Chapter Seven

I DIDN’T KNOW WHY I was chasing them except that, if the coastguard wanted them so badly, they must have done something wrong. Besides, I was really curious. But we were all outside the twelve-mile zone. The only rights Canada had in the two hundred mile zone were commercial, and the only commercial interest in the Grand Banks, as far as I knew, was fishing. Was that it? Was the coastguard chasing foreign ships fishing in Canadian waters? But if we were right on the edge of the two hundred mile zone, why would they bother? Couldn’t foreign ships simply slip across to the other side of the zone and snub their noses at the coastguard?

I guess not.

She wasn’t very fast. With all the changes to the sub, we had no trouble catching her. The coastguard must have caught at least one of her sister ships by now. I could also tell they were not very big, nothing like freighters, because they could turn so easily. And yet, in the heavy fog I couldn’t get close enough to see exactly what kind of ship she was, unless … I did what submarines were designed to do.

Just when she must have expected us to catch her, I cut the engine, shut the hatch and dove to one hundred feet. I engaged full battery power and continued to track her on sonar. We would have disappeared from her radar instantly, which must have made them wonder what the heck was going on. Perhaps they had some sort of fishing sonar on board, perhaps not, but I doubted they had any idea they were being chased by a submarine.

On battery it took almost an hour to catch and pass her. We went under her like a whale. In the meantime, I watched the sea floor drop from five hundred feet to an unfathomable depth. We had crossed the continental shelf! Cool! But our renegade ship showed no signs of stopping. She was going to get away! Assuming the coastguard had good reason to chase her, I decided to cut her off.

That wasn’t hard to do. We sailed about a quarter of a mile in front of her and surfaced. As soon as we broke the surface I turned on our floodlights and coasted to a drift. In the fog she would see our lights before she would be able to make out what sort of vessel we were. Most importantly, we would appear on her radar instantly, directly in front of her! That ought to be enough to convince her to stop. If it wasn’t, I was prepared to dive out of the way in a hurry.

Closer and closer she came. I was beginning to feel nervous. I didn’t want to get rammed by a ship. Through the periscope I could barely make out her lights. It seemed as though she was slowing down but I couldn’t be sure. I kept my hand on the switch, ready to dive. Suddenly, there she was, shrouded in streaks of fog, but lit up like a Christmas tree — a fishing trawler, carrying Spanish colours!

She drifted to a stop. Then I heard the radar beep. Another vessel was coming in fast! In fact, it was already upon us. I raced up the portal and opened the hatch to look. The next thing I knew, I heard machine-gun fire! I jumped back down and got ready to dive, but my curiosity got the better of me and I climbed back up the ladder and peeked over the edge of the hatch. Behind the trawler appeared the red and white hull of a Canadian coastguard ship. Through the binoculars I saw coastguard officers firing machine guns across the bow of the trawler! I couldn’t believe it! I watched in amazement as coastguard officers boarded the Spanish ship, arrested the crew and attached a cable from the stern of the coastguard to the bow of the trawler. Were they actually intending to tow the ship all the way back to St. John’s?

Yes indeed.

As I stood in the portal and leaned against the hatch, watching the lights of the two ships vanish in the fog, the coastguard blasted her horn. Was that a farewell to us, a salute for our part in the chase? I liked to think so. I waved back. I didn’t really understand the significance of what had just happened. That would come later. It had been an exciting chase. Now I needed to sleep.

At two hundred feet we did not have radio. The underwater cable that floated to the surface as an antenna only reached one hundred feet. I didn’t mind; we had had enough excitement for one day. Seaweed and Hollie were really good whenever I wanted to sleep. When the sub’s interior lights were turned low they went into hibernation mode. I figured that was an animal/bird instinct thing.

There was no surface current at two hundred feet, but there was current. It flowed in the opposite direction of the current above, but very slowly. I wasn’t really concerned about that. I wasn’t worried about sinking either because the sub had an automatic surfacing gauge that we had set at 237.5 feet. If the sub reached that depth unintentionally, the ballast tanks would automatically fill with air and we would surface. There were also two safety ballast balloons attached to the outside of the hull. They contained pressurized cartridges that were designed to explode at four hundred feet, filling two nylon balloons with enough air to raise the sub. It never crossed my mind that the sub might surface for any other reason. I brushed my teeth, stretched, wished the crew a goodnight and climbed into my hanging cot, suspended by bungee cords to compensate for the pitch and toss of the sub. Within minutes I was dead to the world.

I woke eight hours later … on the surface! I knew we were on the surface because of the movement of the sub, and there was a faint hue coming up through the observation window — light from the sea. I climbed the portal and opened the hatch. It was a clear, sunny day. I looked all around and wondered if I was dreaming. How had we surfaced? Had we drifted down to 237.5 feet and then risen? But why? I would have to make a close inspection of everything and call Ziegfried on the short wave. But first I turned on the radio and listened to the news from St. John’s. I wondered if the fishing trawler incident had made the news. It had! And how!

