“Yes, I understand all that, but how do they expect to get working at the wreck, for I happen to know they have several divers’ suits aboard here?”
“Listen, and I’ll try to explain,” the other went on. “We carry a large number of empty oil barrels in our small cargo space, also planks with which to make a float, just as they do on the lakes in front of hotels and cottages. Get that, Ballyhoo?”
“Surely, and I begin to see that you’re going to say about the diving part of it, too, Oscar. That float will make a working place for the operation.”
“Just what it will,” Oscar further explained. “They have some sort of windlass they use to help raise the diver, whose armor is terribly heavy, you understand. It is also meant to lift up any cargo the man who goes down may gather while working about the wreck. Sometimes this is heavy machinery, or it may be a ship’s safe that they’re trying to salvage.”
“But will a little float like that stand being knocked about by the waves, for they must run pretty high here sometimes?” Ballyhoo added.
“But those are the times when no work will be attempted,” he was told. “There’s also a chance, if the wind is coming from the quarter that I think it is, we’ll find that the Key itself will act as a buffer to the waves, and on this side it will be almost calm.”
“I declare, you seem to think of nearly everything, Oscar,” the Jones boy exploded. “Now, the captain said we were to ascend, but so far as I can see we’re only moving around to another side of that great bunch of stuff covering the wreck.”
“Then I reckon he means to approach from several different quarters,” proceeded Oscar, “so as to get an idea of just how it lies. In that way a mistake may be avoided such as would cost us dear in the end.”
This sort of procedure continued for nearly an hour. By that time the boys figured that they had run close to the wreck on as many as six different occasions. There was no longer the slightest doubt about the object lodged in the midst of that submarine growth being the hulk of a long sunken ship. Thanks to the play of their powerful searchlight they had been able to make out just how the wreck was lying, and also figure which would be the best method of entering the same, when the diver was sent down.
Finally they changed the programme, and the steady laboring of the electric engines announced that the water ballast reservoirs were being emptied. This meant the captain was bound for the surface again.