Ghosts of the Pacific (7 page)

MANY DAYS HAD
passed since we left the world of floating
ice. Now there was a yellow cloud on the horizon. It stretched
across the sky like a giant yellow snail. It felt as though I was
looking down at the exotic world of the Pacific that I had
always dreamed of, into a cloud that was separating the hot
world from the cold.

I was.

As we sailed beneath that cloud I felt a pocket of warm air
brush my face. What a remarkable feeling. I felt it in every
cell of my body. After coming through the Arctic it seemed
impossible that the air and sea would ever warm up again.
But they did, and it was like magic. I took off my jacket.
There was a strange smell too, like the smell of something
burning—what I imagined a distant forest fire or a volcano
might smell like. It was very faint. But Hollie must have
smelled it too because he whined to come up the ladder
with me. I climbed down and carried him up. His nose was
twitching like crazy. Together we leaned against the hatch
and grinned as the sub cut eighteen knots through the
water—sailing south.

We sailed day after day without seeing anything, not even
a bird. At night the stars and planets lit up the sky so brightly it looked as if you could reach out and touch them. The
Pacific was so vast it felt as though you could sink whole
planets into it and nobody would ever know they were there.

But beneath the surface was a different story. There were
seamounts, which were like mountains except that they were
under water. They had large bases, hillsides and summits
that rose surprisingly close to the surface. We could have settled on a couple of them if I had wanted to dive that deep—
three hundred feet or so—but I didn't. Something about
resting the sub on a mountaintop kind of spooked me. I
didn't know why. It was fascinating watching the seamounts
rise on sonar. From a couple of miles down they climbed
and climbed until I expected to see them jump out of the
water in front of us. But they never did. When a seamount
broke the surface it became an island. I had always hoped to
find an island nobody else had ever seen. Perhaps on this
voyage we would. I would make a monument of stones and
give the island a name. I had already decided what it would
be:
Ziegfried Island
.

Day after day we saw nothing but water. I didn't mind.
After the Arctic, the warmth was company itself. It was almost like having a friend. I didn't feel bored. Every day the
temperature rose and the nights grew longer. Then one day
we heard a beep on the radar.

It was a weak signal. It flashed on the screen then disappeared. That happened when something small was riding on
the surface and was sometimes above water and sometimes
below. Whatever this was it was moving slowly, more slowly
than a ship. More like a canoe. A ship, even a sailboat, would
give a steady signal on radar. I was curious so I headed
straight towards it. What could be way out here in the middle of nowhere?

Nothing. There was nothing there, and the radar stopped
beeping. That was strange. I stood up on the hatch and
scanned the water with the binoculars. Nothing. So, we sailed
away. Ten minutes later the signal came back. It was still
moving. I went back.

There was definitely nothing in the water. No vessel, no
garbage, nothing. But the radar was still beeping on and off.
I was starting to wonder if it was broken when I saw a tiny
splash in the water. I grabbed the binoculars. I saw it! It was
a sea turtle.

I figured it was a loggerhead turtle, though I had never
seen one before. It was pretty big, about four or five feet
long, and had a hard round shell. Somebody had painted a
bright orange spot on its back and attached a small electric
transmitter. That's why we were picking it up on radar:
someone was tracking it.

What a lonely sight it was, a sea turtle swimming all by
itself way out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It had nowhere to stop and rest. It had no one to communicate with.
I had read that sea turtles had been crossing the earth's
oceans for millions of years. Wow. It looked like it too.

We liked him right away. I decided to call him Hugh. He
must have thought we were a tiny island because he swam
over and leaned against the hull and rested. His eyes looked
sad but I knew he probably wasn't. He probably always
looked that way. Hollie didn't bark at him, he just sniffed a
lot and stared. Seaweed liked him because he was the only
other thing to land on besides water. He hopped onto his
back right away and Hugh didn't seem to mind. I wished I
could have given him something to eat but I didn't know
what sea turtles ate and didn't want to make him sick.

Then, he closed his eyes and went to sleep. That's what it
looked like. I didn't want to disturb him so I shut off the
engine and decided to make some stew. I kept coming out to
check on him but he just hugged the side of the hull with his
eyes closed and rested. I went back inside.

While the stew was cooking I rode the bike and Hollie ran
on the treadmill. When we stopped to eat, I checked on Hugh.
He was still sleeping. I carried the camera up and took his
picture. He was still sleeping an hour later, so I went to bed.
It was a warm, starry night and I left the hatch open and we
all drifted slowly to sleep. As I listened to the waves lap
against the hull I felt glad we were giving Hugh a place to
rest.

