearly enough for this.

Kira then pulled her dad to the side and broke out a large old leatherbound binder he knew well. She had managed to find the property book.

This book contained the deeds and details on properties John had purchased around the world before the crash. It was close to irreplaceable. Probably the most valuable book any regular person owned anymore.

If nothing else he was glad Amber did not have it, maybe they could salvage what they had in wealth. And maybe they could pay Ralph.

Kira pointed to a nice property in the Scottish highlands, not terribly far from Wick, John looked at her and nodded. It was paying a very high price for what they were getting, that was a nice property, but it was worth it for safety.

They had lived there before, many years ago. It had been a gift from the royal family before everything went wrong, in exchange for John curing a couple of their princesses of the old disease.

Kira pulled the folder for that property out and opened it before the old man. "We come from some money Ralph, our parents, their parents actually, they really had a lot, and we have a clean deed on a property perhaps fifty miles from here, as the crow flies."

The old man looked at the property and the deed, "You own the Ribigill farm? Fook me," Ralph rubbed his beard. "That would more than pay for what you need, this is too much for you kids to pay."

Kira put her hand on his and smiled, men could not, in general, resist her charms, but this was not a sexual thing she was doing. "We would be paying for more than the work on the boat Ralph," she said sweetly.

"We would be paying for the best work you can do, and your complete discretion, we want everything about us to be a complete secret." She locked eyes with the old man, and his visage softened.

"And we would be paying for you to drive us where we are going in the boat, or close to it. And hopefully, we make a friend, as we might need your help again someday."

That was not a bad offer, Ralph thought, not bad at all. He extended his hand to John, who gave him a firm handshake, and then extended his hand to Kira, who instead hugged him warmly.

Ralph was surprised at her warmth, her embrace was like being wrapped in a warm blanket.

With that John and Kira unpacked the boat, and watched as Ralph's team pulled it into a dock and then drained it, then lifted it to begin their work.

They then prepared for the weeks-long wait as the boat was further improved. Ralph on the other hand considered the place at Ribgill they had signed over to him. A place he could retire to quite comfortably.

These were good people to know, Ralph was determined to be upright with them.

The two lovers considered the changing world. Wars, sickness, famine and other catastrophe had caused the world to shrink in population, and shrink badly.

Nobody knew how many people were left, but it was less. It was a lot less. The world had been over twelve billion people, now it was thought to be at five billion, maybe four.

This smaller group of people used fewer resources and caused a lot less pollution, and the world was reacting.

Gains had been made in cleaning the plastics out of the sea, and now a lot fewer people were around, and few plastics were in use.

Massive automated ships on nuclear and solar power now patrolled the sea to collect and safely destroy the plastic items and even the micro particles. They didn’t have crews and these vessels had been designed to operate without crews for decades on end, maybe centuries.

Fossil fuels were now a thing of the past, as were early attempts at battery power. New combustibles existed that were extremely clean, and plentiful.

But just as the temperature had risen, and the seas with it, and the ice was lost, in the correction the trend was now cooling as the planet corrected.

This was not the world Kira and her dad expected to live in. Back when they were young nobody could have imagined how things now were.

But as always, they had each other. The one thing both of them needed more than anything else, their counterpart. Their love, their other half so to speak.

That night, as they grew to trust the old man, who was as honest as about anyone they had known, the made love before they went to sleep.

They had not done enough of that lately, so this was an outlet for them. And they went at it hard, throwing themselves at each other.

When John was getting close, his daughter felt the rise in him. She held him tight, she needed to feel all of him inside of her. She needed to feel the special orgasm her dad’s cum provided her.

“Inside of me dad,” Kira whispered. “I needed it, please cum inside of me.”

He knew it had been a while since she had taken the birth control he had created for her, well over a month. She might be fertile at this moment, but in this moment he didn’t mind.

Her father did as she asked, and as they had experienced for so long, they felt an orgasm of the sort few in the world would ever know. They felt the moment of peace and ecstasy, they felt the full power of the changes to their bodies.

They were one again. They fell into the deep sleep again, but they needed this, holding each other for hours as they rested.

But nobody took them this time, nobody was in Wick looking for them, and Ralph was keeping watch for the two people he had grown rather fond of.