Geoffrey Jenkins - Scend of the Sea

He took off his Air Force tunic, threw it across the table which had held the second chart (the one I could not explain to her that night of sailing) and sprawled with a sigh again in my armchair.

'Unfriendly, inhospitable,' he grinned. 'Only one chair. No creature comforts. In fact, what joy you extract from this sort of game is beyond my guess.'

'It has its rewards.'

It must have sounded ponderous, stuffy, for he glanced at me narrowly and then exclaimed boisterously:

'What about a little pubcrawl tonight, boy? Beat up the town, you and I. It's a good spot, Durban. We could …'

I liked Alistair, but there were too many undercurrents since Cape Town to surrender to his light-hearted mood.

'I sail tomorrow,' I cried off. 'No dice, I'm afraid.'

He looked at me searchingly. 'I guess, if you hadn't been sailing, there'd have been some other equally good reason. You're growing old, boy, and the grass is growing under your feet. Sorry, I forgot, there's no grass where you graze in the South Atlantic. You've changed since I last saw you, Ian, and that's only a few months back.' He kicked at a length of rope on the floor. 'Even to a dumb flyer like me, you can't pass this off as met. gear.'

I picked up the offending nylon rope. It had a wire core anchored round a thimble. I played with a loose plug-and-socket connection.

'It is and it isn't,' I replied. 'Once we get well south of the Cape, Walvis Bay will be in an area where there are all sorts of exciting and little-understood interchanges of warm tropical water with cold Antarctic streams. For a long time there has been need for an intensive study and we're going to try out a new technique for measuring sea surface temperatures. It's called a trailing thermistor, if you want to know.'

Alistair eyed me quizzically. I wondered if Bruce Fairlie had been like that when he flew his crazy bombers, or was it Douglas Fairlie who had bequeathed Alistair the air of confident nonchalance which once might have graced the high controversial promenade deck of the Waratah, Those were the Edwardian days when captains still wore top hats, and officers fraternizing with attractive lady passengers was permitted only in so far as it promoted the interests of the Blue Anchor Line. Would Alistair mature from the unshakeable confidence of the jet fighter-bomber pilot to … I remembered then that she had spoken of Collingwood. The average age of Nelson's men at Trafalgar was twenty-two; and the Battle of Britain had been won by boys. Alistair was twenty-one.

'When the Buccaneers were ordered to come down to Durban for manoeuvres, I expected to find my distinguished;lder and scientific brother quietly fiddling over barometers and suchlike,' went on Alistair. 'After all, you said you were making this special cruise to gather met. information which apparently no one else can get, it's so bloody remote. Fair enough, but you've been here ten days now, and I'll bet you haven't even been ashore for a run. You should look on me as a heaven-sent piece of luck.'

'Not your sort of run, Alistair,' I grinned back. 'Backwards arid forwards to the Institute..

'Sounds slightly sinister to me,’ he rejoined. 4I always felt you needed your head read.'

'Institute for Marine Research. Down by the beachfront.'

'You mean the aquarium?'

The aquarium is only the shop window for the public,' I replied. The science lies behind. When the Institute heard I was in port, they asked me to carry out some deep-sea scientific studies for them-in addition to the investigations I've already been scheduled to do for my own people. After all, it isn't every day that a scientist gets the opportunity of taking observations in an area where no observations have been taken before. .'

'Here we go,' sighed Alistair. 'Give me another beer, Ian, while you go off on your hobbyhorse. No wonder they all love you and clutter up your ship, even your own cabin. You're the country's No. 1 scientific sucker. Just say the words, where no research and observations have been carried out before, and you're sold on it. Ask you to examine the sex life of plankton in the Roaring Forties and you'd do it too.'

Alistair was as uncomplicated as a summer high pressure system. And as warming too. Like astronauts, Buccaneer pilots must not be bedevilled by imagination.

I caught his bantering mood. There's a sea worm called a Bonollia. She fixes what sex her young are going to be.'

Alistair held up a hand in feigned protest. 'No more without more alcohol.'

'I'll get another from the ward-room.'

'That's the place which is one spit long each way?’

'It is.'

He took imaginary aim across my cabin. 'This place is only half a spit. Easy to see why you don't keep your liquor here.- If I were cooped up for weeks on end like you in this scientific bed-sitter, I'd reach for the nearest bottle. Wise man, to put temptation far away in the ward-room.'

Before I could go, Feldman, the ship's first officer, knocked and said, 'Can you come on deck, sir? We're having a bit of trouble with that crane-like thing."

'Coming, Alistair?'

He nodded. 'Might as well see the worst.'

Two dockyard men were trying to weld and bolt to the maindeck port rail the ungainly collection of pipes and pulleys called a Van Veen grab. It looked like a strange triangle forming an outboard derrick from the ship's side. At its extremity was a small bucket-like grab, worked by pulleys and chains from the deck.

'Looks like a steam shovel born prematurely,' commented Ali stair.

The two workmen relaxed. Alistair had that effect. I had pushed them pretty hard for the past few days.

‘It keeps snapping shut,' explained one of the workmen. 'As soon as we start getting the rest properly into position, the bucket gets itself in the way. Can't you fix it somehow?'

I clambered out on the rail and adjusted the trip chain mechanism of the steel jaws (designed to bring mud samples from the ocean floor), so that it could not run free as it had been doing. This was to be one of my prime instruments for tests along the line of the Agulhas Bank, the oil-bearing continental shelf which envelops the tip of southern Africa. Since the Americans had found that it was uneconomic to exploit offshore oil when the depths exceed 300 feet, Walvis Bay's mission was to proceed along the line of this depth and make preliminary samplings. Before striking south to Bouvet and beyond, I had been commissioned to deliver these samples to one of the big rigs already operating farther round the coast, from where they would be flown by helicopter to land research stations to establish whether more detailed seismic refraction and gravimetric investigation were justified. My route at first down the coast would seldom be more than twelve miles offshore, along the 300-foot line.

Alistair said, 'You've already got one of these grabs on the other side of the ship — what do you want two for?'

A slightly less complicated array of pipes, pulleys and wires hung from the starboard rail.

The other's a gravity corer,' I explained. 'That thing like a mortar bomb hanging on the end is for penetrating the sea-bottom itself. .'

Feldman interrupted. 'It's all right off the coast, sir, but won't all this top-hamper make her a little unstable when we hit the Westerlies?'

I kept my reservations to myself. 'Together they're lighter than the harpoon gun in the bows which we scrapped,' I replied. 'That kept her head down too much. I got rid of it to reduce her overall weight above the waterline and give ler more buoyancy for'ard. In any event, the Van Veen jrab will come into its own again once we start investigating the two seamounts beyond Bouvet.'

'You can always cut all this adrift if you get into trouble,' remarked Alistair.

The two workmen laughed. Feldman looked mildly shocked.