In the late morning I rose and climbed the portal beneath
a hot sun. Hugh was gone. I scanned the water with the binoculars but didn't see him. I checked the radar but found
nothing.

I wondered where he was going. I wondered if he was
lonely. Sea turtles seemed so noble to me. They swam for
months alone, crossing oceans by themselves. What a strange
life. And yet, as I stood in the portal, stretched and looked
across the vast Pacific, I wondered if maybe we were a little
bit alike.

Hugh made me think of Amelia Earhart. She had tried to
fly her plane around the world in 1937 and almost made it.
She went down somewhere in the Pacific. She was never
found, although people on Saipan said that the Japanese
picked her out of the water, brought her to Saipan, put her
in jail for a while and then shot her. They thought she was a
spy.

Explorers have been trying to find her plane ever since,
just like they've been trying to find the Franklin ships. In the
Arctic the problem was ice. In the Pacific it was vastness. If
something disappeared here, I didn't see how anybody
could ever find it.

I tried to imagine Earhart flying at night and not being
able to see the island where she was supposed to land. She
was running out of gas. That's what her last radio communication said. She would have known that nobody could
come for her. But she must have still hoped somehow that
somebody would. She would also have known that when she
hit the water there would be sharks—
if
she survived the
crash. She must have been brave. It made me glad we travelled in a submarine.

In the afternoon I was bent over the side of the hull trying to catch a fish with a line and hook when I heard a blast
of air and felt a shower of water fall on me. Turning my head
I got a heck of a fright. Right beside us was an enormous
whale. It was diving. I grabbed hold of a handle on the portal and held on. The whale's body kept diving as if it went on
forever. I couldn't believe how big it was. Then its tail came
out of the water and it was as big as the sub!

The tail spread out like an enormous fan. As it slipped
beneath the water, the sub rocked back and forth. I scampered inside, grabbed the camera and came back out. When
the whale surfaced again I started taking pictures.

I was pretty sure it was a blue whale. Blue whales are the
biggest creatures on earth, bigger than the biggest dinosaurs
ever were. I was in awe. I carried Hollie up to see it and he
was in awe too, especially because the whale came back and
looked at us. It swam close and looked at us with one of its
enormous eyes. Hollie sniffed but didn't bark. He didn't
even growl. Like me, he really was in awe. And I think he
liked the whale. As big as it was, and as small as he was, they
had something in common. Both were very gentle. They
stared at each other. They really did. Could whales and dogs
communicate? How I wished I knew what they were thinking. It sure seemed like they were communicating.

We watched the whale for half an hour. It dived two more
times. Each time it came back up it blew water out of its
spout like a fire hydrant and we were sprayed. I began to
wonder if it were spraying us on purpose. Did whales have a
sense of humour? It seemed like it. I knew that smaller
whales, like belugas, liked to play. Why not one-hundred-foot blue whales?

THE PACIFIC WAS
so vast it boggled my mind. We sailed day
after day without seeing anything but water, except for when
we sailed over the tops of seamounts. Seamounts formed
chains too, just like mountain ranges. And they had names.
We were crossing the Emperor Seamounts. It was a good
name for the chain, because it was enormous. It swept in an
arc all the way from the Bering Sea to Hawaii! Holy smokes!
If it were above water it would probably be the largest
mountain range in the world.

I was starting to notice that whenever we approached the
summit of a seamount, we began to see more whales, sharks,
dolphins and fish. And then, for the first time since the
Bering Sea, we came upon another vessel.

She was a fishing trawler. She was pretty big for a trawler
but I supposed she'd have to be to come so far out in the
ocean alone. We picked her up on radar ten miles away. We
could see her long before she could see us, even though she
would know we were here too, by radar. Fishing trawlers
usually carried sonar for finding fish, so she could probably
track us if we were underwater too, when we were close
enough.

I would have avoided her except that I heard something
else on radar and it bothered me. It was a weak signal. It
appeared and disappeared, just like before. I wondered if it
was Hugh.

Fishing trawlers have a bad reputation for catching things
they're not supposed to catch, such as turtles, dolphins and
sharks. They get caught in the nets and drown. I couldn't sail
away thinking that might happen to Hugh.

So, I sailed closer. Two miles from the trawler I submerged
to periscope depth and switched to battery. If they were paying attention they would have noticed that we had disappeared from their radar. They were moving slowly, probably
dragging a huge net behind them, scooping fish or shrimp
or something like that. The weak signal had been moving in
their direction and then it disappeared. If it was Hugh, that
meant he had gone under the surface. Where?

