by John Blaine
Pryor, Antell, and Hartson Brant were in the gear room when the boys arrived. Rick asked, “How long will this last, Dad?”
“It depends on the diameter of the eye, Rick, and I don’t know that. It may be anywhere from twenty to fifty miles, and the hurricane is moving at about twenty-five miles an hour. So we may have less than an hour, or more.”
The group collected foul-weather clothing and walked out of the lab building onto the rain-sodden earth.
The grass squished under Rick’s feet as he moved out into the open to look. To the north, the cloud wall of Donna was visible, and he could see heavy clouds in the west. There were a few clouds high overhead, like faraway thunderstorms.
“Look!” It was Roger Pryor who called. Rick turned and saw that the Project Director was pointing out to sea.
About two miles offshore, rising and falling in the heavy seas, was what Rick identified from the silhouette as a large tugboat, the seagoing kind. It was hauling a strange-looking object that pitched violently. He thought that one side of the thing was far down, but he couldn’t be sure.
“What is that thing?” Scotty asked.
Dick Antell had the answer. “It’s a drill rig, the kind used for drilling oil wells in theGulf of Mexico and Page 13
offCalifornia . I’ve taken divers down to work under those things when it was time to cap a well and put the piping on it. And it looks as though that one’s in trouble. It should be riding much higher than that, and it should be more stable, even in a sea like this.”
There was a hail from the Brant house. Barby and Jan were running toward them, carrying the big 10-power binoculars and Rick’s equally powerful telescope.
They arrived breathless with excitement. “Did you see it?” Barby demanded. “It’s sinking!”
“Let’s see.” Rick took the telescope and sighted out to where the tow was rising and falling in the sea.
He got focused, and the drill rig leaped into view. It was huge, with a high tower on it from which drill pipe was lowered as the bit went into the subsea earth far below. Under the big platform were massive cylinders, undoubtedly the buoyancy tanks.
He handed the telescope to Dick Antell. Dr. Brant was using the binoculars.“Barby’s right. It’s sinking.
One side is far down, and the platform is awash.”
“I’m afraid so,” Dr. Brant agreed, handing the binoculars to Pryor. “And I don’t know what we can do about it, except to notify the Coast Guard. The tug skipper probably did so a long time ago, but we can’t take the chance of his radio being out.”
“I’ll call them,” Jan offered. “It looks as though they’re about two miles offshore, perhaps a little more, and bearing about east-southeast from Spindrift. Is that good enough, sir?”
“Very close, I’d say,” Dr. Brant approved.
Rick grinned. He was always a little astonished when a crisp, accurate assessment of a situation came out of such an attractive, feminine creature. Jan Miller was living proof that the old saying “beautiful but dumb” was nonsense. He put the thought aside and spoke to his father.
“Dad, do you think that skipper is going to lose the rig?”
“I’m afraid so, Rick, and pretty quickly, too. When the eye passes and he gets into high winds, he’ll have to cut loose or risk the tug. I’m surprised he hasn’t done it before now.”
“Tugboat captains don’t like to lose their tows,” Roger Pryor observed. “He’s probably hanging on, hoping for a miracle. But you’re right. He’ll have to drop the tow pretty soon.”
“I was thinking that he’s probably not sure of his position within a half mile or so,” Rick said. “We could help by taking bearings. Then, if he does drop the tow, we can at least give a precise position.”
“A good idea, Rick.We have one pelorus, but well need two for accurate triangulation.”
“I still have my Boy Scout compass,” Rick said. “It has a sighting vane. From the top of the lab, I can line up with the church steeple at Whiteside. That shows on the chart. Scotty can put the pelorus on the house porch. Let’s go, boy.”
“Ill help,” Barby offered. She and Scotty ran to the boat cradles to get the portable pelorus and the boat compass. Rick hurried to the house and ran up the stairs to his room. He found the compass and started down again, then remembered that they would have to take simultaneous sightings to be really accurate.
