An Absence of Imagination: A Tale of the China Coast by Richard Woodman

Author:Richard Woodman
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Mystery, Naval, Fiction, Historical, Crime, Thriller
ISBN: 9798595855440
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services LLC - Kdp
Published: 2021-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

4

Macintyre was correct. It rained heavily that evening, severely restricting visibility so that Sanford spent most of the first watch alongside Richards on the bridge. The Da Feng was equipped with radar, but as they approached the great estuary of the Yangtze-kiang it was wise to ‘navigate with caution’ as the time-honoured phrase had it, so the ship was running at half-speed. Every two minutes Richards swung on the lanyard and sent the throaty howl of the Da Feng’s whistle into the wet black night.

For most of the time the fo’c’s’le bell remained silent, rung only in response to its smaller sister on the bridge to mark the passing of the half hours. But once the forward lookout struck the three distinct strokes that told them there was a light dead ahead.

The sound alarmed Sanford; there was nothing showing on the radar on that bearing, though a small echo told of a local craft – inevitably a fishing junk – less than half a mile to starboard.

‘Shall I come to starboard, sir?’ Richards called from the bridge wing, staring into the wet darkness. In clear weather a light dead ahead generally required the Da Feng to alter her course to starboard. But the International Regulations were less specific when it came to operating in nil visibility. Richards’s reaction was visceral, for they had no plot of the obstruction and had no idea in which direction it was proceeding. If the lookout could see it, it was close, very close indeed. They had no time to stop and, unless they wanted to run into whatever it was that lay in their grain, they had to do something fast.

In such circumstances all that Sanford had learned on the coast came to his aid far faster than it takes to tell of it. He guessed the light and the echo to starboard were connected and shouted:

‘No! hard a port!’

The Quartermaster put the helm over and the Da Feng heeled to the turn. The noise of breaking crockery came from the chart-room where the night’s tea tray went for a burton as Sanford ran out onto the starboard bridge wing in time to see, thirty feet below him, wallowing in the bow wave, a small sampan. It was manned by a single fisherman holding up a hurricane lamp. The man shouted something and was gone again in an instant, lost in the wet darkness, but Sanford had seen – briefly, the lamp’s light gleaming on them - the ropes leading over the sampan’s far side, stretched between the little craft and the junk a few cables away. These ropes, he had guessed correctly, supported a demersal fishing net.

The rain fizzled out shortly after midnight revealing the lights of a large fishing fleet dotted around the ship and extending to the horizon. Sanford left the bridge to the Second Mate, who saw him off with a confident, ‘No worries, Cap’n.’

But at two o’clock a wet mist dropped on them and the Second Mate blew down

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