by Philip Roy
“Concentrate! Get a grip!”
I opened my eyes, reached for the ballast switches and pulled them. I heard the movement of pressurized air. The sump pumps had also engaged, as they were designed to do. I felt like crying with happiness, but was far from finished. The pumps could not remove enough water quickly enough to save me from drowning. Swimming back up, I unlocked the hatch, climbed out and sealed it again. I swam to the surface, raised my head and took a deep breath of air. That’s when I heard Ziegfried yell, “Yay! Way to go, Alfred! Way to go. Yippee!”
I couldn’t help myself: “Yahoo!”
“One minute thirty-seven seconds, Al. And let me tell you, that was the longest minute-and-thirty-seven seconds of my life. I was ready to go in after you, Al. I was ready!”
I swam over to the rock. Ziegfried gave me a hand and pulled me up. Then, without warning, he gave me a big bear hug.
“You make me proud, Al. You make me proud. If ever I had a son I would want him to be just like you.”
I felt tears start in my eyes but forced them back. I did not want Ziegfried to see me cry. Inside, I was deeply happy. Ziegfried had become the father I had never had.
The sump pumps did what they were designed to do and removed the water from the sub. The sub then rose back to the surface. We climbed in to survey any damage. All of the watertight compartments were intact. But the flood left salt stains everywhere and Ziegfried suggested we wipe everything down with fresh water. I had removed my bedding, books, clothing and anything I didn’t want to get wet. In a real flooding emergency I would just have to dry those things out. At least now we knew it was possible to survive such an ordeal should it ever happen. But what if the sub sank in deep water? At 237.5 feet the ballast tanks would fill. Would that be sufficient to raise the sub if it were filled with water? No, Ziegfried said, the sump pumps could never keep up with water rushing in through an open portal. The hatch would have to be shut. This led him to consider a system for the automatic sealing of the hatch. I sighed at the thought of any more delays.
“It’s too important, Al, It might save your life someday. What if a passing ship swamped the sub while the hatch was open? What if you got caught in a hurricane?”
“I would seal it.”
“What if you couldn’t? What if you were sleeping? What if you were sick or wounded?”
I shrugged my shoulders. Sometimes it was so difficult to accept Ziegfried’s cautious wisdom.
In September I took practice runs in the sub while Ziegfried stayed in the yard and worked on the new hatch system. He installed a small motor charged solely with shutting and sealing the hatch when there was water collecting inside the sub. The system could also be operated from a switch on the panel board. This turned out to be an excellent feature as it allowed me to shut the hatch and dive without leaving my seat at the controls. Now I could dive almost instantly.
But, like everything else, the system had to be tested. This meant we had to flood the sub again — in deeper water.
We decided to sink the sub at Deep Cove, next to the schooner. We set the automatic ballast inflation depth at sixty-five feet and the automatic hatch sealing at six inches of water. Ziegfried placed sensors above the floor that would detect water once it had risen to six inches. The plan was for me to sink the sub and hold onto the outside of it as it went down. On the way down I could observe if the ballast tanks had engaged and watch the hatch close. At seventy-five feet I would let go and return to the surface and wait for the sub to come back up by itself. This could take a while because the sump pumps had to remove enough water to make the sub buoyant again. It was a critical amount of time in the case of an emergency where I might be in freezing water, waiting for the sub to resurface.
There was less stress involved in this sinking because I was never going to be inside when the sub was going down. I simply opened the tanks enough for a slow dive, then climbed out and sat on top while the sub gently submerged and water rushed inside. Holding onto a handle, I took a few deep breaths just before the sub pulled me under. At the last second I looked to the beach and saw Ziegfried waving. I stuck my hand up in the air as the sub pulled me down.
The hatch closed quickly but a lot more than six inches of water got in before it shut. At fifty feet it was still falling and I was afraid it was going to hit bottom too hard and get damaged. At sixty-five feet I heard pressurized air but the sub was not slowing down yet. At seventy-five feet I let go. As I came up I stared down at the sub. It appeared to be slowing down. When I reached thirty feet I saw a cloud of sand burst from beneath the sub. Well, if it hit bottom at the same speed I was rising that wasn’t too bad.
