A SPECK ON THE SEA by William Longyard

Author:William Longyard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Published: 2004-07-26T22:00:00+00:00

Schultz’s Sea Fever was modified many times on its journey from the Andes down the Amazon, and up the Caribbean to Miami. Its sails were made from canvas awning material.

The “Reds” that Congress didn’t think President Truman was doing enough to stop were successful in Europe, as well as Asia. Stalin had parked the Soviet Red Army in Eastern Europe, with no intention of taking it out. Germany became a divided nation, and trapped in the Soviets’ new police state of East Germany were our old friend Paul Müller, his wife Aga, and their children. Müller had mastered the sea before, and to save his family now from the horrors of Stalinism he intended to do so one more time.

The Wannsee is a beautiful lake in the southwest corner of Berlin remembered today mostly for the evil that was planned at a lovely tree-shaded villa on its shores one week in January 1942—Hitler’s extermination of the Jews—but most local people thought of it only as a place of recreation, especially pleasure boating. It was here that Müller, for a song, acquired an eighteen-foot rowboat in early 1949.

That spring he added an external hollow wooden keel into which he stuffed nearly a thousand pounds of scrounged scrap metal. Next he added a cuddy, flush decking, and in the stern a little cockpit for the helmsman. In a hurry because each day the Russians were tightening their grip on the people, he gave her a simple sloop rig, with the mainsail laced onto the mast and boom, and a small jib. During rough weather he would deploy a sea anchor over the stern.

Dubbing his craft the Berlin, he intended to sail her across the canals that connect Berlin to the Elbe River, then downriver into West Germany, out to the English Channel, and by stages to Argentina. For navigation he had only a compass and the memories of his previous voyage.

It was decided that he and his teenage daughter, also named Aga, should leave first, and when they made it to South America they would earn enough money to buy the freedom of his wife and young son. The two began their hazardous voyage in August and by good fortune eluded the communist guards and informants as they worked their way through the elaborate canal system that connects the Wannsee with the Elbe. Arriving at the river undetected, they went downstream past Hamburg and out to the Frisian Islands. It was now November 1949. The shifting sands of the Frisians, as any reader of Erskine Childers’s classic The Riddle of the Sands knows, were difficult to navigate, but it seemed better to work coastwise through the sands along the Netherlands than to attempt the North Sea immediately. Finally they made the jump to England, and after weathering several storms during the late fall they managed to reach Ireland. All along the way, kindhearted people helped the pitiful refugees when they landed. To Paul it must have seemed like a second youth, a second 1929.

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.