And then, suddenly, there it was again, stabbing out of the blackness well astern of the cruise ship, a powerful beam reaching a white finger of light into a bank of fog, then coming clear as it swung steadily across the ship, reaching out and momentarily illuminating the tug, swinging past it and suddenly blinding me, then on to vanish into fog again. And with the light came the distant sound of what I thought at first was a diaphone, but later identified as a horn. It was a double blast at intervals of about forty seconds and I guessed, quite correctly, that it was sounding two every minute.
I must have watched the beam pass over us at least half a dozen times before I lost it, and the lights of the ship, as the fog rolled over us again. But I could still hear the foghorn. I had been counting the interval between the flashes. It was a powerful light, undoubtedly a lighthouse, and it was flashing white every fifteen seconds, perhaps a little more. If only I had had a chart I would have known where I was.
In fact, it was the San Rafael lighthouse at Friendly Cove in the south-eastern corner of Nootka Island, and Brian identified it as such. Having explored this part of the coast when visiting his grandfather’s old home, he reckoned we ought to be about halfway down it, probably opposite where Cook had landed on his third and fateful voyage, the first landing on the Canadian west coast by an Englishman. ‘If it’s the lighthouse I think,’ he said, ‘then it marks the entrance to Cook Channel and the fjords leading up to the forestry centres of Tahsis and Gold River. But better wait till we’re in the Juan de Fuca Strait.’ That was after I had suggested taking over the barge now and trying to raise the lighthouse on the VHF set. There was a bit of a wind and it was blowing onshore, variable, but quite strong in the gusts, and the ride should be making. ‘It’s about three miles off, maybe less, and we’ll be pushed into the land quite fast.’
But he shook his head. ‘Not fast enough. And apart from that one ship, and it’s past us now, I haven’t heard anything passing us close.’ He wanted us to wait until we were in the Juan de Fuca Strait. ‘There’ll be plenty of ships around us then.’
The logic of it was unanswerable and I would have agreed if it hadn’t been for Miriam. She had scrambled up the log butts and had seen the lights, had watched the fog roll in again, blotting out even the lights of the tug. ‘And suppose the fog holds. Suppose there’s fog all the way to Seattle, to the moment we tie up at the SVL Timber quay. We’ll never see another ship. And it’ll be daylight.’ And she added, her voice trembling with urgency: ‘We’ll never get a chance like this.’
Brian started to reason with her, but she wasn’t in a reasoning frame of mind. She was very close to hysteria and it was only then I began to realize what those eighteen days cooped up in that lonely lakeside hut had done to her. ‘You can wait if you like. Not me. There’s a lighthouse there. I saw it. There’ll be lighthouse keepers, a village, people — honest, straightforward, ordinary people.’ Her voice was quite wild, the words tumbling over themselves. ‘If you won’t cut the tow loose I’m going to swim for it.’ She was staring at Brian, her eyes very large as she looked into his face.
He wasn’t going to budge. I could see that. And so could she. ‘All right,’ she said and unzipped her anorak.
She was literally starting to strip off. ‘For God’s sake, Miriam!’ I had my hand on her arm, restraining her, my voice tense. ‘Don’t be silly. You’d never make it.’ I could feel her trembling.
Brian tried again, his tone gentler than I had ever heard it before, but it made no difference. Nothing he could say, no pleading from me, had any effect. Her mind was made up and nothing would budge it. She had seen a light ashore and developed a mental block, so that she didn’t seem to hear what we were saying, and it gradually dawned on us then that if we didn’t do what she wanted and cut the tow, we should have to restrain her physically.
Brian looked at me, a half smile and little shrug. ‘So we cut the tow. Agreed?’
I nodded slowly, thinking it wouldn’t take long for the men on the tug to realize the barge was no longer attached. Fog or no fog, their radar would soon pick us up, and then what? But when I tried to explain this to Miriam, she simply said, ‘You’ve still got that gun, Brian. You can hold them off for a rime, and every minute that passes, we’ll be closer to the shore. We won’t have to swim so far.’
She smiled then. She actually smiled, a look of triumph on her face as though what she had said was unanswerable. And in a way it was. Darkness and fog, with a lighthouse three miles away, or daylight in the Strait with some vessel passing us a lot nearer. You could toss a coin as to which was the best course of action. Neither was very sensible or necessarily offered much hope.
‘So we cut the tow,’ I said and Brian nodded.
‘Not much choice.’ That smile again. Then he turned to Miriam. ‘Two rifles, a walkie-talkie and VHF, but no ammunition and that tug a hawser length away. Better get out your prayer mat.’ He swung himself onto the steel rungs. ‘Okay. Let’s go.’ And he began to hoist himself up to the deck.
The wheelhouse was empty and we closed the trap door on whoever was sleeping in the cuddy down below. ‘I’ll leave you to handle things this end,’ he said to me, and he laid his rifle on the shelf in front of the wheel. ‘Start calling on the radio as soon as I’ve slipped the tow and get that Coastguard here quick. I hope to God,’ he added as he pushed out through the leeward door into the night, ‘there’s a quick release on that hawser.’
The door slammed shut, his figure swallowed instantly in the black void of the fog, and we stood there, Miriam and I, waiting. I gave him two minutes by my watch to get up for’ard and work out how the release mechanism worked, then I switched on the VHP set and, with the mike close against my mouth, began calling on channel 16: ‘Coastguard cutter Kelsey. Coastguard cutter Kelsey. This is Redfern calling Kelsey. Come in please, Kelsey.’ To my surprise the Kelsey answered immediately and it was Cornish himself, his voice loud and clear. I gave him our position. ‘We are on the barge and cutting the tow. The tug won’t take long to pick us up and to hold them off we have only two rifles. Hurry, hurry, hurry. It could be a matter of life or death.’
There was a pause, and in that pause I sensed the barge faltering. Then Cornish’s voice again, not speaking to me, but to the tug, warning the Gabriello to heave to and await the Coastguard escort into Victoria. ‘I have you clear and very close on my radar. Do not attempt to make contact with your tow. I repeat — you are not to make contact with or attempt to board that barge. Any such attempt will be resisted by force.’
Fists began pounding at the under side of the trapdoor, a man shouting to be let out. The door to the deck slid open and Brian thrust his head in. ‘Tow released,’ he said. And he added, ‘It slipped away over the bows like a whiplash. Can you feel the difference?’
I actually could. The barge seemed to have gone dead, and I thought it had turned slightly to port, broadside to the wind and the waves. The wind force I estimated at about 4, the rate of drift possibly as much as 2 knots — an hour and a half, maybe two hours before we were blown onto the coast below that lighthouse. It was ridiculous. Long before then the tug would be alongside and ourselves overwhelmed, or else swimming for it.
‘Did you raise the cutter?’
‘Yes.’
‘How far away?’
‘He was wise enough not to say.’
In fact, the cutter was then about six miles seaward of us, steaming at the same speed and on a parallel course, but keeping several miles astern. When he had failed to pick us up on his radar at Pearl Rocks, or to identify us amongst the traffic west of the Rankin Shoals, he had headed south at full speed with the intention of intercepting and identifying the tow as it entered the Queen Charlotte Strait. Only after he had wasted most of the night lying in the fairway between the BC mainland and the top of Vancouver Island watching for us on his radar did he finally come to the conclusion that the Gabriello was taking the open sea route. It had then taken him almost eight hours to catch up with us so that it was well past midday before he had finally taken station to seaward waiting for the fog to clear so that a helicopter could fly in with police and customs.