The Boat Who Wouldn't Float (26 page)

I looked at the compass, and the awful truth dawned on me. Somehow Glen had switched his attention from the light on Goose Cape to the bright masthead light of a big ship heading east down the southern channel.
Happy Adventure
was making about seven knots over the bottom, on a falling tide, and heading resolutely for salt water and for home. This time, however, nobody could lay the blame on her.

We came about and resumed our uphill course and, despite heavy traffic and a spell of abominable weather, we reached the Citadel City at dusk on September fourth. Montreal and Expo 67 now seemed just around the corner.

At Quebec
Happy Adventure
changed crews for the last time. If she had done nothing else during her chequered career, she could at least now lay claim to having been instrumental in leading one human being to a new way of life. Glen Wilson left us to sign on as ordinary seaman on a Norwegian freighter outbound for Pernambuco. The sea had claimed him.

Claire and Albert rejoined the ship and I was as glad to see them as they were to get aboard again. That evening we departed for Montreal.

The journey up river was anti-climactic. Still shivering at the fate that had befallen her Nova Scotian sister at Rimouski,
Happy Adventure
behaved like the angel she was not. The weather was inland summer weather: hot, muggy, almost windless. The river itself posed no problems because, while in Quebec, I had met the skipper of a
goélette
, and he had taught me the tricks involved in climbing the remaining slopes. We did as the
goélettes
did, riding the rising tide against the current, and anchoring in some snug cove when tide and current both flowed against us.

Our only immediate difficulty was with the river traffic. As the ship channels grew narrower, big ships grew more numerous. At one exceedingly narrow bend, just past the head of Lac St. Pierre, we found ourselves facing a twenty-thousand-ton downbound tanker—while being overtaken by an equally gigantic upbound grain carrier. Although neither of these behemoths bore us any ill will, it was impossible for them to alter course and so make room for us. We had to seek our own salvation. We sought it by scuttling right out of the channel into the shoal water, where the wake of the tanker struck us like a tidal wave and washed us almost high and dry on a spoil bank. Moments later the wake from the grain carrier, rebounding from the shore, washed us off and back
into the channel again. Albert thought this was great fun. Claire and I wished fervently that we were back In the wide, grey, empty wastes of the North Atlantic.

From Trois Riviéres, where we lost the last tidal influence, we entered still another world—a truly horrid one. This was the world of motor pleasure craft. Overpowered, overbearing, all over the channel, they made life hell for slow, deep-draft vessels like ours. Storming along at twenty knots, pushing half the river ahead of them and sucking the other half behind, they made more noise and disturbance than the big freighters; and most of their owners were not only devoid of elementary courtesy, but seemed to know nothing of the rules of the road, and to care less.

A torrent of these raucous, ostentatious toys made our final day on the river an ordeal. It was fearfully hot and we were near exhaustion, having run almost continuously from Trois Riviéres. As the hours wore on and more and more power boats sent us pitching wildly in their wake we grew increasingly distraught. By the time we raised the unlovely skyline of oil refineries at the eastern edge of Montreal, and entered the stinking yellow pall of smoke they laid across the river, we were near the end of our tether.

Hot, sticky, dirty, and excessively tired, I began to wonder why we had gone to all this trouble to drag our little vessel from a world of cool and quiet peace to this brimstone cauldron. I was still wondering as we came abreast of the heart of Montreal and began trying to locate the fabulous goal at the end of this shoddy rainbow.

The harbour was as busy as a through way. Ferries nipped across our bows and stern. Big ships hooted and boomed at us on all sides. Claire, at the tiller, was chivvied by a tug and its tow until she nearly burst into tears. I could see the towers, minarets and domes of Expo, but I could
not
see how I was going to reach them. At this juncture yet another motor boat bore down on us like a hyena on a hapless groundhog.

Only—this was no ordinary power boat. As she came foaming toward us her blue hull began to look familiar.
Painted huge on her bow was the inscription
MP 43
and suddenly I recognized her as the
Blue Heron
, sister ship to the
Blue Iris
.

“Oh my God!” I cried despairingly to Claire. “The blue doom has us!”

“The long claw of the Sea Puss gets us all, in the end,” Claire replied unhelpfully. “Well, Skipper, let's see you talk your way out of this one.”

The point was that we were flagrantly illegal. Not only did we fail to have our vessel's name on her bows, according to marine regulations, but we did not have our official number painted on them either, as is sternly required by the Canada Shipping Act. To make matters worse, we were not flying the prescribed Canadian ensign at our mainmast. We were flying the flag of the Basque provinces with, underneath it, as a courtesy to Quebec, the fleur-de-lis. I could only hope that
MP 43
did not know who we really were and that we might bluff our way to freedom.

Blue Heron
throttled back abeam of us. A smartly uniformed Mountie with a loud-hailer stepped out on the bridge. “Ahoy, the
Happy Adventure!
Follow me, please!”

And with that, the police vessel swung around our stern and took station dead ahead.

For one moment I was tempted to dive below, open the seacocks, and scuttle my ill-fated schooner; but the spirit had gone out of me. I was beaten, and I knew it.

Blue Heron
led us up the harbour at a funereal pace until we neared a mighty breakwater in front of the islands upon which Expo towered. Four fast speedboats now appeared and raced toward us. The drivers had walkie-talkies, and were dressed in some sort of esoteric uniform I did not recognize.

Blue Heron
now veered off, put on speed, and raced away while the four whining speedboats formed up, two ahead and two astern, shepherding
Happy Adventure
inexorably toward a gap in the seawall.

As we entered the narrow gap I was appalled to see puffs of blue smoke rise suddenly from the pierheads at either side.
We were deafened by a series of terrible concussions.

“Duck! For the love of God!” I screamed at Claire and Albert. “Now they're
shooting
at us!”

