The Boat Who Wouldn't Float

by Farley Mowat

  I hope the good fishermen of Richibucto will forgive me, but once we were well at sea again I returned the lobsters to their native element. I had to do it. There was no way we were going to get on with our voyage as long as my mate had to spend all his time, and occupy both his hands, trying to alleviate a remorseless itch.

  We sailed all that night, passed by Escuminac, and began the long haul across the broad and treacherous mouth of Chaleur Bay. Jack celebrated our departure from sight of land by indulging in a fit of absent-mindedness.

  I had ordered him to stream the log; the brass cylinder on the end of a long log-line which recorded the distance run. He streamed it all right, but forgot to make the end of the line fast to the boat. I shall long cherish the memory of his face as he stood on the afterdeck, peering with a puzzled expression at his empty hands through which the last few inches of line had just run free. Despite the loss of the log, a cherished antique, I could not forbear laughing—and that was foolish of me. When, an hour later, we began to run into gale conditions and I decided to put back to Miscou for the night. Jack turned on me.

  “Put back? God almighty, that’s all you ever do! If you had the guts of a canary you’d hold your course. Afraid to die, are you? Bloody coward!”

  I was very much afraid to die, but I was also afraid of having to live with Jack in future years unless I took his dare.

  The crossing of Chaleur Bay was a wicked experience. We spent the night bucketing through some of the worst weather I have ever seen. Even the excellent Prince Edward Island clay could not keep its hold in the fearful seaway that was tossing us about like an ice-cube in a cocktail shaker. The clay washed out of Happy Adventure’s seams, and we were soon in a sinking condition and desperately looking for a landfall.

  We eventually found one at Grande Riviere, a hamlet on the north shore of the bay, into which we pumped our way just before noon.

  Grande Rivière was the first shore village we encountered that was not kind to men in little boats. It had no mud bank worthy of the name. The nearest approximation we could find was a peaty cutbank marking the shore side of somebody’s cabbage garden. We backed Happy Adventure against this bank, and her counter hung right over the first row of cabbages. We were doing the cabbages no harm, but the owner of the garden, a sour old crone with a piercing voice, thought otherwise. She stood on the shore and harangued us until Jack lost patience. Assuming his most menacing scowl he glared down at her and in a thickly accented voice informed her that we were two officers of the Soviet Navy, sailing our small boat from Leningrad to Expo 67.

  “Een Rahssia, old vimmen who makes too much noise we poot to slee-eep!” he told her, and made as if to jump ashore.

  She fled in haste, and we were still chuckling about the incident half an hour later when we noticed two car-loads of Quebec Provincial Police pull up at the side of the highway a quarter of a mile from us, and pile out to form a squad armed with riot guns.

  “You and your jokes!” I said bitterly as I dived for the engine. Jack said nothing. He was too busy straining to help the diesel get us off the shore into deep water.

  Still leaking, Happy Adventure fled out into Chaleur Bay seeking a more hospitable haven. It was a bright and sunny day. It soon became so hot that we were moved to strip off all our clothes as we pumped our way around Cap d’Espoir, and opened a stunning view of Bonaventure Island, Percé Rock, and the towering Gaspé cliffs beyond. For almost the first time on the voyage up through the gulf we had a favouring wind and as we closed with Percé Rock, our tanned sails set and drawing, we must have added considerably to the picturesqueness of the scene. At any rate we attracted the attention of a big sightseeing boat loaded with tourists.

  The captain of the boat changed course to bring his herd of gawkers close alongside Happy Adventure, and as a score of cameras began to click, Jack, who is a gentleman first and foremost, uncoiled himself from his position in the cockpit, stood up to his full height, and bowed formally toward the array of glittering lenses.

  Alas, this courteous gesture was not appreciated. The captain of the cruise boat thrust an enraged face out of his steering cabin and began cursing at us in piquant French. Several male passengers waved their fists at us. Others shook their cameras. One particularly solidly built matron stood up, at great risk to herself, and bellowed something about “filthy nudists.” The tour boat put on speed and tore away in high dudgeon leaving us bewildered and not a little hurt.

