Ghosts of the Pacific

by Philip Roy

  “Yes, sir. Took me a whole month.”

  He kicked the hull with his boot. “That’s pretty cool. Don’t know if I’d be comfortable travelling so far in such a small boat. Anyway, it’s good you’re flying the flags. Are you intending to stop anywhere along the United States coast on your way?”

  “No, sir. As soon as I pass through the strait I will head southwest.”

  “To where?”

  “To Micronesia.”

  “Do you have enough fuel?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What do you want to see in Micronesia?”

  “Lots of things. I want to visit Saipan, for sure.”

  “Do you have a visa to visit Saipan?”

  “Not yet. I guess I’ll ask for one when I get there.”

  I hadn’t even thought about it. I just figured I’d hide the sub and sneak on shore. But I wasn’t about to tell him that. He raised his eyebrows. “Well you’d better plan to wait for that, from what I hear.”

  I nodded. “I will.”

  They started to climb back into their boat. “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  He shook his head. As they revved their engines and pulled away, he pointed to the water and yelled out, “Stay on the surface!”

  “I will!”

  He gave me a small wave and they were gone. I waved back. We were free to continue. What a wonderful feeling.

  Chapter 10

  MANY DAYS HAD passed since we left the world of floating ice. Now there was a yellow cloud on the horizon. It stretched across the sky like a giant yellow snail. It felt as though I was looking down at the exotic world of the Pacific that I had always dreamed of, into a cloud that was separating the hot world from the cold.

  I was.

  As we sailed beneath that cloud I felt a pocket of warm air brush my face. What a remarkable feeling. I felt it in every cell of my body. After coming through the Arctic it seemed impossible that the air and sea would ever warm up again. But they did, and it was like magic. I took off my jacket. There was a strange smell too, like the smell of something burning—what I imagined a distant forest fire or a volcano might smell like. It was very faint. But Hollie must have smelled it too because he whined to come up the ladder with me. I climbed down and carried him up. His nose was twitching like crazy. Together we leaned against the hatch and grinned as the sub cut eighteen knots through the water—sailing south.

  We sailed day after day without seeing anything, not even a bird. At night the stars and planets lit up the sky so brightly it looked as if you could reach out and touch them. The Pacific was so vast it felt as though you could sink whole planets into it and nobody would ever know they were there.

  But beneath the surface was a different story. There were seamounts, which were like mountains except that they were under water. They had large bases, hillsides and summits that rose surprisingly close to the surface. We could have settled on a couple of them if I had wanted to dive that deep— three hundred feet or so—but I didn’t. Something about resting the sub on a mountaintop kind of spooked me. I didn’t know why. It was fascinating watching the seamounts rise on sonar. From a couple of miles down they climbed and climbed until I expected to see them jump out of the water in front of us. But they never did. When a seamount broke the surface it became an island. I had always hoped to find an island nobody else had ever seen. Perhaps on this voyage we would. I would make a monument of stones and give the island a name. I had already decided what it would be: Ziegfried Island.

  Day after day we saw nothing but water. I didn’t mind. After the Arctic, the warmth was company itself. It was almost like having a friend. I didn’t feel bored. Every day the temperature rose and the nights grew longer. Then one day we heard a beep on the radar.

  It was a weak signal. It flashed on the screen then disappeared. That happened when something small was riding on the surface and was sometimes above water and sometimes below. Whatever this was it was moving slowly, more slowly than a ship. More like a canoe. A ship, even a sailboat, would give a steady signal on radar. I was curious so I headed straight towards it. What could be way out here in the middle of nowhere?

  Nothing. There was nothing there, and the radar stopped beeping. That was strange. I stood up on the hatch and scanned the water with the binoculars. Nothing. So, we sailed away. Ten minutes later the signal came back. It was still moving. I went back.

  There was definitely nothing in the water. No vessel, no garbage, nothing. But the radar was still beeping on and off. I was starting to wonder if it was broken when I saw a tiny splash in the water. I grabbed the binoculars. I saw it! It was a sea turtle.