Breaking the surface, I waved to Ziegfried. I saw him check his watch.
“Anything happening?”
“I don’t know.”
I swam to shore to wait. Sitting on the beach together we stared at the buoy, holding our breath.
“We’ll be able to tell how much water got in by the watermarks,” Ziegfried said.
“How much do you think got in?”
“I don’t know . . . two, maybe three feet. How fast did it fall?”
“Pretty fast.”
“Hmmm. Maybe four.”
He stared at his watch. We both sighed. Suddenly the portal broke the surface.
“Yay!”
“Seventeen minutes, Al.”
I swam out and climbed onto the sub. Opening the hatch, I looked inside and saw several inches of water still swirling and heard the sump pumps going full blast. I read the watermark on the wall: three and a half feet. If I had been inside I would have survived. It would not be a nice experience to be trapped in a sinking sub that’s filling with water, but, provided the automatic hatch and automatic ballast inflation systems were functioning properly, I would survive.
Sticking my head out of the hatch, I yelled, “Three and a half!”
“Yes!” exclaimed Ziegfried, and he did a little dance on the beach.
I laughed. Then took a deep breath and sighed happily. The tests were finally over.
Chapter Eleven
On the first of October, beneath a full moon and broken cloud, I went to sea. The ocean was strangely calm. It was like crossing a lake. But further from land, the swells began to grow. I sailed on top with the hatch open. Since most of the sub rode beneath the surface, it cut through the waves more easily than a fishing boat.
I had packed food for three months and fuel for three thousand miles — depending upon how much pedalling I did. My plan was to sail clockwise around Newfoundland, and work south around the Avalon Peninsula, then follow the ferry over to Nova Scotia. I hoped to sail as far south as Halifax, and, if time permitted, out to Sable Island. I had daydreams of stepping onto the beach there and taking a peek at the island’s famous ponies. I would return before the ice. Ziegfried called it “The Grand Tour of the Maritimes,” and asked only that I keep a written log of my adventures that he could read at Christmas time. He gave me another one of his great bear hugs when we said goodbye.
Twenty miles from shore I shut the engine off. A look through the periscope revealed nothing in the dark. Nothing appeared on the radar. Turning on the radio, I found a station that played nice music. Climbing onto the bicycle I began to pedal. My plan was to pedal for two hours, two or three times a day, and work up to a total of ten hours. That would earn one hour of battery power.
After two hours, a peek through the periscope showed the sun coming up. Still nothing showed on the radar. The sonar revealed the ocean floor four hundred feet below. I made a cup of tea and opened a can of peaches for breakfast and was about to climb the portal to watch the sun rise when the radar beeped. Startled, I watched as the screen revealed an object coming in my direction. It was about ten nautical miles away. Taking the binoculars, I climbed the portal and scanned the horizon. There it was — a ship, coming towards me. Likely she was a freighter. Maybe she was coming from Iceland. As I didn’t have the engine running and wasn’t moving, I didn
’t know if the ship could detect me or not. Once I started the engine she certainly would. I thought of calling Ziegfried on the short-wave radio and asking his advice. But he was probably sleeping. Besides, I had to learn to make decisions like that on my own.
The freighter was coming straight on. Maybe she would pass closely. Maybe I should pedal out of the way, or, maybe I should dive and let her pass over me. I went down and took another look at the radar. The ship was eight miles away now. She seemed to be moving pretty fast. I went back up and peered through the binoculars again. Yes, she was a freighter. And she was pretty big. I wondered how deeply I should dive.
Going back inside, I watched the radar indicate the ship was six miles away and closing. It was time to make a decision. Flipping the automatic hatch switch, I waited until it sealed, then let water into the tanks. The sub started to dive. As I went down I watched the ship close in on the sonar. At one hundred feet I stopped and sat still and waited. The ship came directly towards me. I had the eerie feeling she was chasing me.