“… Spanish authorities are calling for immediate retaliation. No retaliatory action has been ruled out …,” said the radio.

Holy smokes! It had become an international story already. As usual, the news-people made it sound like more than it had really been.

“Spain considers Canada’s high-seas chase and violent assault on its fishing fleet an act of war,” one announcer said.

An act of war! It was just an old beat-up trawler. I was surprised it had crossed the Atlantic without sinking. I sure hoped Canada and Spain wouldn’t go to war over it. I tried to reach Ziegfried on the short wave.

“Al! Como estas?”

“What?”

“That’s Spanish. It means ‘how are you?’”

“Oh. Good. Did you hear the news?”

“You bet we did! Did you see any Spanish trawlers on your way across the Grand Banks?”

“Uhhh … yup.”

“Really? Up close?”

“Uhhh … sort of.”

“Interesting. And everything’s working all right?”

“Ummm … sort of.”

“Sort of? What do you mean, ‘sort of?’ What’s wrong, Al?”

“Nothing really, but the sub rose by itself. I went to sleep at two hundred feet and woke on the surface.”

“It surfaced by itself? Ohhhhh … that’s not good. Listen, Al. You’ve got to make a thorough inspection of everything right away, okay?”

“I know. I was just about to.”

“Good. And then, when you’ve finished, you’ve got to run tests. Practise diving, sit in one spot for several hours and watch your depth. See if you sink or rise, okay? This is very important, Al. You must inspect and test everything thoroughly. You know that, right?”

“Yes, I know. Don’t worry, I will.”

“Maybe you should come back here and we can test it together.”

“No. No, it’s okay. Maybe I just made a mistake and didn’t shut off the air valve properly when I went to sleep.”

“Well, check that first, and keep me posted, okay?”

“Okay.”

“You promise to keep me posted, right?”

“I promise. I’ll start an inspection right away.”

“And tests, right?”

“Right.”

Yikes! The last thing I wanted to do was return. Ziegfried would run tests all summer long and I wouldn’t get back to sea until the fall. After we hung up I began my inspection. Hollie saw me examining things and he immediately joined me, sniffing at every corner with his sharp little nose. Seaweed was up in the sky somewhere. After two hours of close examination I hadn’t found anything suspicious at all. When Seaweed returned, I decided to make a test. I shut the hatch, dove to a hundred feet, opened a bag of popcorn and sat in front of the depth gauge.

Seaweed loved popcorn. Hollie didn’t care for it much, but if Seaweed was eating, he had to eat too. What they both really liked was catching it. We made a game of it while I stared at the gauge. No change. The sub sat perfectly still for a whole hour.

“Okay, that’s it, guys. Let’s go.”

I decided to continue our journey. I’d call Ziegfried later. He wouldn’t be satisfied with my testing, I knew. He was a perfectionist when it came to testing. But I didn’t want to hang around in the middle of the ocean doing nothing. And I sure as heck didn’t want to return to Newfoundland.

I surfaced, flicked the engine switch and got ready to leave, except … there was one little problem: I didn’t know where we were. I mean, I didn’t know where we were exactly. I knew where we were approximately, and I knew that all we had to do was sail east and we’d reach Portugal. But I didn’t want to miss the Azores. For that, I had to know with greater certainty where we were. We had obviously drifted with the current after we had surfaced. How far, I didn’t know. I had sea charts, of course, but once I lost track of where we were, it was kind of hard to find our exact location. Sea navigation is a lot trickier when you are far from land because of currents and a few other things, such as the fact that magnetic north is about eight hundred miles away from true north. Basically, you have to take compass readings. Normally that would be impossible on a submarine because of all the metal that interferes with the magnetic pull of the North Pole. But it is possible to compensate for that by placing magnets around the compass in just such a way as to correct for true north. And that’s what Ziegfried had done. That was the theory anyway; practise is something else. Even experienced sailors get lost at sea.

After half an hour of taking compass readings, checking the charts carefully and measuring the current, I made my best guess on our position, turned east, cranked up the engine, climbed up on the bike and started to pedal.

I pedalled on and off during the night and listened to the radio. I heated up a frozen pizza, peeled a couple of oranges, made tea and played tug-of-war with a piece of rope. Seaweed and I teamed up against Hollie, and lost. Hollie was really possessive with his rope. But Seaweed didn’t try very hard. He wasn’t really interested in closing his beak around anything he couldn’t swallow. After a quiet night at sea, during which we did not encounter a single vessel, we settled at two hundred feet, at a spot I carefully marked on the chart, and went to sleep. In the late afternoon I woke … on the surface! And we had drifted.