  I figured it was a loggerhead turtle, though I had never seen one before. It was pretty big, about four or five feet long, and had a hard round shell. Somebody had painted a bright orange spot on its back and attached a small electric transmitter. That’s why we were picking it up on radar: someone was tracking it.

  What a lonely sight it was, a sea turtle swimming all by itself way out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It had nowhere to stop and rest. It had no one to communicate with. I had read that sea turtles had been crossing the earth’s oceans for millions of years. Wow. It looked like it too.

  We liked him right away. I decided to call him Hugh. He must have thought we were a tiny island because he swam over and leaned against the hull and rested. His eyes looked sad but I knew he probably wasn’t. He probably always looked that way. Hollie didn’t bark at him, he just sniffed a lot and stared. Seaweed liked him because he was the only other thing to land on besides water. He hopped onto his back right away and Hugh didn’t seem to mind. I wished I could have given him something to eat but I didn’t know what sea turtles ate and didn’t want to make him sick.

  Then, he closed his eyes and went to sleep. That’s what it looked like. I didn’t want to disturb him so I shut off the engine and decided to make some stew. I kept coming out to check on him but he just hugged the side of the hull with his eyes closed and rested. I went back inside.

  While the stew was cooking I rode the bike and Hollie ran on the treadmill. When we stopped to eat, I checked on Hugh. He was still sleeping. I carried the camera up and took his picture. He was still sleeping an hour later, so I went to bed. It was a warm, starry night and I left the hatch open and we all drifted slowly to sleep. As I listened to the waves lap against the hull I felt glad we were giving Hugh a place to rest.

  In the late morning I rose and climbed the portal beneath a hot sun. Hugh was gone. I scanned the water with the binoculars but didn’t see him. I checked the radar but found nothing.

  I wondered where he was going. I wondered if he was lonely. Sea turtles seemed so noble to me. They swam for months alone, crossing oceans by themselves. What a strange life. And yet, as I stood in the portal, stretched and looked across the vast Pacific, I wondered if maybe we were a little bit alike.

  Hugh made me think of Amelia Earhart. She had tried to fly her plane around the world in 1937 and almost made it. She went down somewhere in the Pacific. She was never found, although people on Saipan said that the Japanese picked her out of the water, brought her to Saipan, put her in jail for a while and then shot her. They thought she was a spy.

  Explorers have been trying to find her plane ever since, just like they’ve been trying to find the Franklin ships. In the Arctic the problem was ice. In the Pacific it was vastness. If something disappeared here, I didn’t see how anybody could ever find it.

  I tried to imagine Earhart flying at night and not being able to see the island where she was supposed to land. She was running out of gas. That’s what her last radio communication said. She would have known that nobody could come for her. But she must have still hoped somehow that somebody would. She would also have known that when she hit the water there would be sharks—if she survived the crash. She must have been brave. It made me glad we travelled in a submarine.

  In the afternoon I was bent over the side of the hull tr
ying to catch a fish with a line and hook when I heard a blast of air and felt a shower of water fall on me. Turning my head I got a heck of a fright. Right beside us was an enormous whale. It was diving. I grabbed hold of a handle on the portal and held on. The whale’s body kept diving as if it went on forever. I couldn’t believe how big it was. Then its tail came out of the water and it was as big as the sub!

  The tail spread out like an enormous fan. As it slipped beneath the water, the sub rocked back and forth. I scampered inside, grabbed the camera and came back out. When the whale surfaced again I started taking pictures.

  I was pretty sure it was a blue whale. Blue whales are the biggest creatures on earth, bigger than the biggest dinosaurs ever were. I was in awe. I carried Hollie up to see it and he was in awe too, especially because the whale came back and looked at us. It swam close and looked at us with one of its enormous eyes. Hollie sniffed but didn’t bark. He didn’t even growl. Like me, he really was in awe. And I think he liked the whale. As big as it was, and as small as he was, they had something in common. Both were very gentle. They stared at each other. They really did. Could whales and dogs communicate? How I wished I knew what they were thinking. It sure seemed like they were communicating.