But she wasn’t. She passed right over my head and kept on going. I heard the roar of her engines loud and clear, as if they were in the next room. As soon as she was a mile away I surfaced. I wanted to get a look at her from behind. Breaking the surface, I opened the hatch and looked out. With binoculars I could tell from the stern and flags that she was a Greek-owned vessel sailing from Norway. Likely she was carrying wood products to St. John’s, or Halifax, or the eastern U.S.
I waited until she was ten miles past before starting up the engine. The sun had risen and revealed a sky of broken cloud. I set a course for the northeastern corner of Newfoundland — a tiny group of islands known as “Little Fogo Islands.” It looked like a quiet spot where I could dive beneath the current and catch some sleep.
By mid-morning I reached them. Sailing in between the islands, I watched the ocean floor rise to seventy-five feet. I climbed out, dropped a line overboard and measured the current. I shut the engine, dove to fifty feet, yawned and stretched. The nice thing about a sub was that you could make it as dark as you liked any time of day. All the same, I left a faint light on and climbed into bed. I also left the radio on, with its floating antenna. It felt nice having the sound of voices. Curling up in my blankets, I listened to the radio and drifted off to sleep.
Waking in the late afternoon, I rose to the surface and opened the hatch. I made a cup of tea and peeled an orange and turned on the short-wave radio. Maybe Ziegfried was trying to reach me. He was.
“Alfred!” came Ziegfried’s voice, crackled and broken. “There’s . . . storm coming . . . by morning . . . things going? Over.”
“I’m in the Little Fogo Islands. Everything’s going great! Over.”
“. . . high winds and heavy rain,. . . the hatch . . . waves . . . okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
“ . . . listen to the radio.”
“I am listening to the radio.”
I finished breakfast and listened to the weather station. A big storm was coming. Recreational boaters were advised to stay off the water. Fishermen too. I was excited. I wanted to witness a storm at sea. If things got too wild on the surface, I could simply go beneath. At a hundred feet you wouldn’t even be able to tell there was a storm.
I charted a course towards Cape Bonavista, past Deadman’s Bay. It could take anywhere from seven to ten hours, depending upon the current, and the storm.
The sky grew progressively darker when I left the shelter of the islands, and the ocean churned itself into massive swells. They washed over all but the very top of the portal. I rode with the hatch open for an hour. I wanted to travel as far as possible before diving. If I had to sail by battery I wouldn’t make it to Cape Bonavista the same day. As the waves crested, water began to splash inside and engage the sump pumps. It began to rain. The sub rose and fell like a bucking horse. It was exciting. And then, I got a terrible fright.
I was leaning towards the stern because the back of the sub would rise clear out of the water as the bow went into a trough, and the propeller would spin with a strange whistling sound. I was leaning out of the hatch, straining to see, when a large wave struck and lifted me right out of the portal! I never had a chance. All I could do was grab a handle and hang on as my whole body was thrown against the side. The sub promptly dove beneath the next swell and took me with it.
It happened so fast, I never had a chance to think. I just held on, then reached up with my other hand and pulled myself up. My arm was full of pain. It was at least sprained, if not broken. With considerable difficulty I reached the hatch and climbed inside. Large splashes came in with me. There were several inches of water on the floor and the sump pumps were going full blast. Reaching the control panel, I shut the hatch and opened the ballast tanks, shut the engine and dove to a hundred feet.
My hand opened and closed, so the arm probably wasn’t broken but was very sore. It was frightening how close I had come to being washed out to sea. The sub was moving too fast to catch; the shore was too far to swim; the rising storm was overwhelming — not to mention that the water was cold. It was a close call, too close to do anything but shudder. Never again would I be so careless. Never again would I hang out of the portal without some sort of safety line. I would make a harness and attach it to a cable, and wear it whenever the sub was moving, storm or not.