If the sightings were at different moments, the tug and tow would have moved a distance between their Page 14
sightings. He opened the drawer and got out two of the small transceiver units he and Scotty had built, which they called the Megabuck Network, a family joke based on the original idea from which the tiny units had grown.
As he reached the bottom of the stairs, Jan was just coming out of the library that served as Hartson Brant’s office. “The Coast Guard had already received a message from the tug saying it was in difficulty,”
she reported. “I gave them the approximate position, and they said thanks and please keep them posted if anything developed, especially if we could see anything of the tow after it was dropped.”
“We’re going to take exact positions,” Rick told her. “Scotty and Barby are setting up the pelorus on the porch. I’m going to the lab roof with my old compass.”
“I’m coming with you,” Jan stated.
Rick waited until Scotty and Barby arrived with the pelorus, a sighting device built on a compass rose, and the boat compass with which to align it. He handed Barby the Megabuck unit.
“Here, Barb. We’ll have to take simultaneous sightings. You and Jan set your watches together, and you can be the time-tick twins.”
The girls compared watches and set them as close as possible. Fortunately, both had watches with second hands. It was the style at Whiteside High for girls to wear boys’ wrist watches instead of the tiny things most girls wore. Rick had received a watch for Christmas, although his old one was perfectly good, and he had loaned it to Jan. Barby had borrowed Scotty’s watch, because the husky ex-Marine had assured her that time was meaningless to anyone as lazy as he was, and besides Rick had a watch.
While Scotty set up on the front porch of the Brant house, Rick and Jan hurried to the flat roof of the lab building. The boy knew that the compass wouldn’t point to magnetic north with accuracy, because there were too many metallic objects on the roof and in the lab itself to throw the needle off, so he didn’t bother aligning it the way he would have used it in the open. Instead, he used the steeple of theWhitesideMethodistChurch and the exact center of the seaward side of the lab roof as his base line.
Both were shown on the Coast and Geodetic chart of the area.
When Rick had first started cruising, he had been amazed at the detail shown on the charts. Not only were aids to navigation, depths, hazards, and other sea details shown, but also land objects visible from the water. He had been pleased to find that both the Brant house and the lab were landmarks on the chart.
With his base line established, he lay flat on his stomach and turned the movable sight ring of the compass until the sighting vanes were lined up on the drill rig. He could see that it was deeper in the water even in the short time it had taken to get ready for sightings.
Jan had gone downstairs while he was lining up the compass. When she came back she was carrying the binoculars and a pad and pencil. Rick had forgotten that he would need something to write on. He thanked her and put the pad down where he could write easily. The roof was damp, but it drained quickly and there was no standing water.
He looked through the binoculars, noting that the tug and tow had drawn nearly abreast of Spindrift. The entire deck of the drill rig was awash now, and it was canted heavily to one side. It was obviously sinking. He wondered why the tugboat skipper was waiting so long to cut it loose, or why he didn’t head into land while he was still in the hurricane’s eye.
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“If I were hauling that thing, I’d want it to go down where I could reach it ea
sily,” Rick told Jan.
“It will probably have to be salvaged,” Jan agreed. “When will you start taking sights, Rick?”
“I think we’d better start. See if Scotty is ready.”
Jan spoke briefly with Barby over the Megabuck unit, then reported, “They’re ready when you are.”
“Okay. Give them ten seconds, then five, then go.”
Rick realigned his sighting vane. When Jan called, “Go,” he read the scale. The tow was 8 degrees south of his base line. He jotted it down.
The sightings continued at five-minute intervals for about twenty minutes. Jan, who had been watching through the binoculars between counts, said excitedly, “The tug just dropped the towline!”
The drill rig was visible for only a few minutes longer. The tug circled it, and kept circling until no trace remained, then Rick saw the boat head out to sea. “He knows he can’t get into a safe port until the storm subsides, so he’s heading out where he has enough sea room to ride it out,” Rick guessed.
