FROM the books they had read Harry and Joe had learned exactly what to do in case of capsizing under sail, and had often discussed the matter. “When I capsize,” Harry would say, “I shall pull the masts out of her, and she’ll then right of her own accord. Then I shall unship the rudder, put my hands on the stern-post, and raise myself up so that I can straddle the deck, and gradually work my way along until I can get into the cockpit. After that I shall bail her out, step the masts, and sail on again.” Nothing could be easier than to describe this plan while sitting in a comfortable room on shore, but to carry it out in a rough sea was a different affair.
Harry was not at all frightened when he found himself in the water, and he instantly swum clear of the canoe, to avoid becoming entangled in her rigging. He then proceeded to unship the masts and the rudder, and when this was done tried to climb in over the stern. He found that it was quite impossible. No sooner would he get astride of the stern than the canoe would roll and throw him into the water again. After half a dozen attempts he gave it up, and swimming to the side of the canoe managed to throw himself across the cockpit. This was the way in which Charley Smith had climbed into his canoe the day before, and to Harry’s great surprise—for no such method of climbing into a canoe had been mentioned in any of the books he had read—it proved successful.
Of course the deck of the canoe was now level with the water, which washed in and out of her with every sea that struck her. Harry seized the empty tin can which he used as a bailer, and which was made fast to one of the timbers of the canoe with a line, to prevent it from floating away, but he could not make any headway in bailing her out. The water washed into her just as fast as he could throw it out again, and he began to think that he should have to paddle the canoe ashore full of water. This would have been hard work, for with so much water in her she was tremendously heavy and unwieldy; but, after getting her head up to the wind with his paddle, he found that less water washed into her, and after long and steady work he succeeded in bailing most of it out.
Meanwhile Charley, whose help Harry had declined, because he felt so sure that he could get out of his difficulty by following the plan that he had learned from books on canoeing, was trying to help Joe. At first Joe thought it was a good joke to be capsized. His Lord Ross lateen-sail, with its boom and yard, had floated clear of the canoe of its own accord, and, as the only spar left standing was a mast about two feet high, she ought to have righted. But Joe had forgotten to lash his sand-bag to the keelson, and the result was that whenever he touched the canoe she would roll completely over and come up on the other side. Joe could neither climb in over the stern nor throw himself across the deck, and every attempt he made resulted in securing for him a fresh ducking. Charley tried to help him by holding on to the capsized canoe, but he could not keep it right side up; and as Joe soon began to show signs of becoming exhausted Charley was about to insist that he should hang on to the stern of the Midnight, and allow himself to be towed ashore, when Tom in the Twilight arrived on the scene.
Tom had seen the Dawn and the Sunshine capsize, and was far enough to leeward to have time to take in his sail before the squall reached him. It therefore did him no harm, and he paddled up against the wind to help his friends. It took him some time to reach the Dawn, for it blew so hard that when one blade of the paddle was in the water he could hardly force the other blade against the wind. Before the cruise was over he learned that by turning one blade at right angles to the other—for the two blades of a paddle are joined together by a ferrule in the middle—he could paddle against a head-wind with much less labor.
The Twilight, being an undecked “Rice Lake” canoe, could easily carry two persons, and, with the help of Charley and Tom, Joe climbed into her. Charley then picked up the floating sail of the Dawn, made her painter fast to his own stern, and started under paddle for the shore. It was not a light task to tow the water-logged canoe, but both the sea and the wind helped him, and he landed by the time that the other boys had got the camp-fire started and the coffee nearly ready.
“Well,” said Harry, “I’ve learned how to get into a canoe to-day. If I’d stuck to the rule and tried to get in over the stern I should be out in the lake yet.”
“I’m going to write to the London Field and get it to print my new rule about capsizing,” said Joe.
“What’s that?” asked Charley. “To turn somersaults in the water? That was what you were doing all the time until Tom came up.”