I switched to battery power, reset the sub’s course and changed my clothes. The thought of being out in the waves, fighting for my life, haunted me and I tried to think of other things. But it kept coming back. However I turned it around, the same conclusion loomed in front of me: I would have drowned. I’d be swimming around in the huge waves, going nowhere, swallowing seawater and growing weaker. I might have lasted an hour or so, maybe two. Who knows? But I would have drowned. The sub would have sunk, then come back up. It would have gone until it ran out of gas or hit something. Ziegfried would never know what had happened to me. Neither would anyone else. It would be a short bit on the news — a fourteen-year-old boy lost at sea. Everyone would blame Ziegfried. What a terrible mistake! I had to be so much more careful. The sea didn’t care if you were sincere. How true!
After five hours of battery, and two hours of biking, I rose to check on the storm. Even before reaching the surface I could tell it was still raging. It was impossible to walk straight; I had to hold the walls and be careful not to bang my head. Looking out the periscope I couldn’t see anything but water. I tried to reach Ziegfried on the short-wave but heard nothing but static. After fifteen minutes of this circus ride, I dove again. How peaceful it was at one hundred feet.
Five hours later I surfaced again. I was out of battery power and had to run the engine. The storm was still raging. I had to hold on to avoid being flung around inside. As much as I wanted to juice up the batteries, it was no fun getting banged up, especially with a sore arm. There was nothing to do but dive again and pedal. It was becoming clear not only how dangerous a storm was, but how inconvenient it was. Ten hours of pedalling would only gain one hour of battery power. I was reduced to moving at the speed of a canoe. This was not a comforting thought. What if I had to get out of the way of a supertanker, or, something else?
Murphy’s Law. After two and a half hours of pedalling, a beep on the sonar revealed another vessel in the water less than ten miles away. It was coming closer but not directly towards me. If it kept a straight path it would pass by about two miles away. But the closer it came, the more I realized there was something strange about it. Either it was extraordinarily large and deep, or, it was another submarine. If it were a submarine, it had to be a military submarine, which meant it would have listening devices that would tell if it were being detected by another sonar. In other words, they would know I was there.
At six miles I was certain it was a submarine. It was riding between one hundred and fifty and two hundred feet deep. It seemed to take up a lot of space. Then, as I feared, it altered its course and veered slightly in my direction. I didn’t know
what to do. I couldn’t run. If it passed too closely it might spin me around and cause us to collide. If it were a ship, the last thing I would have wanted was to surface. But the sonar clearly indicated it was submerged. I decided to surface.
I came up in the raging storm and frantically scanned the sea with the periscope. If the sonar were somehow wrong and it was a large ship fast approaching, I might get a glimpse of its lights and still have time to dive out of the way. I strained to see in the direction of the sonar beeps but saw nothing. The vessel was closing and would pass on the starboard side. At least it wasn’t coming head on.
I decided to dive to fifty feet. That would take me beneath the worst of the storm and maybe offer a peek at the passing sub. I let water into the tanks, went down and stopped tossing like a fish on the wharf. When the approaching vessel was half a mile away and I was confident it would pass by, I went into the bow and sat in the observation window and watched.
Nothing, nothing . . . and then, silently and ghostly, an enormous dark object started to pass below on the starboard side. There seemed no end to it. I even wondered if it had stopped. But the sonar revealed that it was still moving at a steady speed. It was absolutely enormous. The fact that it was so big and could travel so fast beneath the surface, and so quietly, meant it was a nuclear-powered submarine. Most likely it was American. No doubt it had sophisticated devices that told it everything about me. It must have determined that I was no threat because it passed by and continued on its way.
I breathed a sigh of relief. I made a cup of tea, ate two oranges, climbed onto the bike and resumed pedalling. I felt a lot smaller than before.
Chapter Twelve
The storm abated but the sea did not. The rain stopped, the clouds parted and the sun appeared, but the ocean continued to toss like a pot of bubbling soup. I decided to surface anyway and run the risk of getting seasick. It wasn’t that I minded pedalling, but I was so far out to sea I couldn’t judge if I was getting anywhere. It was possible I was going backwards in the current without even knowing it. So I decided to run the engine and sail within sight of land. At least then I would know.