“Hurray!” cried Tom, as the craft took the waves. “She’s a success all right.”
“Not so fast! Hold on a bit!” cried Abe. “She’s leaking like a sieve in one place!”
“Leaking!” cried his shipmate.
“Yes. One place where I must have forgotten to do the calking good enough. Haul me back, and we’ll get her out of water again, and patch her up.”
Under Abe’s directions Tom, Joe and Professor Skeel pulled on the rope that was still fastened to the craft and she was worked back on the deck of the derelict. Then Abe, making a careful examination, began the work of calking up the cracks where the water had poured in.
The work took him longer than he had supposed it would, for he found out that he had to change his ideas when it came to making a reconstructed boat water-tight. He was most of the day at the task, and when he had finished he thought of something else.
“We need oars,” he said. “We can’t always depend on the wind, and if we get becalmed out on the ocean, with no shelter, such as we have here, we’ll be in a bad way if we can’t make some headway. So I will just make a pair of sweeps.”
Which he did out of some of the lighter planks that formed part of the cargo of the derelict. Thole pins were cut out to serve as oarlocks, for there were none on the made-over boat, and thus equipped the lifeboat could be rowed, though not very fast.
“Now I reckon she’s likely to be of more use,” declared Abe, when he had finished his task.