“That was for exercise, and had nothing to do with my rule, which is, ‘Always have a fellow in a “Rice Lake” canoe to pick you up.’”
“All your trouble came from forgetting to lash your ballast-bag,” remarked Harry. “I hope it will teach you a lesson.”
“That’s a proper remark for a Commodore who wants to enforce discipline,” cried Charley; “but I insist that the trouble came from carrying too much sail.”
“The sail would have been all right if it hadn’t been for the wind,” replied Harry.
“And the wind wouldn’t have done us any harm if we hadn’t been on the lake,” added Joe.
“Boys, attention!” cried Harry. “Captain Charles Smith is hereby appointed sailing-master of this fleet, and will be obeyed and respected accordingly, or, at any rate, as much as he can make us obey and respect him. Anyhow, it will be his duty to tell us how much sail to carry, and how to manage the canoes under sail.”
“This is the second day of the cruise,” remarked Joe an hour later, as he crept into his blankets, “and I have been wet but once. There is something wrong about it, for on our other cruises I was always wet through once every day. However, I’ll hope for the best.”
In the middle of the night Joe had reason to feel more satisfied. It began to rain. As his rubber blanket was wet, and in that state seemed hotter than ever, Joe could not sleep under the shelter of it, and, as on the previous night, went to sleep with nothing over him but his woollen blanket. His head was underneath the deck, and as the rain began to fall very gently, it did not awaken him until his blanket was thoroughly wet.
He roused himself and sat up. He was startled to see a figure wrapped in a rubber blanket sitting on his deck. “Who’s there?” he asked, suddenly. “Sing out, or I’ll shoot!”
“You can’t shoot with a jack-knife or a tin bailer, so I’m not much afraid of you,” was the reply.
“Oh, it’s you, Tom, is it?” said Joe, much relieved. “What in the world are you doing there?”
“My canoe’s half full of water, so I came out into the rain to get dry.”
“Couldn’t you keep the rain out of the canoe with the rubber blanket?”
“The canoe is fourteen feet long, and hasn’t any deck, and the blanket is six feet long. I had the blanket hung over the paddle, but of course the rain came in at the ends of the canoe.”
“Well, I’m pretty wet, for I didn’t cover my canoe at all. What’ll we do?”
“Sit here till it lets up, I suppose,” replied Tom. “It must stop raining some time.”
“I’ve got a better plan than that. Is your rubber blanket dry inside? Mine isn’t.”
“Yes, it’s dry enough.”
“Let’s put it on the ground to lie on, and use my rubber blanket for a tent. We can put it over a ridge-pole about two feet from the ground, and stake the edges down.”
“What will we do for blankets? It’s too cold to sleep without them.”
“We can each borrow one from Harry and Charley. They’ve got two apiece, and can spare one of them.”
Joe’s plan was evidently the only one to be adopted; and so the two boys pitched their little rubber tent, borrowed two blankets, and crept under shelter. They were decidedly wet, but they lay close together and managed to keep warm. In the morning they woke up rested and comfortable, to find a bright sun shining and their clothes dried by the heat of their bodies. Neither had taken the slightest cold, although they had run what was undoubtedly a serious risk, in spite of the fact that one does not easily take cold when camping out.
As they were enjoying their breakfast the canoeists naturally talked over the events of the previous day and night. Harry had been kept perfectly dry by his canoe-tent—one side of which he had left open, so as to have plenty of fresh air; and Charley had also been well protected from the rain by his rubber blanket, hung in the usual way over the paddle, although he had been far too warm to be comfortable.
“I’m tired of suffocating under that rubber blanket of mine, and I’ve invented a new way of covering the canoe at night, which will leave me a little air to breathe. I’ll explain it to you when we camp to-night, Joe.”
“I’m glad to hear it, for I’ve made up my mind that I’d rather be rained on than take a Turkish bath all night long under that suffocating blanket.”
“Will your new plan work on my canoe?” asked Tom.