  “Ah, well,” said Jack resignedly as he settled his sunburned carcass back in the cockpit. “That’s what you get for trying to be nice to people. Let it be a lesson to you, Mowat.”

  Once beyond Cap Gaspé, and properly into the estuary of the mighty St. Lawrence River, our progress slowed from a healthy snail’s pace, to that of a badly crippled one. This was not entirely Happy Adventure’s fault, although our anxious search for suitable mud banks, in almost every little port we passed, inevitably resulted in some delay.

  The major difficulty was that we were now “going uphill.” When the tide flowed against us, as it did for twelve hours out of every twenty-four, it combined with the current of the great river to set us back toward the gulf at from three to five knots. Since our maximum speed was not much better than five knots, there were times when we spent hours virtually sitting in the same place. This enabled us to have a leisurely look at the magnificent scenery, but it had a bad effect upon Jack’s temper. When he originally assessed the length of time it would take us to reach Montreal he had probably been subconsciously thinking in terms of a motor torpedo boat capable of making forty knots. At any rate he had failed to allow for head winds, head tide, head seas and head currents.

  One day we spent an entire morning staring at the unchanging shape of Fame Point looming a few miles ahead of us, and by noon Jack was fuming.

  “Christ Almighty,” he burst out. “We could swim to Montreal faster than this!”

  He was overstating the case a little, but was not far enough off the mark that I cared to argue with him. I kept my peace because, although he was not yet aware of it, we were changing our position in regard to Fame Point. We were getting farther and farther away from it!

  It was just plain bad luck that at this juncture we should be overtaken by a Montreal-bound freighter going west at about fifteen knots. It was not the freighter that set the seal on Jack’s unhappiness—it was the spectacle of a handsome sailing yacht nestled contentedly on the freighter’s deck: and the sight of three people whom we could only assume must be the crew of the yacht, taking their ease in deck chairs beside their pretty boat.

  That night, when we parked Happy Adventure on a mud bank in the tiny port of L’Anse-à-Valleau, somewhat east of Fame Point, we had lost five miles of our precious westering.

  We also lost Jack McClelland. For the second time in his experience with our little vessel, he was forced to leave her somewhat short of her destination. About nine hundred miles short of it.

  Jack felt badly about abandoning me on this remote coast but, as he had done before, he swore he would find me a new mate. I did not believe him, since neither of us knew a soul within hundreds of miles of L’Anse-à-Valleau. Jack departed in a hired car for Gaspé. forty miles away, leaving me despondent and alone and faced with the awful prospect of having to proceed single-handed—if I was to proceed at all.

  Three hours later I was roused from my gloomy ruminations below decks by a hail from the wharf.

  “Is that the boat called the Unhappy Misadventure?”

  Now I occasionally allow myself to say uncomplimentary things about my vessel, but no one else is going to do it with impunity. Stung to the quick I leapt up the companionway.

  “Who the hell wants to know?” I yelled angrily.

  Far above me (it was low tide, and the schooner’s deck was twenty feet below the level of the wharf) a tousled head of hair appeared against the sky. Below it was a young, sunburned face whose innocent blue eyes looked down at me with some timidity.

&nb
sp; “Sorry, sir, but Mr. Macklunon said I was to look for a boat of that name. I’m supposed to be her mate.”

  I invited the owner of the face aboard and all six-foot-lanky-six of him crawled awkwardly down the iron ladder. He introduced himself as Glen Wilson, age twenty-one, formerly a Pfc in the U.S. armed forces, now a free wanderer upon the face of the globe. Having left the U.S. Army rather suddenly after a disagreement about the validity of the Vietnam war, Glen had smartly betaken himself across the border into British Columbia, and was hitch-hiking his way eastward to Newfoundland. He had been standing on a bridge at Gaspé when a car pulled up alongside him and, as he described it:

  “A flashy looking guy with blond hair got out, looked me over, and asked me had I ever sailed a boat. I told him. no, I’d never even been in a boat. He asked would I like to try it once, and heck, I thought, why not? Next thing I knew I was in the car and he was telling the French driver something. Then he shook my hand, told me I was going to go on the schooner. Unhappy Misadventure, bound for Montreal, and here I am. I hope you don’t mind too much.”

