Free Chasing Icarus by Gavin Mortimer Page A

eased considerably and things begin to look joyful again. While I’m on watch everybody else is asleep. All the crew wake up one by one and I assure them all is well and there are prospects of a fine day.” With the engines off and the wind down, the silence of the night was matched only by the magnificence of the dawn. Even in their parlous situation, Simon felt moved to comment on “a beautiful sunrise and I quite enjoyed it.” Uplifted by the sight, he descended the rope ladder into the lifeboat and cooked himself breakfast.
    Wellman woke at six thirty A.M. to the first piece of good news since they’d left Atlantic City two days earlier—the sun was out.
    At midday Simon took advantage of the sun to calculate their position: thirty-eight degrees six minutes north, sixty-six degrees twenty-one minutes west, “about 400 miles east of the Hampton roads,” as he noted in his log. Half an hour later Jack Irwin picked up two shore stations calling the America ’s signal letter, one in Siasconset and the other in Cape Cod. Over and over they repeated the W , but Irwin was unable to make himself heard no matter how loud he shouted into the receiver or how hard he banged the side of the boat in frustration. The rest of the crew joined him in the lifeboat and listened mutely as they heard one of the shore stations “tell us great anxiety exists on land regarding our welfare.”
    When the distant voice died, all they could hear was the soft smack of the swell against the hull of the lifeboat. Thoughts of home cast a shadow over them far greater than that of the airship, until eventually Wellman broke the silence with a request for lunch. Fred Aubert dished out six plates of smoked ham and dry biscuits, and afterward Simon sat back in the lifeboat and enjoyed a quiet smoke as Wellman outlined their plan.
    For the last few hours the America had been running fifteen to eighteen knots per hour with a southeasterly wind, which meant they were headed toward Bermuda. They would hold the remaining gasoline in reserve for what Wellman called “the final struggle” to reach the island. Simon suppressed a laugh for the sake of the others. He admired Well-man’s calm determination, but as a sailor long in the tooth he knew that the chances of reaching Bermuda were negligible.
    While the rest of the men napped in the warmth of the afternoon sun, Simon retrieved from the car his logbook and camera. First he took a snapshot of the airship, then one of Kiddo the cat stretched out contentedly in the lifeboat. Simon opened his logbook: “The America airship will die from sheer exhaustion, a sort of bleeding to death, and before the last comes we must take to the boat,” he wrote, demolishing his skipper’s plan in a sentence. That prospect held no fear for Simon, who was experiencing a nostalgic yearning for the old-fashioned type of ship. “I am looking forward with plea sure to three or four days in the lifeboat. It is well stocked with provisions, water and tobacco. It contains several sleeping berths, sea anchor, and wireless plant. That lifeboat has always looked good to me. It is the most complete little craft for its size I have ever seen and reflects credit upon Saunders of Cowes, who built it. My favorite sport is boating, but whether my longshore shipmates will regard two or three days in an open lifeboat in the Atlantic in the light of sport I do not know.”
    However, launching the lifeboat presented a problem large as well as dangerous. Simon described it succinctly as “that blessed equilibrator.” The lifeboat was suspended between the airship and the equilibrator; to launch the lifeboat the equilibrator would need to be submerged, but the moment they released the lifeboat’s shackles, the reduction in weight would pull the equilibrator up out of the water and . . .
    It didn’t require much imagination to picture the damage that a two-ton, thirty-three-foot-long equilibrator could inflict on a twenty-seven-foot-long