Chapter Eight

I HAD PROMISED TO keep Ziegfried posted, so I called him again on the short wave. The weather was good, the reception clear.

“Al! Great! Good to hear from you, buddy. How’s the sub working?”

“Great!”

“Everything’s working properly?”

“Yup. Everything’s working just right.”

“And you made the tests?”

“Yup. The sub never rose or fell an inch.”

“And did you find anything wrong?”

“Nope.”

“Nothing?”

“Nope.”

“So you still don’t know why it surfaced by itself?”

“No. I guess it’s a mystery.”

“Al, submarines don’t just surface by themselves. There’s got to be something wrong somewhere.”

He paused.

“Maybe you’d better bring her back.”

“Oh, no, I’m sure everything’s all right. It was just a weird thing. I’m sure it won’t happen again.”

“But if it happens, you’ll tell me, right?”

“Uh huh.”

“Hmmm … I don’t like the sound of it, Al, not one little bit.”

“It’s okay, really. So … do you think we’re going to war against the Spanish?”

“Holy smokes, I sure hope not! You wouldn’t believe the crazy talk here, and the crazy talk there. I’m sure glad you didn’t get messed up in that, eh?”

“Yah.”

I felt badly for not telling Ziegfried everything, but he would only worry. There would be lots of bumps along the road in my journey. I knew that. I didn’t want him to have to worry every single time. After a breakfast of oranges, cookies and dog biscuits with the crew, I took our bearing, made my best guess at the charts, cranked up the engine, climbed onto the bicycle seat and headed east. Seaweed took to the sky. Hollie ran around and around the stationary bike, then wrestled with a piece of rope. I tuned the radio to Spanish guitar.

After a while I climbed the portal to make sure Seaweed was still within sight. Boy, did I get a surprise!

I poked my head out the portal and found myself surrounded by a dozen large, strange-looking geese lined up on the bow and stern, just the way submariners line up during a ceremony. They had obviously flown a long way and were very tired. They tucked their beaks into their feathers and went right to sleep, oblivious to me or to the rather territorial Seaweed, who was making a fuss about it over their heads, to no avail; the geese rested until they were good and ready to leave.

It became common for really tough looking, long-distance seabirds to drop out of the sky and treat the sub like a mini-aircraft carrier. But landing was difficult and sometimes they would miss the hull altogether and hit the sea. Then they would shake the water from their wings and hop up. Seaweed didn’t like it but I felt honoured to have them.

On the third night the sky was clear and the stars glittered like diamonds and sapphires. There were so many! If you stared at any black spot long enough, you would eventually see a star. I stood in the portal, mesmerized, with Hollie under my arm and Seaweed on the bow. Once in a while we would hear a splash in the water but wouldn’t see anything. Hollie would bark, but I never knew what he was barking at. After the sun came up, on our fourth day at sea, I dove to two hundred feet, turned the lights low, got cozy and went to sleep. Nine hours later we woke on the surface again, in a tossing sea.

I couldn’t believe it! Always the sub was rising to the surface, never sinking, at least not while I was awake. Why was that? I knew I hadn’t made tests as thoroughly as Ziegfried would have liked, but I did test a little, and nothing had moved at all. What was going on?

On our fourth night at sea I figured we were roughly halfway to the Azores and probably a bit north. I’d have a better idea when we were closer. The sea was changing now. The small choppy waves had become rising swells. The sun had disappeared in the day. There would be no stars this night. But the biggest indication that bad weather was coming was Seaweed. When we came out for our evening air, he took to the sky but didn’t go far. Then, he landed on the stern instead of the bow, and seemed a bit agitated. Very uncharacteristic of him, he came inside earlier than usual. Little did I know what was really on his mind.

It was just a little while later; I was in the engine compartment making a routine inspection when seawater began rushing into the sub! We were diving! Horrified, I raced to the ladder, pulled myself up under the water flooding in, grabbed hold of the hatch, pulled it shut and sealed it. Whew! I was shocked! I was completely soaked. I looked down. Hollie was looking up at me. He was soaked too. There were several inches of water on the floor and the sump pumps were running full blast trying to remove it. I had a terrible feeling in my stomach. The sub was malfunctioning. We would have to return to Newfoundland. It was too dangerous now.

I felt so disappointed, so terribly disappointed, I could barely contain it. I went to the control panel, slumped down on the seat and dropped my head. I felt like crying. But what would that solve? It was a setback, nothing more. Explorers didn’t cry at setbacks; children did. The mature thing to do was to recognize that there was a problem and take the proper steps to fix it, even if that meant returning and starting all over again. That’s what Ziegfried would have said, and he always knew what he was talking about. If I wanted to survive at sea all by myself, then I had to face the challenges and setbacks like an adult. And so, I didn’t let myself cry. Instead, I took a deep breath and turned … just in time to see Seaweed raise a foot towards the switches. It was him! The little rascal! It was Seaweed all along! I couldn’t believe it! I opened my mouth to give him a scolding but caught myself. What was the point in scolding a seagull? Besides, he was a valuable member of the crew. I would just have to watch him around the control panel and cover it with a blanket when I was sleeping. Suddenly I was so happy I wanted to yell. I didn’t know if that was very adult-like or not. I did it anyway.

Returning to the surface, I couldn’t wait to call Ziegfried and explain what had happened. But the reception was poor. Ziegfried said there was another storm on the way and that I ought to brace myself. He said to keep a low profile in Spain, too; there was a storm on the political front.

The nice thing about a submarine is that you could simply dive beneath a storm and not even know it was there. But it did make navigation more difficult, and, in truth, I wasn’t navigating nearly as well as I thought I would. I would take a bearing, check the sea charts and more or less guess where we were. Then I’d do it an hour later and find that we were too far away from the first reading. We were always moving east, that much I knew for sure. I could always tell by the sun and stars, although the sun and stars were covered now and we only had the compass. And the worse the weather became, the poorer the compass reading was.

There wasn’t much danger to the sub in a storm, but getting tossed around on the surface could get pretty uncomfortable and seasickness was hard to avoid. So, we would submerge. Beneath the surface we had twenty hours of battery power when the batteries were fully charged, and I could pedal. All together we could sail for about twenty-two hours submerged, which might be enough to sail out of the storm if it were blowing in the opposite direction. If it were blowing in the same direction it was better to stay where we were and let it pass, although twenty-two hours submerged was kind of hard on the crew. We had to surface from time to time anyway to fill the air compressors. We needed a constant supply of compressed air for diving, surfacing and breathing. I kept a close eye on the air gauges as a matter of habit. That’s what was difficult about a storm — the inconvenience. On the sea, they started earlier and lasted longer. Having said that, I had to admit that storms at sea were pretty exciting. You never knew what might be coming your way …