I motored in to half a mile, then a quarter-mile. There
were several men in the open stern of the boat. They were
pulling the net up with powerful motorized winches. The
net was wide and probably stretched a thousand feet long.
As we closed the distance I could see lots of splashing on the
surface inside the net. It was full. And then I saw something
that really upset me. One of the men raised a rifle, aimed at
the creatures inside the net and started shooting!

I was horrified. I couldn't believe what was happening.
Quickly, I surfaced just a foot above the water, leaving the
hull concealed, opened the hatch and scanned the net with
binoculars. There were dolphins, sharks and turtles inside.
The man on the boat was slaughtering them instead of letting them out. It was insane.

I had to stop him. But I didn't know what to do. In a panic
I grabbed the flare gun, tried to aim it just above the trawler,
and pulled the trigger. I hoped maybe I could scare them
into thinking that authorities were coming to investigate,
though who would ever come out here?

The flare went off with a loud bang and made a bright
orange streak towards the boat, losing height on the way and
narrowly missing the men in the stern. I never meant to aim
it so low. They must have thought I was shooting at them. I
jumped back inside and hit the dive switch. We went down
to periscope depth. I motored closer, steering in an arc
around the stern of the trawler, just outside of the net. I
pulled the periscope down so that they couldn't see us. But
I knew they could track us if they tried. I sat at the sonar
screen and studied the situation.

I just wished there was some way I could free everything.
Cautiously I raised the periscope. The men in the boat were
scanning the water with binoculars but not in our direction.
They didn't know where we were. Probably the net was
blocking us from their sonar waves. I turned the periscope
towards the net and was almost certain I saw a bright orange
spot on the back of a turtle. I had to free them.

I rose so that the top of the portal was awash, took a hacksaw from the tool box, carried it up the portal and opened
the hatch. Seaweed climbed up behind me and flew out. I
grabbed the rim of the net and started cutting as quickly as
I could. If I could just cut down four feet or so, many of the
trapped creatures could escape.

It was extremely frantic. It was difficult cutting to start
with, but I also had to keep an eye on the men in the boat
and an eye on the sharks in the net.

I wasn't fast enough. They were going to see me any second. I jumped back down, grabbed a ten-foot length of rope,
climbed up, slid into the water and tied one end of the rope
around the top of the net, the other end to a handle on the
portal. I had to dive underwater and hold my breath to tie
the rope to the net. It was such a desperate thing to do. I was
hoping to pull the top of the net down with the sub and free
everything. When I climbed out of the water I felt something hit my arm and spin me around. Then I heard a rifle
fire. It took me a couple of seconds to realize what had happened. I looked down at my arm and saw a gash about four
inches long. It was creamy white, as if somebody had just
scooped the skin away. It wasn't even bleeding yet. I was
stunned and confused. Had I been shot?

My instinct told me to get my head inside the portal and
so I did. I heard more shots ring out. They bounced off the
hull. But where was Seaweed? Then another shot rang out. I
peeked out of the portal and saw Seaweed's wings fold as he
fell from the sky.

They shot him. They shot Seaweed. I was horrified. Was
he killed? Was there any chance he was okay? Had they maybe just brushed his wings, maybe stunned him but he was
still okay? I had to go to him. I had to find him. He would
be waiting for me. He would know I would come. I had to.

The wound on my arm started to ache but was nothing
compared to the pain in my heart. I pulled the hatch down
and sealed it, jumped inside, rushed to the controls and hit
the dive switch. The sub dove a few feet then stopped. I forgot I had tied it to the net. I put the motor in gear, cranked
up full battery power and pointed the nose down for a steep
dive. We started to move. But it was too slow! I filled the
tanks full and kept the motor on full battery power. The
motor was working hard. We were moving, but very slowly.
We must have pulled one corner of the net down twenty feet
or so. I hoped all the turtles, dolphins and sharks were
escaping. But I also hoped the rope would snap so I could
rescue Seaweed.

And then, it did. The sub suddenly lunged forward and
down. We went into a very steep, fast dive. I pumped some
air into the tanks and brought us level at sixty feet. I was in
a panic now. My arm was starting to bleed and it was getting
very sore. I pulled off my t-shirt and wrapped it around the
wound. It was so ugly I didn't want to look at it. I couldn't
think about it now. I had to find Seaweed.

I went a short distance, maybe two hundred feet, and rose
to periscope depth. Through the periscope I saw the men
trying to straighten up the net. The trapped creatures were
mostly gone. The men were so busy I decided to try surfacing awash again. Maybe I could find Seaweed with the
binoculars.

But the sky was growing dark. As I came up and opened
the hatch I felt the first drops of rain. It was going to rain
hard. When I raised the binoculars I saw blood run down
my arm onto my chest. I was bleeding a lot.

