Stranded by Aaron Saunders

Author:Aaron Saunders
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2015-10-02T04:00:00+00:00

Of greater concern to Davis was the gash in her hull plating. It was expelling an enormous amount of water, somewhere in the neighbourhood of “two to three hundred gallons a minute — something like that — in a four to six inch stream.”[10]

Captain Davis also noticed one of Princess Sophia’s lifeboats — the third from the bow on her starboard side — had been lowered approximately halfway down the side of the ship. Davis could see the shadowy black outline of people in it, and noticed others had gathered up near the bow on the ship’s sunken well deck.

With the wind blowing fifteen to twenty miles, Captain Davis believed a rescue might be in progress. As he man-oeuvred the Estebeth closer to the wreck, his brother and a local Juneau doctor who had been travelling with him stepped out on deck. The snow had stopped and the seas were calmer, with little more than wavelets disturbing the surface. The Davis brothers had the foresight to bring a very important piece of equipment with them on this rescue mission: a camera. Steadying it against the portside rail of the Estebeth, Davis’s brother snapped the first shot of the stricken Princess Sophia up on Vanderbilt Reef: smoke wafting lazily from her funnel and a handful of whitecaps crashing on the reef.

Lying halfway between the Estebeth and the Princess Sophia was the triangular safety buoy, supposedly placed there to keep ships from running aground in the first place. A few more photographs were snapped and then Estebeth’s engines were powered up.

As Davis guided the Estebeth within two hundred feet of Princess Sophia, he hollered out to the ship. Captain Locke stepped out onto the starboard side of the open deck near the wheelhouse. Cupping his hands to his mouth, Davis shouted as loudly as he could so as to be heard over the wind: “Is an evacuation in progress?”

Locke replied that there wasn’t. The crew had lowered the lifeboat to inspect the hull of the ship. This was the same one the crew of the Peterson had noticed an hour earl-ier. Locke shouted through his megaphone that they were resting securely on the reef for now, but asked the Estebeth to stay close. His plan, should the weather allow for it, was to hold tight until the wind let up a little more. Locke told Davis that once that happened he wanted the Estebeth to come around to the port side to assist in the evacuation.

Captain Locke looked down on the Estebeth, then shouted through his megaphone: “Do you think the wind will go down?” Davis yelled “No!” at the top of his lungs. The Estebeth didn’t have a megaphone or a wireless set and his words, drowned out by the still-howling wind and surf, failed to reach Captain Locke. After a few seconds of silence, Locke repeated the question through his megaphone. This time, on the Estebeth, Captain Davis vigorously shook his head back and forth; the international signal for “No.”[11]

Not

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.