In my plans, I had counted on the darkness, which must come soon. We would be very economical of the power, so that it would take us to the point which I had selected after carefully studying the chart. We kept to the same course for half an hour. Then, when the darkness must have settled down, I turned off at an angle of ninety degrees, and headed straight for the coast, where I knew the depth would permit us to rest on the bottom, to wait until the enemy had given up his manhunt. This would be towards morning, I thought, especially if the storm coming up from the southwest should increase in violence so that the searching of the water with nets would become very difficult.
The point that I had selected for our resting place was far from comfortable. And it was marked on the chart, not with the reassuring “Sd.” which indicated a sand bottom, but with the dreaded “St.” which meant the bottom was stony. But we had no choice. And when the devil is in a pinch, he will eat flies, although he is accustomed to better food. We did not rise again, since we knew it was dark over the sea, but continued at a considerable depth without incident and slowly approached our goal.
About midnight, according to my calculations, we would be able to touch the bottom. And the storage batteries had to last up to that time. Krüger figured and figured and came to the conclusion that they would hardly last long enough.
Until ten o’clock we had heard our friend’s propellers over us several times. Thereafter all became quiet on the surface, and, relieved, I drew a deep breath. They had lost the scent. It became bearable again in the U-boat. I sat on the stairway leading to the “Centrale” and was eating sandwiches and drinking hot tea with the other officers and the rest of the crew. It was almost twelve o’clock and still we had not touched bottom. What would happen if the computation of our location was wrong? This could easily have occurred, because of the strong current and our slow speed.
Half-past twelve! Still no bottom! Engineer Krüger was nervously stamping his feet and turned out one electric light after another in order to save power. For the same reason, the electric heating apparatus had been cut off for a long time, and we were very cold.
At five minutes to one we felt a slight scraping. The motors were stopped and then we reversed them in order to decrease our speed. A slight jolt! We filled the ballast tanks and were lying on the bottom where we could wait for morning at our ease. Who thought that? He who imagined that we would have any rest was disappointed. We were lying on a rock, and the tide turned about two o’clock, and the southwest wind swept the sea fiercely.
At the beginning, it seemed as if we would be all right, down there on the “St.” bottom, but we soon discovered differently—when the rolling began. There was no chance of gentle resting, as on the soft sand of the North Sea, but, instead, we banged and racked from one rock to another, so it was a wonder the boat could stand it at all.
Sometimes it sounded as if large stones were rolling on deck and, again, our boat would fall three or four meters deeper with a jolt, so that the manometer was never at rest, and we had to stand this continued rising and falling between twenty-two and thirty-eight meters.
At last, towards four o’clock, we gave it up. At some of the joints in the ship, there were small leakages, and none of us had any thought of sleeping. We, therefore, went up to the surface.
I opened the conning tower hatch and let the fresh air rush against me. I had a queer sensation. It seemed to me as if we had been buried in the deep for an eternity and had had a long, bad dream.