  I was amused at first, then thoughtful. It seemed unlikely that this young foot-slogger would be of much assistance to me, but at least he would be company. I misjudged him. Glen was a natural-born sailor who was about to find his proper métier for the first time.

  L’Anse-à-Valleau gave me more than a new mate—it gave me good advice. That evening a portly, dignified, French gentleman came to the wharf, and introduced himself as the retired captain of one of the unique St. Lawrence river vessels called goélettes. I told him something of my frustrations in trying to climb the hill, and he explained how it should be done.

  We should, he told us, sail mainly at night when the prevailing westerly wind goes down; as far as possible we should make our runs with the rising tide; and we should stay within a mile of the shore in order to catch a series of reverse currents which set upstream instead of down.

  That very night we put this new formula to the test, and it worked splendidly. By daybreak we were sixty miles west of Fame Point. This so heartened me that we kept going all that day and all of the next night, and might have kept going indefinitely had we not been forced to seek out another mud bank.

  However we were now on a coast where mud banks simply did not exist. After trying two or three little harbours we had to settle for a sawdust pile; the spillage from a lumber mill that had been dumped into a shallow basin forming an artificial bar. Although the sawdust treatment worked quite well, it did not measure up to Prince Edward Island clay. As a connoisseur of mud banks I can assert that the red clay of the island cannot be surpassed for certain nautical purposes.

  Ever since leaving the Bras d’Or lakes, Happy Adventure had behaved moderately well, except of course for her leakage, which was chronic. She seemed to be not just resigned to the voyage, but actually enjoying it. However that mood did not last long after we began running into the ship traffic in the mouth of the river.

  Apart from a few freighters we had met in the gulf, she had never really seen big ships before. When, one night, we encountered three liners, an aircraft carrier, a fifty-thousand-ton ore carrier, and scores of other vessels, all of which ignored us completely, and sent us scuttling like demented water spiders to avoid being run down, Happy Adventure balked.

  She did so in her usual, inimitable style. We were under power about ten miles from Rimouski when an ear-splitting scream burst from the engine room. A moment later the engine stalled.

  It did not take long to find the trouble. The reduction gearbox was so hot it glowed. When it cooled I found that every bearing and gear in it had melted or exploded. The high temperature lubricant in the box had mysteriously vanished. This seemed impossible, because I had checked the level and filled the box only the previous day. It was not, of course, impossible. At the bottom of the box was a drain plug whose existence I had never even suspected. Happy Adventure knew about it. I found it some days later, lying in the bilge, several feet distant from the box.

  We sailed back to Rimouski, and there we stayed for ten interminable days while we waited for spare parts that apparently had to come from Outer Monogolia via camel post.

  However the long wait at Rimouski was not a total loss. Moored near us was a weather-beaten and sadly neglected little schooner from somewhere in Nova Scotia. One day, when an onshore blow made our moorings uncomfortable, we moved over and lay alongside this schooner. Her story was an unhappy one—but it had a useful moral. She had been bought several years earlier by a young couple from Toronto who had then tried to sail her up the river. After wrestling with her for a month or more, her owners gave up, tied her up at Rimouski, and went away, never to return.

  It was perhaps underhanded of me, but I arranged with the man who told me the story to come aboard Happy Adventure one night, and tell it again. When he was through I asked him what would happen to the forlorn little vessel.

  “The government, they take her for wharfage fees,” he said, and, brutally, “they sell her cheap to some fellow in the town. This winter he will haul her out and cut her up for firewood. Good riddance, too.”

  That night Happy Adventure did not leak a drop. When we departed for Quebec on September first, she behaved so well that we ran on by day and by night.

  Glen had made such good progress as a sailor that I was able to entrust him with short tricks at the tiller while I napped below decks. We passed Murray Bay on a moonless, cloudy night that was as dark as pitch. At about one in the morning I was unable to keep awake any longer, so I gave Glen a course on the distant lighthouse at Goose Cape, telling him to steer for it until it was getting close, then to call me back on deck.

