There was a sudden flurry of activity, the engine-room telegraph jangling, the engines juddering and the wake changing to a confused froth as the cutter heeled sharply to port, one engine still going ahead, the other astern as we turned 180° and headed back up the Sound, hugging the western shore, then swinging steadily in towards it to round a lit buoy, land closing in on our starb’d side. I was on the sidedeck then, one of the crew tumbling down the ladder from the bridge. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked.
‘We’ve sighted them, heading seawards through the Hakai Passage. Skipper says…’ But the rest was lost in the noise of the engines, the rush of the bow wave, his words swept away by the wind.
I went up to the bridge then, thinking to hell with it. He could only throw me off again, and as long as Tom was safe down below … The Captain and the Mate were standing shoulder-to-shoulder at the radar, the helmsman rigid with concentration. The Chief was there talking to Jim. I slipped over to the chart table. It was Kelpie Point we had rounded, not a lit buoy, but a beacon on a little rock island, and the Hakai Passage ran north of Calvert and Hecate Islands almost due west out of the Sound to the open sea. A small cross had been pencilled just by a lit beacon north of Starfish Island. I turned expecting to see the flash of it, but there was nothing. ‘Steer two-two-five.’
‘Two-two-five,’ the helmsman repeated.
Cornish moved to the chart table in a couple of strides. ‘Fog’s thicker here,’ he said, using the sliding rule to pencil in the line of our course through the passage, checking the distance with the dividers, then scribbling 220° — 8m. ‘Say the tow is making something over five knots, then we’ll be alongside in less than an hour.’ Without turning his head he ordered, ‘Steer two-two-o.’
‘Two-two-o.’
‘Your friend all right?’ He gave me a quick sideways glance, and when I said he was sleeping he nodded. ‘Best thing for him.’ Then he was back at the scanner, no word about my leaving the bridge, so I stayed, making myself as inconspicu ous as possible. Apparently the tow was visible on the radar. But then the Captain straightened up, stretching and rubbing his eyes. ‘Well, that’s that, out of sight now round Starfish and Surf heading south beyond the South Pointers. Another hour.’ He sighed and turned to me. ‘You ever been on this coast before, Mr Redfern?’
I shook my head.
‘Show you something,’ he said, smiling and beckoning me back to the chart. ‘See that reef?’ He indicated the Pacific Ocean end of the passage, the southern side. ‘The South Pointers. There’s a big drying rock there and the tug’s gone outside. Had to, of course. But there’s a way through between the reef and Surf Island that’s marked thirty — that’s fathoms on this chart so it’s almost sixty metres deep if I’ve got the nerve to risk it. The fog’s thick out there. Have to do it on radar.’ He was staring down at the chart, using me as a sort of sounding board for his thoughts. ‘Not as bad as the Spider. I took the Kelsey through the Spider once. But then it was broad daylight and good visibility, even the little Fulton Passage quite straightforward.’ He spread the chart out, and I saw the short cut he proposed to take and all the rocks, it looked about as bad as anything I had ever seen.
But that’s the way we went, and the engines going flat out as we steamed south-west through the litter of rubbish, the Captain glued to the radar giving alterations of helm without reference to the chart, and all the time the single sideband radio squawking last-minute instructions as the Mate reported to RCC that our ETA and visual sight of the tow was now less than fifteen minutes away.
A few minutes and we were through, the helm to starb’d as we steered seaward. Cornish reached for the mike. ‘Distance off two and a quarter miles, fog fairly thick, sea calm with a slight swell.’ We were in fact rolling quite heavily. He had switched to VHP and was talking to the chopper pilot.
The next ten minutes seemed to drag interminably. The Mate was now at the scanner, the wheelhouse dark and everybody staring out through the windshield, searching the void, fog swirling round the bows. ‘A light, sir.’ It was the helmsman. ‘Bearing Green 10.’
‘Okay, have got.’ Cornish had the binoculars up to his eyes. ‘Steer two-five-o.’ And then he was through to the helicopter pilot again, talking him down over the target. I could see the towing lights now, all blurred by the fog, and as the shadowy shape of a big barge loaded with logs began to emerge the Captain reached for the engine-room telegraph and rang for slow ahead on both engines.
‘God!’ the Mate said, peering through the glasses. ‘That’s pretty ancient, that thing. What is it, an old scow?’
We were passing it close now, moving up on the tug’s port side. ‘Scows are usually wood.’ Cornish reached over and took the glasses. ‘That’s steel,’ he said.
‘Yeah, steel. And it’s got a wheelhouse — a sort of caboose on its backside. I wonder where they got it — off the scrap heap most like. It’s as rusty as hell.’
‘Scows are wood,’ Cornish repeated. ‘And they’re flat-sided for on-deck loading. That’s a barge.’
‘Yes, sir.’ The Mate grinned. ‘It’s a barge — as you say, sir.’
It must have been at least zoo feet long, very low in the water with a little wheelhouse aft and the logs stacked end-to-end so high that if there was a man steering the thing he would have to be constantly in and out of the wheelhouse to peer ahead.
We were past the tow, the tug now visible through swirls of mist. Cornish rang the engine-room to reduce revs still further and ordered the helmsman to close the tug’s port side. Then, when there was barely a ship’s length between the two vessels, the lights all haloed and blurred in the seething billows of fog, he lifted the loudhailer mike off its hook and put it to his lips: ‘This is Coastguard Cutter Kelsey. Do you hear me? This is Coastguard cutter Kelsey. You are to heave-to please. I repeat — heave-to. Do you hear me?’
And back out of the fog came an American voice: ‘I hear you. This is Micky Androxis of American tug Gabriello. I am towing. I cannot heave-to.’
‘You can reduce speed gradually and turn to port.’
no
‘Why? Why should I reduce speed?’
The Mate’s voice cut in then. ‘Captain, I’ve got another blip, just westward of the tow. Looks like it’s heading north.’
Cornish nodded. ‘That’ll be the yacht, I imagine.’ The men were moving up the starb’d side of the cutter, automatic rifles gripped in their hands. They took up positions in the bows as Captain Cornish repeated his order to heave-to. The tug-master pointed out once again that he was in command of an American-registered ship. ‘As a Coastguard officer you have no authority to order me to stop — or to board, Captain. You understand?’
Cornish smiled, lifting his shoulders and his eyes in an expression of mock resignation. ‘Seems he knows all the answers.’ And he added, ‘Something I don’t believe an ordinary tugmaster would be likely to know.’ He told the helmsman to close right in, and repeated his order to heave-to.
‘You have to have police on board for me to do that, brother. You don’t give me orders. But I take them from an RCMP officer. Okay?’
‘A real sea-lawyer,’ Cornish muttered as a light glimmered through the fog astern and the faint whoop-whoop-whoop of chopper blades reached us as they beat at the thick humidity. ‘Police now arriving,’ Cornish snapped over the loudhailer. ‘Start slowing down — at once.’
The helicopter was hovering over the barge, lights picking out the piled-up logs and a man being lowered onto the stern, the rotor blades just visible so that it looked like a ghostly dragonfly, everything veiled, the fog iridescent. Our spotlight held the tug in a merciless glare, the froth of water moving past the two hulls gradually lessening as the speed of both vessels decreased. I saw a second man drop onto the barge, unfasten the harness that had attached him to the winch wire and, as it was reeled in, the helicopter emerging more clearly from the fog, whirls of grey vapour as it slanted forward to take up a position over the tug’s long after run, a man swinging down, pushing himself clear of the thick towing hawser, his feet reaching for the steel plates of the deck gleaming wet in our spotlight. Others followed.