“No; nothing will keep that ‘Rice Lake’ bathtub of yours dry in a rain, unless you deck her over.”
“That’s what I’m going to do when we get to Magog. I’ll buy some canvas and deck over the ends of my canoe. Sleeping in her in the rain as she is now is like sleeping in a cistern with the water running into it.”
“Now that we’ve had a chance to try our sails, which rig do you like best, Sailing-master?” asked Harry.
“That lateen-rig that Joe has,” replied Charley. “He can set his sail and take it in while the rest of us are trying to find our halyards. Did you see how the whole concern—spars and sail—floated free of the canoe of their own accord the moment she capsized?”
“That’s so; but then my big balance-lug holds more wind than Joe’s sail.”
“It held too much yesterday. It’s a first-rate rig for racing, but it isn’t anything like as handy as the lateen for cruising; neither is my standing-lug. I tried to get it down in a hurry yesterday, and the halyards jammed, and I couldn’t get it down for two or three minutes.”
“I can get my leg-of mutton in easy enough,” remarked Tom, “but I can’t get the mast out of the step unless the water’s perfectly smooth, and I don’t believe I could then without going ashore.”
“Now, Commodore,” said Charley, “if you’ll give the order to start, I’ll give the order to carry all sail. The breeze is light and the water is smooth, and we ought to run down to the end of the lake by noon.”
The little fleet made a beautiful appearance as it cruised down the lake under full sail. The breeze was westerly, which fact enabled the canoes to carry their after-sails—technically known as “dandies”—to much advantage. When running directly before the wind the “dandy” is sometimes a dangerous sail, as it is apt to make the canoe broach-to; but with a wind from any other direction than dead aft it is a very useful sail.
The canoes sailed faster than they had sailed the day before, because there was no rough sea to check their headway. They reached Magog at noon, went to the hotel for a good dinner, bought some canvas with which to deck Tom’s canoe, and then looked at the dam which crosses the Magog River a few rods from the lake, and wondered how they were ever to get through the rapids below it.
There was a place where the canoes could be lowered one by one over the breast of the dam and launched in a little eddy immediately below. The rapids, which extended from below the dam for nearly a quarter of a mile, were, however, very uninviting to a timid canoeist. The water did not seem to be more than three or four feet deep, but it was very swift, and full of rocks. “You boys can’t never run them rapids in them boats,” said a man who came to look at the canoes. “You’ll have to get a cart and haul round ’em.”
The boys did not like to be daunted by their first rapid, and, as there did not seem to be much risk of drowning, they decided to take the chances of getting the canoes through it safely. Harry gave the order to lash everything fast in the canoes that could be washed overboard, and he prepared to lead the way in the Sunshine.
It was magnificent sport shooting down the rapid like an arrow. The canoes drove through two or three waves which washed the decks, though the canoe-aprons of the Dawn, Sunshine, and Midnight kept the water from getting into the cockpits. Harry’s and Charley’s canoes each struck once on the same rock while in the rapid, but in each case only the keel struck the rock, and the current dragged the canoes safely over it. When the fleet was reunited in the smooth water below the rapid the boys expressed their enthusiasm by all talking at once at the top of their lungs. Every one was delighted with the way his canoe had acted, and with the skill with which he had avoided this or that rock, or had discovered the best channel just at the right moment. In their excitement they let the canoes float gently down the stream, until they suddenly discovered another rapid at the beginning of a sharp bend in the river just ahead of them.
It was nothing like as fierce in appearance as the first rapid, and as Harry led the way the others followed close after him, one behind the other, fancying that they could run the rapid without the least trouble. Half-way down Harry’s canoe struck on a rock, swung broadside to the current, and hung there. Tom was so close behind him that he could not alter his course, and so ran straight into the Sunshine with a terrible crash. The Dawn and the Twilight instantly followed, and as the four canoes thus piled together keeled over and spilled their occupants into the river, it began to look as if the rapid had determined to make the irreverent young canoeists respect it.
