The Boat Who Wouldn't Float by Farley Mowat Page B

coughed, and stopped for good. Silently, in that black night, the little ship ghosted forward.
    Jack came tumbling out on deck for there was no point in remaining below while the vessel foundered. He had, and I remember this with great clarity, a flashlight in his mouth and a bottle of rum in each hand….
    â€¦At that moment Happy Adventure’s forefoot hit something. She jarred a little, made a strange sucking sound, and the motion went out of her.
    â€œI t’inks,” said Enos as he nimbly relieved Jack of one of the bottles, “I t’inks we’s runned ashore!”
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    Jack believes Happy Adventure has a special kind of homing instinct. He may be right. Certainly she is never happier than when she is lying snuggled up against a working fish-plant. Perhaps she identifies fish plants with the natal womb, which is not so strange when one remembers she was built in a fish-plant yard and that she spent the many months of her refit as a semi-permanent fixture in the fish-plant slip at Muddy Hole.
    In any event when she limped into Trepassey she unerringly found her way straight to her spiritual home. Even before we began playing flashlights on our surroundings we knew this was so. The old familiar stench rose all around us like a dank miasma.
    The flashlights revealed that we had run ashore on a gently shelving beach immediately alongside a massively constructed wharf. Further investigation had to be delayed because the tide was falling and the schooner was in danger of keeling over on her bilge. Jack made a jump and managed to scale the face of the wharf. He caught the lines I threw him and we rigged a spider web of ropes from our two masts to the wharf timbers to hold the vessel upright when all the water had drained away from under her.
    When she seemed secure I joined Jack on the dock and cautiously we went exploring. The fog was so thick that our lights were nearly useless and we practically bumped into the first human being we encountered. He was the night watchman for Industrial Seafood Packers, a huge concern to whose dock we were moored. After we had convinced the watchman that we did not have a cargo of fish to unload, but were only mariners in distress, he came aboard.
    He seemed genuinely incredulous to find we did not have a radar set. How, he asked, had we found our way into the harbour? How had we missed striking the several draggers anchored in the fairway? And how, in hell’s own name (his words), had we found the plant and managed to come alongside the wharf without hitting the L-shaped end where the cod-oil factory stood in lonely grandeur?
    Since we could not answer these questions we evaded them, leaving him with the suspicion, which spread rapidly around Trepassey, that we were possessed by an occult power. Witches and warlocks have not yet vanished from the outport scene in Newfoundland.
    The watchman was a generous man and he told us we could stay at the wharf as long as we wished. He felt, however, that we might be happier if we moored a hundred feet farther to seaward.
    â€œ ’Tis the poipe, ye know; the poipe what carries off the gurry from the plant. Ye’ve moored hard alongside o’ she.”
    Happy Adventure had come home with a vengeance and, for all I know, it may have been vengeance at that.
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    That was a singularly dreadful night.
    We had to begin repairing the leak immediately, while the tide was low. We soon found that Enos’s diagnosis had been correct. The outside stuffing box, or gland, had come adrift when both retaining lag screws parted, allowing the box to slip down the shaft until it rested against the propeller.
    In order to repair it we had to borrow a big drill from the helpful watchman, drill out the remains of the old lag screws, fair off the dead wood where the shaft had chewed it up, and then screw the gland back into place. Perhaps this does not sound like much of a task, but let me try to paint the scene.
    To reach the