Jan asked, “Are we going to plot the bearings on a chart?”
“Sure. Look south and you’ll see the cloud wall approaching. The eye is nearly past, and we’ll be in the soup again very soon. We can spend the rest of the storm plotting points on the chart and then playing chess. Okay?”
“If you promise not to let me beat you.”
Rick winced. It was a sore point. Jan beat him at chess about six games out of ten, and she was convinced he was letting her win. Rick knew better.
As they walked to join Scotty and Barby, Rick said, “It felt funny, watching the rig sink. My stomach sank with it. I’ll bet the skipper feels pretty awful.”
CHAPTER IV
The Curious Skipper
While Rick and Scotty were plotting the track of the sunken tow on the chart of the coast, Hartson Brant gave the girls an informal lecture on hurricanes in response to a question Barby had asked.
“We don’t know yet what actually causes a hurricane, but there are indications that it requires a combination of a very warm sea-which is why they start in the tropics-and a cold mass of air high above the sea. This starts a convection current, which begins to rotate because of the earth’s rotation. As more heat energy from the sea is fed into the storm, it becomes a huge, whirling cylinder, rather like a wheel Page 16
spinning. In the center, things are relatively calm. That’s the eye of the storm. Toward the outer edges, the highest velocity winds occur.”
Barby nodded her understanding. “That’s why it was not very windy when the eye passed us, and why it’s windy now.”
“Right.And the winds will get worse now, until the storm passes us completely.”
Rick looked up from the chart. “Here it is, everybody!”
The group gathered around the library table where the chart had been spread. Rick and Scotty had drawn lines for each sighting, to where the sightings converged at sea. The points where the lines from lab roof and porch met had been connected, showing the track of the sunken tow. The last one was 2.4
miles from the island.
“What we don’t know,” Rick explained, “is what happened to the tow after it vanished from sight. When the tug cut loose, the forward motion of the tow would have decreased sharply, but there would still have been a little left. Probably the drill rig didn’t go straight down.”
“Undersea currents wouldn’t have affected it much,” Roger Pryor observed. “It’s too massive for anything but a really powerful current to move, and none in this area is that strong. But we have to assume that surface waves moved it a little, probably inland. Then, it still had a little forward motion, residual energy from the tow.” He put his finger on the chart. “I think it must be on the bottom about here.”
Hartson Brant nodded. “That sounds about right, Roger. I’d bet on it, give or take a couple of hundred yards.”
Rick frowned. “That couple of hundred yards could make all the difference. Look at the fathom readings.”
The chart was liberally sprinkled with numbers, each one a depth reading. Together, they showed the contour of the ocean bottom. Off that part of the coast, the bottom was fairly even, with normal rise and fall like the land itself, except for a great undersea trench that began just north of Spindrift and continued to sea for nearly six miles. The average depth of the bottom near where the tow had gone down was about 300 feet, but in the trench, it dropped rapidly to nearly 1500 feet. Geologists believed the trench was the bed of an ancient river, cut into the land when it was above sea level.
Jan Miller spotted quickly what Rick had meant. “Depending on how accurate Mr. Pryor’s estimate is, the drill rig is either on the edge of Tansey’s Trench or down at the bottom!”
“It may be on the slope,” Scotty observed.
“If old Tansey’s discovery really claimed the rig, I don’t see much hope of salvage,” Rick said, referring to the oceanographer who had first plotted the trench outlines. “It’s too deep. But if the rig isn’t in the trench, it can be reached easily.”
“Not easily,” Antell said. “But it would be reachable. No one likes salvage work in these waters. The sea and weather are too unpredictable.”
Jan marked off the distance with a pair of dividers to the spot Pryor had indicated, then used a parallel Page 17
ruler to get the exact bearing for the point where the tow had dropped, and for its estimated position on the bottom. The group listened while she called the Coast Guard.