  He did not call me, and at half past three I awoke feeling vaguely conscious of something being not quite right. Sleepily I went on deck and looked about me. Far ahead—as far away as it had been when I went to my bunk—I saw a light.

  “What the hell?…” I said to Glen who was sitting stolidly at the tiller. “We should have been abeam of Goose Cape light long ago. What the devil’s happening?…”

  “Couldn’t say, Captain.” He always, called me Captain, a hangover from his army days perhaps. “It got closer for a while, but it sure don’t get no closer now.”

  I looked at the compass, and the awful truth dawned on me. Somehow Glen had switched his attention from the light on Goose Cape to the bright masthead light of a big ship heading east down the southern channel. Happy Adventure was making about seven knots over the bottom, on a falling tide, and heading resolutely for salt water and for home. This time, however, nobody could lay the blame on her.

  We came about and resumed our uphill course and, despite heavy traffic and a spell of abominable weather, we reached the Citadel City at dusk on September fourth. Montreal and Expo 67 now seemed just around the corner.

  At Quebec Happy Adventure changed crews for the last time. If she had done nothing else during her chequered career, she could at least now lay claim to having been instrumental in leading one human being to a new way of life. Glen Wilson left us to sign on as ordinary seaman on a Norwegian freighter outbound for Pernambuco. The sea had claimed him.

  Claire and Albert rejoined the ship and I was as glad to see them as they were to get aboard again. That evening we departed for Montreal.

  The journey up river was anti-climactic. Still shivering at the fate that had befallen her Nova Scotian sister at Rimouski, Happy Adventure behaved like the angel she was not. The weather was inland summer weather: hot, muggy, almost windless. The river itself posed no problems because, while in Quebec, I had met the skipper of a goélette, and he had taught me the tricks involved in climbing the remaining slopes. We did as the goélettes did, riding the rising tide against the current, and anchoring in some snug cove when tide and current both flowed against us.

  Our only immediate difficulty was with the river traffic. As the ship channels grew narrower, big ships grew more numerous. At one exceedingly narrow bend, just past the head of L
ac St. Pierre, we found ourselves facing a twenty-thousand-ton downbound tanker—while being overtaken by an equally gigantic upbound grain carrier. Although neither of these behemoths bore us any ill will, it was impossible for them to alter course and so make room for us. We had to seek our own salvation. We sought it by scuttling right out of the channel into the shoal water, where the wake of the tanker struck us like a tidal wave and washed us almost high and dry on a spoil bank. Moments later the wake from the grain carrier, rebounding from the shore, washed us off and back into the channel again. Albert thought this was great fun. Claire and I wished fervently that we were back In the wide, grey, empty wastes of the North Atlantic.

  From Trois Riviéres, where we lost the last tidal influence, we entered still another world—a truly horrid one. This was the world of motor pleasure craft. Overpowered, overbearing, all over the channel, they made life hell for slow, deep-draft vessels like ours. Storming along at twenty knots, pushing half the river ahead of them and sucking the other half behind, they made more noise and disturbance than the big freighters; and most of their owners were not only devoid of elementary courtesy, but seemed to know nothing of the rules of the road, and to care less.

  A torrent of these raucous, ostentatious toys made our final day on the river an ordeal. It was fearfully hot and we were near exhaustion, having run almost continuously from Trois Riviéres. As the hours wore on and more and more power boats sent us pitching wildly in their wake we grew increasingly distraught. By the time we raised the unlovely skyline of oil refineries at the eastern edge of Montreal, and entered the stinking yellow pall of smoke they laid across the river, we were near the end of our tether.

  Hot, sticky, dirty, and excessively tired, I began to wonder why we had gone to all this trouble to drag our little vessel from a world of cool and quiet peace to this brimstone cauldron. I was still wondering as we came abreast of the heart of Montreal and began trying to locate the fabulous goal at the end of this shoddy rainbow.