However Claire, brave woman that she is, did not flinch. Standing proudly at the bow she looked straight ahead, daring the Fates to do their worst. Albert stood beside her, solid and indomitable. They were a sight to make a man's heart catch with pride.

As the echoes of the fusillade died away, Claire spoke.

“Ooooooh, Farley,” she cried ecstatically. “They're giving us a
reception…
isn't that
nice!
”

The words were barely uttered when we were deafened again, this time by such a cacophony of blasts, toots, whistles, hoots and screeches that I let go of the tiller and clapped my hands to my ears.

We had passed through the gap and directly ahead of us was a huge artificial basin containing what must have been one of the most glittering arrays of expensive yachts ever gathered together in one place. All of them were sounding their noisemakers. People stood on their decks, waving glasses and bottles and flags. The din was indescribable. I glanced over my shoulder expecting to see a Royal Yacht entering in our wake—but there was nothing to be seen. Slowly it was borne in upon me that, inconceivable as it seemed, all this hullabaloo was being raised for us.

The speedboats guided us to the number one berth, directly in front of the main buildings of this exotic marina, and there we were moored by a quartet of eager young men between two floating palaces that, together, must have been worth the equivalent of a shah's ransom. A bosun piped us ashore to where a posse of officials waited. One of them made a little speech welcoming us to Montreal and to Expo 67, then a familiar face moved forward from the crowd. It belonged to a senior executive of Expo, and a friend from long ago.

I grabbed him by the arm.

“What in hell is this all about? I've never been so bloody scared in all my life!”

Grinning, he explained. In our remote fastness of Burgeo it had not occurred to us that the outer world would ever hear, or could possibly have cared, about our voyage. We had been wrong. Expo knew; Expo cared. From the time we passed the pilot station at Escuminac Point in the mouth of the river, Expo had been getting reports of our erratic progress. We had been under surveillance all that time.

“Mind you,” my friend told us, “nobody ever expected you'd actually
make
it. The betting odds were twenty-five to one against. I lost a bit myself. I thought you'd sink for good long before you reached Quebec. The boat that wouldn't float! What'd you do? Fill her up with ping-pong balls?”

“Quiet!” I muttered urgently. “Don't
say
things like that. Not when she can hear you, anyway.”

But I am afraid she must have heard.
That night we celebrated the end of fourteen hundred miles of struggle, of wrestling with adversity in all its manifold forms—in proper style.

It was late the next morning before we awoke. The sun was streaming into the cabin through the big forward port. I lay for a while and thought about the voyage. Then I turned my head toward Claire's bunk.

“Well, dear, it's all over now. Want some coffee? I'll put the kettle on.”

I swung my legs out of my bunk…and stepped into twelve inches of cold water.

She had done it again.

 

21.
Envoi

F
OR THE NEXT
five days Expo repented of its folly in welcoming the boat that wouldn't float.
Happy Adventure
had opened up so badly that we could only keep her head above water by continuous pumping with several electric pumps, and the somewhat malodorous jets that these flung against the millionaire yachts to either side of us were not appreciated. Expo officials kept moving us farther and farther into the hinterland of the Marina. We never saw our executive friend again, and he probably wished he had
never
seen us. All our efforts to staunch the leaks failed, and finally, in absolute desperation, we sailed our sinking vessel out of there, heading west in hopes of finding either a mud bank or a shipyard before it was too late.

We needed neither. Two hours after she left Expo,
Happy Adventure
stopped leaking, as suddenly and as inexplicably as she had begun.

A week later she, and we, arrived at the little Lake Ontario town of Port Hope, where Claire and I had bought a house. There were no facilities there to haul the vessel, so she had to stay in the water that winter. She did not like it. In January, when she was surrounded by ice not quite strong enough to bear a man's weight, she opened up again. We saved her-just-but I had two memorable and uninten
tional swims amongst the ice-floes, while trying to reach her from the shore.

This being almost the last straw, I had her hauled that spring at Deseronto, on the Bay of Quinte, and she spent most of 1968 ashore, while experts came and looked at her, and probed, and fiddled, and admitted themselves baffled. Once in a while we would launch her on trial. She would leak like a sieve, so we would haul her up again. By the end of the summer I was ready to abandon hope. I told Don Dawson, the shipyard owner, to tear the engine out of her, strip her of anything useful, and let her die.

Don is a strange sort of a man. He cannot easily endure defeat. Without consulting me, he made one last attempt to discover
Happy Adventure
's fatal flaw. One October day he phoned me.

“Farley? Listen now. I launched your boat last week. She's been sitting in the water ever since, and
she hasn't leaked a drop
. I think I've found the trouble.”

Of course I did not believe him, but being an eternal optimist I was persuaded to rescind her death sentence.

A few days before she was due to be launched in the spring of 1969 I visited her. As always, she looked a bit ungainly out of water, and she looked totally alien amongst the rows of slick motor-cruisers and fibreglass yachts. She was a sad, forlorn little ship; and I was suddenly stricken with guilt.

I thought to myself that she had been good to me in her way, and loyal too. And I thought what a dirty trick it was to bring her into exile in this land of fresh (polluted) water, toy boats and play boats, and there to let her rot her heart away.

On a sudden impulse I said, “Never mind, old girl. I'll tell you what. Come summer, if you stay afloat and mind your
P'S
and
Q's
, I'll take you back where you belong. What do you say to that?”

She said nothing then, but as I write these words she has been afloat for a month, is tight as a drum, and is in better health than I have ever known her to enjoy. That is her answer. So one of these days Claire and I and Albert and
Happy Adventure
will turn eastward, down the long, long river, to the salt and living sea; to the silence and the fog; to the world in which my little ship was born.
Happy Adventure
will be going home.