“Hello, Duty Officer? . . . This is Spindrift again. We called earlier about the tow that was in trouble.
What? . . . Oh, I see.” She listened for a moment. “Our figures are pretty close, but not exactly the same as the captain’s. We think it was cut loose 2.4 nautical miles from the northeast corner of Spindrift on a true bearing of 87 degrees 32 seconds. We estimate that it bottomed at about 2.35 miles, on a bearing of 87 degrees 30 seconds.”
“We’ll make it precise as soon as the weather clears,” Rick said.
“How?”Barby demanded. Her eyes widened. “You mean, dive and see?”
“Why not?”Scotty asked. “We can get close enough for a look!”
“Wonderful!” Barby exclaimed. “Jan and I will go with you.”
“So willI ,” Dick Antell added.
Rick looked at Roger Pryor and grinned. “I don’t suppose we could go in the Sea Horse?”
Pryor grinned back. “You suppose correctly. Sorry, Rick.”
“Well, it didn’t hurt to ask,” Rick said philosophically.
The storm grew in intensity, while the Spindrift group remained in the big house. Not until the following day did they resume work on the sonoscope installation, and it wasn’t until two full days had passed that the seas began to subside and the clouds showed the breaks that presaged good weather. Rick and Scotty took time out from the sonoscope to put the Spindrift boats back into the water, then went back to work again.
On the first day of full sunshine, a phone call from the house interrupted work in the lab. Barby announced that a strange boat was coming into the Spindrift dock.
Hartson Brant stopped work to go meet the visitors, and Rick and Scotty trailed along. By the time they reached the dock two men were being greeted by Barby. Both wore business suits, but one had a craggy, weathered face and obviously was not someone who spent his life at a desk. The other would look more at home in an office than standing on a dock.
The businessman type introducedhimself . “How do you do, Dr. Brant? I’m Robert Maxwell, vice president of Coastal Petroleum Corporation. This is Captain George Biggs, skipper of one of our tugs, the Hester II. We understand from the Coast Guard that you were kind enough to report the trouble Captain Biggs was having with our drilling platform, and that you took bearings when he had to cut the tow loose.”
So this was the unfortunate skipper! Bick looked at him closely. The seamed, weathered face was expressionless, but the blue eyes were very alert.
“Yes, we thought we could at least do
that much,” Hartson Brant responded. “Unfortunately, there was nothing else we could do. I hope there was no loss of life.”
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“No, nor bodily harm to anyone,” Maxwell said. “When Captain Biggs realized that the tow was in serious danger, he brought the men from the tow aboard the tug.”
Captain Biggs spoke up. “We were in the eye of the hurricane when I finally had to choose between cutting loose and losing my ship. You must have had a good view from here.”
“We did,” Dr. Brant agreed.
“How did it look to you?” the tug skipper asked.
Rick stared. That was an odd question. He interjected, “I’m sure your view was a lot better than ours, Captain.”
Glacial blue eyes returned his stare. “It was in one way, but with the tug heaving so badly, we couldn’t be sure whether the tow started listing by the stern, or by the portside. Perhaps you could tell us.”
“Does it make a difference?” Scotty inquired curiously.
“Yes, because it may give us a clue to whether it went down relatively straight, or on its side or stern,”
Maxwell answered smoothly.
“It seemed to be listing heavily to port,” Hartson Brant told them. “But it didn’t seem to roll.”
Biggs nodded. “That was the way it looked from the deck, too. We’re trying to anticipate salvage problems, if the rig is in a salvageable position.”
“I may say that we’re also trying to anticipate insurance problems,” Maxwell put in. “Of course the first question that will arise is whether the captain, who is a company employee, did all within his power to save the tow. Because your helpful call to the Coast Guard put you in the picture, you may be asked for an opinion.”
“We are not qualified to give an opinion, and will so state if the questionarises ,” Dr. Brant said promptly. “No one watching from the land could give an opinion under those circumstances.”