Sea Cruise

I love ships. I love the sea. I love the throaty roar of marine diesels. I therefore thought I had died and gone to heaven when I managed to talk my way on board the HMCS Cormorant, a Canadian Navy sub tender bound for Lancaster Sound for various reasons, including sending its little sub down to the seabed off the Labrador coast to look for places where icebergs had hit the bottom and carved trenches in the sediment. I attended meetings to discuss the work. With earnest expression I spoke of dropstones and relict scours. In private I skipped and whistled sea chanteys.

Finally departure was imminent. I had packed and repacked a dozen times. Although I had never been troubled by seasickness, everybody involved in the trip warned me that it was lunacy not to start the trip with a Gravol, just to be sure. So I did. And I soon discovered that the primary effect of Gravol is drowsiness. A deep and insurmountable drowsiness. I first noticed this about the time we dragged our last box down into the hold. I flopped down onto it and was all set set for a little nap when a crewman bustled in and told me I had to move since he had to tie everything down. I shuffled back up the ladder to the deck and spotted a big soft coil of rope in which I made a nest and was just about sound asleep again when another crewman chased me off it, offering the weak excuse that he needed it. A lifeboat caught my eye and I was headed for it when yet another busybody threw a canvas over it and tied it down. I finally found a nook right up in the bow next to the anchor chain and went right to sleep for two hours, completely missing our departure from St John's harbor. But I wasn't seasick.

The HMCS Cormorant, it turned out, started life as an Italian fishing trawler. The Canadian government got a deal on it and made it over into a sub tender, which means that they added a large, heavy enclosure to keep the sub in and finally the large, heavy sub itself, which effectively moved the center of gravity a good deal higher than it once was. The result of all this was a very slow-moving little ship that wallowed like nobody's business in almost no sea at all.

There was to be another ship in our little convoy which was the HMCS Protecteur. This was a much larger, more serious navy ship, with guns and secret handshakes and no women. As we steamed out of port, the HMCS Protecteur was down in Halifax having a last minute repair. Nobody was concerned by our head start since we were such a pitiful scow and they were such a big sleek ship of the line and would catch up with us in a couple of days as soon as she was clear of Halifax.

So we settled happily into our routine of dining in the officers' mess, partying with the chiefs and petty officers, and chatting with the folks on watch.

We had put Newfoundland behind us and were on our way up the Labrador coast when word came that the mighty Protecteur was still stalled in Halifax. Our new instruction was to slow down until further notice.

Meanwhile, a storm had begun to form and seemed to be heading our way. The swells had already caught up with us and we wallowed constantly. Some of the crew started skipping meals and the first pea-green faces started to appear. After a couple of days the storm had developed as a tight little well with howling winds and green water over the bow. After the deafening crash of a thousand pieces of crockery at lunch one day we sustained life with sandwiches on paper plates.

Meanwhile, back in Halifax, the majestic Protecteur had developed another problem which might be fixed tomorrow if they could get the part. I was up on the bridge when the news came and so discovered that the Canadian navy was given to exchanging bible verses in a conversational sort of way. My father had told me that this was common during WWII when he was plying the North Atlantic, and that one of their favorites was Ecclesiastes 9:4 which explains “A living dog is better than a dead lion,” which I thought was entirely suitable for our situation. I think they might have used it if the Protecteur's captain hadn't outranked ours.

At length the storm passed. We took the sub out for a romp at some unscheduled location and started getting hot food again. We received orders not to cross 60ºN. We did another dive and another, and before you knew it, a month had passed. The Protecteur had still not left Halifax, and ice was beginning to form in Lancaster Sound. So we were called back. The trip was cancelled.

After another small storm we arrived in the Straits of Belle Isle, and steamed south between Newfoundland and Labrador. We saw a little iceberg. There was a chill in the air. The crew oscillated between ill-tempered crabbiness at being stuck out at sea for so long, and giggling euphoria at being so close to port.

We entered the long fjord leading to the Corner Brook harbor early one morning. It was sunny – a beautiful day. I went out on deck to admire the unfamiliar lumps on the horizon. Then I smelled the pines. Until that moment I had not understood how much I had missed the smells of land. As we steamed slowly down the fjord we passed hay-scented islands. And finally the homey smell of a fish plant.

I loved that cruise. Even the storm. I would do it again in a flash. But one of the most euphoric moments of those six weeks was standing on the dock at Corner Brook with the gulls squawking overhead and the querulous growl of rusty pick-ups in the distance, still swaying gently with the rhythm of the ship.