  We watched the whale for half an hour. It dived two more times. Each time it came back up it blew water out of its spout like a fire hydrant and we were sprayed. I began to wonder if it were spraying us on purpose. Did whales have a sense of humour? It seemed like it. I knew that smaller whales, like belugas, liked to play. Why not one-hundred-foot blue whales?

  Chapter 11

  THE PACIFIC WAS so vast it boggled my mind. We sailed day after day without seeing anything but water, except for when we sailed over the tops of seamounts. Seamounts formed chains too, just like mountain ranges. And they had names. We were crossing the Emperor Seamounts. It was a good name for the chain, because it was enormous. It swept in an arc all the way from the Bering Sea to Hawaii! Holy smokes! If it were above water it would probably be the largest mountain range in the world.

  I was starting to notice that whenever we approached the summit of a seamount, we began to see more whales, sharks, dolphins and fish. And then, for the first time since the Bering Sea, we came upon another vessel.

  She was a fishing trawler. She was pretty big for a trawler but I supposed she’d have to be to come so far out in the ocean alone. We picked her up on radar ten miles away. We could see her long before she could see us, even though she would know we were here too, by radar. Fishing trawlers usually carried sonar for finding fish, so she could probably track us if we were underwater too, when we were close enough.

  I would have avoided her except that I heard something else on radar and it bothered me. It was a weak signal. It appeared and disappeared, just like before. I wondered if it was Hugh.

  Fishing trawlers have a bad reputation for catching things they’re not supposed to catch, such as turtles, dolphins and sharks. They get caught in the nets and drown. I couldn’t sail away thinking that might happen to Hugh.

  So, I sailed closer. Two miles from the trawler I submerged to periscope depth and switched to battery. If they were paying attention they would have noticed that we had disappeared from their radar. They were moving slowly, probably dragging a huge net behind them, scooping fish or shrimp or something like that. The weak signal had been moving in their direction and then it disappeared. If it was Hugh, that meant he had gone under the surface. Where?

  I motored in to half a mile, then a quarter-mile. There were several men in the open stern of the boat. They were pulling the net up with powerful motorized winches. The net was wide and probably stretched a thousand feet long. As we closed the distance I could see lots of splashing on the surface inside the net. It was full. And then I saw something that really upset me. One of the men raised a rifle, aimed at the creatures inside the net and started shooting!

  I was horrified. I couldn’t believe what was happening. Quickly, I surfaced just a foot above the water, leaving the hull concealed, opened the hatch and scanned the net with binoculars. There were dolphins, sharks and turtles inside. The man on the boat was slaughtering them instead of letting them out. It was insane.

  I had to stop him. But I didn’t know what to do. In a panic I grabbed the flare gun, tried to aim it just above the trawler, and pulled the trigger. I hoped maybe I could scare them into thinking that authorities were coming to investigate, though who would ever come out here?

  The flare went off with a loud bang and made a bright orange streak towards the boat, losing height on the way and narrowly missing the men in the stern. I never meant to aim it so low. They must have thought I was shooting at them. I jumped back inside and hit the dive switch. We went down to periscope depth. I motored closer, steering in an arc around the stern of the trawler, just outside of the net. I pulled the periscope down so that they couldn’t see us. But I knew they could track us if they tried. I sat at the sonar screen and studied the situation.

  I just wished there was some way I could free everything. Cautiously I raised the periscope. The men in the boat were scanning the water with binoculars but not in our direction. They didn’t know where we were. Probably the net was blocking us from their sonar waves. I turned the periscope towards the net and was almost certain I saw a bright orange spot on the back of a turtle. I had to free them.

  I rose so that the top of the portal was awash, took a hacksaw from the tool box, carried it up the portal and opened the hatch. Seaweed climbed up behind me and flew out. I grabbed the rim of the net and started cutting as quickly as I could. If I could just cut down four feet or so, many of the trapped creatures could escape.

