The Boat Who Wouldn't Float (18 page)

It was with difficulty that Théo marshalled us back to
Oregon
. It was past time for us to go, because the tide had already begun to fall as we drove through the shoals to the mouth of the Barachois and into its narrow entrance.

The place was truly magical. There was a faint almost intangible mist although the sun burned clear above us. Distant objects wavered and grew unreal in a combination of mirage and haze. The mercury surface of the broad lagoon shimmered in strange patterns, the cause of which was not at once apparent to us. It was only when
Oregon
had fought her way, fishtailing like a salmon, through the entry against the swirling outflow that we could see and identify hundreds of sleek, black heads bobbing up and down, each sending out its own spreading cosmos of silvered ripples.

Miquelon's great lagoon belongs to seals—to the big, gentle grey seals. Their rookeries once gave life to a thousand off-
shore islands and reefs from Labrador south to Cape Hatteras, but the grey seals fell easy prey to man, not because they are stupid but because they are possessed of remarkable innocence combined with great curiosity. For more than fifty years their only remaining haven was the Grand Barachois. Now, under protection, small colonies have moved out from this place to reoccupy some of their old haunts. Meanwhile the Barachois harbours as many as three thousand of them, young and old.

The Barachois is shoal, being nowhere more than three feet deep at low tide, and its bottom is the home of millions of clams that provide an inexhaustible food supply for the seals, and an infallible source of codfish bait for St. Pierre fishermen. Shell piles thirty feet tall, rising like white pyramids in the unclear distance, testified to the wealth of the lagoon.

At low tide two-thirds of the Barachois dries out in a random pattern of sand and mudbanks, with narrow and extremely shoal channels full of racing waters running between them. As we entered, the tops of the banks were just beginning to emerge, and Théo had to use all his skill and knowledge to find and to stay in the channels.

The rest of us were free to stare with incredulity at the myriad seals that rose around us and stared back. They were of all ages and all sizes, from pups of the year that thrust their wrinkled faces up to peer myopically at us from a few yards away, to ancient bulls weighing at least four hundred pounds that stood on their tail flippers, raising their bodies high out of the water to glare at us with a hint of challenge.

As the dory galumphed its way along, the seals gathered from distant parts of the lagoon until we were surrounded by them. The current-roiled waters were filled with twitching whiskers and pop-eyes. We passed one partly exposed bank upon which more than a hundred had already hauled out to sunbathe. They turned as one to watch us pass, but the day was too drowsy for action and they soon went back to sleep.

It took Théo an hour to wend his way to the northern
shore, under the loom of the Miquelon mountains, where Martin had a little hunting cabin. Here our passengers debarked, but we three crewmen had no time to go ashore. The tide was falling fast and we knew that if we did not immediately escape we would be marooned in the middle of the watery waste for ten hours or more. We fled for the entrance of the lagoon.

Because the St. Pierre and Miquelon dories must be beached each night their owners have invented a remarkable method of protecting the shafts and propellers. The shaft is equipped with a universal joint at the point where it descends through the bottom of the boat; and toward the stern there is a wooden-walled well. When a dory approaches shoal water, a handle protruding from this well is hauled upward and the propeller and shaft are lifted into the well, leaving the bottom clean of all protuberances.

As Théo sniffed for a passage where none seemed to exist, he delegated me to stand by the handle and, at his warning shout, to haul the propeller up before it struck bottom. Several times we lost the channels and drifted in three or four inches of water over the bars, but always we found another channel with sufficient depth to permit us to lower the propeller and put the engine back to work.

Then, halfway to the entry, I was just a trifle slow in answering Théo's bellow. There was a shuddering impact, the engine stopped, and we found ourself disabled.

We still had oars—or sweeps—massive fifteen-foot things, one of which was as much as a man could handle. However St. Pierre was twenty miles or more away. I assumed we would row back to Martin's shack from which point a ten-mile overland walk would have taken one of us to Miquelon, to arrange for a tow or perhaps to procure replacement parts.

I did not know Théophile Detcheverry. We rowed, if that is the word for manipulating the huge sweeps between their wooden thole-pins, the other way. We rowed and we rowed, frequently grounding, until we reached the entrance channel. Here we anchored in deep water in order to examine the damage.

Since
Oregon
was far too heavy to permit the three of us to haul her out and, since Théo could not swim, and I was too much of a gentleman to delegate the job to Claire, I stripped off my clothing and went diving. The water was bitterly cold but crystal clear. My first dive showed me that the propeller shaft was hopelessly bent. This, together with other damage, was beyond our means of repair. The best I could do was to attempt to release the shaft, so that the propeller could be hauled up into its housing out of the way.

This took some time and it attracted an audience. During my third dive I found myself staring, from a range of three feet, at a large, female, grey seal. At least I assumed it was a female, for it seemed to take an intense and uninhibited interest in me, thrusting its inquisitive head so close that, in my nudity, I would have blushed had I been able. Not being able (because I was blue with cold), I swam ashore where I stood, shivering and indignant, trying to explain my predicament to Claire and Théo. They were unsympathetic. Théo assured me that, in my semi-frozen state, I would be quite secure from sexual molestation. Claire merely smirked.

I went back to work and this time there were three seals waiting to give me a hand, or whatever it was they had in mind. Turning my back on them I finally freed the propeller, surfaced, and climbed aboard.

“You see,” said Théo, and I think he was a little disappointed, “nothing happened, eh?”

I was at a loss to guess what Théo planned to do next but he soon told us. “Maintenant,” he said firmly, “we sail home!”