I scanned the boat first. The men hadn't seen me yet. I
tried to see through the water around me. Nothing. I was
starting to get sick to my stomach. My head was dizzy. It felt
so hopeless. I tried yelling. “Seaweed! Seaweed!”

A man in the boat saw me and reached for the rifle. I
ducked back inside. I had to go. This was impossible. I shut
and sealed the hatch, went down a few feet and motored a
few hundred feet away. Then I surfaced completely and
opened the hatch. There was no way they could shoot me
from such a distance in a tossing sea. I was still hoping, hoping somehow Seaweed was all right and could make it back
to us.

The rain came down hard. The wind had picked up.
Clouds on the horizon were black. A bad storm was coming.
The fishing trawler looked so small from the distance. She
was becoming less visible in the rain. I was struggling to believe that Seaweed was still okay. My heart was breaking. I
looked down at Hollie at the bottom of the ladder. The rain
was splashing down on him but I could see by his face that
he knew something terrible had happened.

And then I saw something that gave me hope. Through
the darkening rain I thought I saw the silhouettes of three or
four birds fly to shelter on top of the trawler's bridge. Maybe
the seagull they shot was not Seaweed. Maybe it was another
seagull. If he were still alive he would find us. I knew he
would.

I jumped inside, grabbed a bag of dog biscuits and climbed
the portal. I had to do everything with my left arm; my right
one was too sore now. There was blood on the ladder and it
was slippery. I climbed up, stuck my torso out and shook the
bag in the air. The rain poured down harder. “Come on,
Seaweed! Come on!”

I waited. I had never hoped for anything so much before
in my life. I shook the bag again. “Come on, Seaweed!” Now
I was feeling really sick and weak. I was afraid I was going to
faint. I wondered how much blood I had lost. With a last
look through the binoculars I saw the men in the trawler
trying to collect their net. They didn't seem to care about the
approaching storm. I couldn't watch anymore; I had to go
inside.

I climbed down the ladder, but was so dizzy now I had to
lie down or I was going to faint. I made it to the controls and
dropped to my knees. The hatch was still wide open so I
reached over and put my hand on the switch. Once I pulled
the switch I could dive and leave all this madness behind.
But what about Seaweed? Was he even still alive, or were
those just different birds on the boat?

I had to lie down. Something inside told me not to fall
asleep without shutting the hatch. The sub would fill with
water and swamp. I had to protect myself. I had to protect
Hollie. But what about Seaweed? My eyes welled up with
tears as I gripped the switch, because I had to pull it. I had
to before I fell asleep.

But I couldn't. I lay down on the floor, shut my eyes and
fell asleep. The last thing I felt was Hollie licking my face, but
he seemed so far away.

When I woke there were about two inches of water inside
the sub. The sump pumps were running full blast. The sub
was tossing and pitching. Waves were splashing in through
the open hatch. My arm was throbbing with pain. My head
felt funny, dizzy. I was sick. I tried to raise my head but I was
so weak. I was confused. Where were we? Where was Hollie?
I managed to turn my head. Hollie was on my cot. So was
Seaweed!

I cried with happiness. I reached up for the automatic
switch, shut the hatch, then hit the dive switch. As we went
down to a hundred feet I fell back down on the floor.

I had to clean and dress my wound. It didn't matter how
sick I felt, I had to do it. I rolled over and crawled on my
hands and knees to the stern, where the first-aid kit was. The
sump pumps were taking the water away. I felt chilled. If I
could turn up the temperature I could dry everything out
and warm up. I wondered how much blood I had lost. It
wasn't the kind of wound that bled constantly. It was a long
gaping cut on my arm. The skin and fat were just gone. It
was white at first but had filled in with blood. Now there was
dried blood all over my arm, chest and stomach. It looked
really bad. Hollie hopped off the cot when the floor started
to show again. He started licking me. He knew I was injured.
I glanced at Seaweed. He looked fine. It was another seagull
they had shot.

I pulled the first-aid case down to the floor and started
cleaning the wound. I poured peroxide over the open cut,
and it made me cry because I was so weak and it hurt. I didn't
care. Then I wrapped wound dressing around it, taped it and
took tablets for the pain, though I wasn't expecting them to
help much. I just wanted to sleep. I crawled over to my cot.
Seaweed hopped off and I pulled myself up and collapsed. I
laughed and cried nervously at the same time. All I had
wanted was Seaweed to come back, and he had. Then I
thought of all the creatures that had escaped from the net.
Was it worth getting shot in the arm? Yes, it was. Then I
laughed again, cried again and went back to sleep.