  It was extremely frantic. It was difficult cutting to start with, but I also had to keep an eye on the men in the boat and an eye on the sharks in the net.

  I wasn’t fast enough. They were going to see me any second. I jumped back down, grabbed a ten-foot length of rope, climbed up, slid into the water and tied one end of the rope around the top of the net, the other end to a handle on the portal. I had to dive underwater and hold my breath to tie the rope to the net. It was such a desperate thing to do. I was hoping to pull the top of the net down with the sub and free everything. When I climbed out of the water I felt something hit my arm and spin me around. Then I heard a rifle fire. It took me a couple of seconds to realize what had happened. I looked down at my arm and saw a gash about four inches long. It was creamy white, as if somebody had just scooped the skin away. It wasn’t even bleeding yet. I was stunned and confused. Had I been shot?

  My instinct told me to get my head inside the portal and so I did. I heard more shots ring out. They bounced off the hull. But where was Seaweed? Then another shot rang out. I peeked out of the portal and saw Seaweed’s wings fold as he fell from the sky.

  They shot him. They shot Seaweed. I was horrified. Was he killed? Was there any chance he was okay? Had they maybe just brushed his wings, maybe stunned him but he was still okay? I had to go to him. I had to find him. He would be waiting for me. He would know I would come. I had to.

  The wound on my arm started to ache but was nothing compared to the pain in my heart. I pulled the hatch down and sealed it, jumped inside, rushed to the controls and hit the dive switch. The sub dove a few feet then stopped. I forgot I had tied it to the net. I put the motor in gear, cranked up full battery power and pointed the nose down for a steep dive. We started to move. But it was too slow! I filled the tanks full and kept the motor on full battery power. The motor was working hard. We were moving, but very slowly. We must have pulled one corner of the net down twenty feet or so. I hoped all the turtles, dolphins and sharks were escaping. But I also hoped the rope would snap so I could rescue Seaweed.

  And then, it did. The sub suddenly lunged forward and down. We went into a very steep, fast dive. I pumped some air into the tanks and brought us level at sixty feet. I was in a panic now. My arm was starting to bleed and it was getting very sore. I pulled off my t-shirt and
wrapped it around the wound. It was so ugly I didn’t want to look at it. I couldn’t think about it now. I had to find Seaweed.

  I went a short distance, maybe two hundred feet, and rose to periscope depth. Through the periscope I saw the men trying to straighten up the net. The trapped creatures were mostly gone. The men were so busy I decided to try surfacing awash again. Maybe I could find Seaweed with the binoculars.

  But the sky was growing dark. As I came up and opened the hatch I felt the first drops of rain. It was going to rain hard. When I raised the binoculars I saw blood run down my arm onto my chest. I was bleeding a lot.

  I scanned the boat first. The men hadn’t seen me yet. I tried to see through the water around me. Nothing. I was starting to get sick to my stomach. My head was dizzy. It felt so hopeless. I tried yelling. “Seaweed! Seaweed!”

  A man in the boat saw me and reached for the rifle. I ducked back inside. I had to go. This was impossible. I shut and sealed the hatch, went down a few feet and motored a few hundred feet away. Then I surfaced completely and opened the hatch. There was no way they could shoot me from such a distance in a tossing sea. I was still hoping, hoping somehow Seaweed was all right and could make it back to us.

  The rain came down hard. The wind had picked up. Clouds on the horizon were black. A bad storm was coming. The fishing trawler looked so small from the distance. She was becoming less visible in the rain. I was struggling to believe that Seaweed was still okay. My heart was breaking. I looked down at Hollie at the bottom of the ladder. The rain was splashing down on him but I could see by his face that he knew something terrible had happened.

  And then I saw something that gave me hope. Through the darkening rain I thought I saw the silhouettes of three or four birds fly to shelter on top of the trawler’s bridge. Maybe the seagull they shot was not Seaweed. Maybe it was another seagull. If he were still alive he would find us. I knew he would.