I had not known we had a sail—and
what
a sail it proved to be. I think it must have belonged originally to a Greek trireme for it was of unbelievable antiquity. Of leg-of-mutton cut, it was so thin and sere that what wind there was (and there was hardly more than a zephyr) blew right through it.

With the aid of the sweeps we bucked out through the wild rip, where the incoming swell met the outgoing tide, until we were again in the open ocean.

Now the shore mist, which had seemed so lovely while
we were in the Barachois, became an enemy, for it obscured the low line of the dunes and dissolved the images of Miquelon and Langlade. We were soon alone upon an empty ocean with no land in sight.

Not that there was any reason to worry about getting lost.
Oregon
did have a compass. Théo proudly produced it from under the thwart and casually set it on top of the engine hatch—on top of three hundred pounds of iron. The compass must have been, I think, Chinese, circa twelfth century. Its cover glass was so sand-etched that it was impossible to read the card. However since the pivot and the card were rusted into one, this hardly signified. The fact was we
had
a compass. Théo never looked at it, which may have been just as well.

Oregon
sailed on. The sail kept falling down as its rotten halyards snapped. Then the lashings on the boom began to part. That sail was down for repairs more often than it was up. No matter. We idled in a generally southerly direction with a growing sense of unreality and, strangely, of contentment. We should have been distraught but we were not. We stretched full length on the hatch boards in the late afternoon sun, drank wine, ate
pâté de foie gras
, chatted, snoozed, and whiled the time away with a lack of concern that, in retrospect, is difficult to explain. We might well have whiled away an entire infinity of time—had not the wind begun to shift. Mysteriously, it began to swing until it had gone through a full one hundred and eighty degrees, and had settled into the southeast.

Théo and I exchanged glances, although we said nothing aloud. There was no point in speaking our thoughts to Claire, but both of us knew that such a switch, at such a season of the year, under such conditions as had prevailed all day, meant storm.

I was not much worried even then. There was something about Théo's craggy certainty and something about the enduring qualities of
Oregon
that banished fear. Even if we were in for a blow I felt sure
Oregon
would weather it. Neverthe
less, I was glad when the shore mist vanished and we found ourselves in sight of Langlade, and about five miles off its shores.

We could get no closer to the land because
Oregon
, having no keel, would not sail to weather. The wind was now rising briskly on our starboard beam and the sail, shrunken by repeated repairs into a mere rag, was moving us along at two or three knots. We were going generally in the direction of St. Pierre and were not dissatisfied with our progress, until Théo gestured with his head and I looked astern. The grey-black loom of fog was rolling in across the hills of Langlade, rolling implacably toward us.

At this juncture the rotten mast broke in half. We could have jury-rigged a sweep to take its place, but Théo vetoed this. The sweeps were needed. We would now, he told us, row to the eastward, until we gained shelter from the approaching storm under the lee of Langlade's cliffs.

So row we did, and made pathetically little progress for the current was setting off the land. And then we saw another motor dory hugging the shore under Anse aux Soldats, and going hell-bent for the beach at Grande Rivière. Claire promptly climbed up on our engine hatch and began waving Théo's yellow oilskin jacket on the end of a boathook. She waved it bravely, but either the distant dory did not see us, or was in too much of a hurry to reach shelter herself to come to our assistance.

The fog began pouring off the cliffs of Langlade and soon that island vanished. Théo and I rowed. God, how we rowed! The fog rolled closer, a scant two miles away, and we knew we were not going to make it to shore. Then Claire leapt to her feet again, balanced herself precariously, and began to wave her flag so furiously I thought she would go overboard. She had heard the distant mutter of another engine. We rested for a moment and listened too. Then, very faintly, we saw the shape of a vessel at the edge of the fog bank. She was making knots toward St. Pierre.

Now we all waved, and Théo roared. I blew a huge conch
horn that was normally used for a fog warning. The stranger vessel held to her course, entered the fog bank, disappeared, and then miraculously reappeared heading directly for us.

She was the
St. Eugène
, a big power launch belonging to the commune of St. Pierre and used as a passenger boat between that place and Miquelon. When she came alongside and took our tow-rope, her skipper told us that neither he nor any member of his crew had seen or heard us. However an old woman (the widow of a dory fisherman lost on the Plate Banks many years earlier), who was sitting wrapped in a blanket in the stern, thought she glimpsed a boat far out to sea. She was ignored until she became so insistent that, despite his own anxiety to reach port, the skipper turned back out of the fog to set her mind at rest.

He also told us that the first hurricane warning of the season had been issued, and all shipping had been advised to seek shelter immediately.

To say that Claire and I were happy to be under tow would be an understatement; but Théo was not at all happy. While I took the tiller he stood amidship. arms crossed, head hunched forward between his massive shoulders, ignoring the good-natured banter from the crew of the
St. Eugène
, and seemingly unaware of the world around him. For him this was ignominy. For the first time in his seafaring life he had been forced to take a tow.

Sea and wind were rising fast as we rounded Colombier. We never saw its towering cliffs because by then the fog had become an all-embracing shroud. As we entered the channel,
St. Eugène
slowed till she barely had steerage way, and we became aware that the black fog on every side was alive with ships. Their sirens and fog-horns sounded all around us, and they began looming up ahead, astern, abeam, until we seemed to be completely hemmed in. They were Spanish trawlers, sixty of them, feeling their way in by radar from the Grand Banks on the wings of the hurricane warning.

Théo and two of his sons hauled
Oregon
high on her slip. Claire and I went off to drink and eat, and to be happy we
were ashore upon a solid rock, as the hurricane began to whine and whistle through the chimney-tops of St. Pierre.