Now he was putting his faith to the acid test. Woodleigh was in sole control of the helm. If he failed to carry out his instructions or misinterpreted the reading of the chart, then goodness only knows what might happen.
Woodleigh was in his element. It seemed to him that he had reached the zenith of his ambition to be in charge as navigator of a large motor-boat in the North Sea. True, he was not out of sight of land, and the North Sea as pictured by present conditions, with a maze of sand-banks, buoys, and sea-marks, and a few lightships and pile-beacons thrown in, hardly coincided with what he imagined it to be.
The Scoutmaster was sleeping soundly; Peter Stratton was dosing fitfully on one of the lockers in the cockpit; Roche, as engineer on duty, was "standing by"; the other Sea Scouts were preparing breakfast; and Mr. Murgatroyd, gamely determined to recover his sea-legs, was hanging on to the coaming of the cockpit and watching the low-lying coast-line.
Before long Woodleigh discovered that making a passage by the aid of a chart was a comparatively simple matter.... It was merely a question of going from one buoy to another and noting the name on each one as he passed it. Even the Maplin, standing like one of Wells's Martians on its spider-like legs, the lad greeted as an old friend.
Up through the South-West Reach, across the shoals into the East Swin, the Olivette made her way.
"The Whitaker Beacon on the port hand," soliloquized the youthful helmsman. "Good enough; that must be the Swin Spitway buoy I can see ahead."
His surmise was correct. He starboarded helm on passing the latter buoy and stood on through the Wallet. The breaking seas on the Buxey and the tail of the Gunfleet looked formidable, and Woodleigh, for the first time doubting the advisability of "carrying on" farther than Mr. Armitage had stipulated, was on the point of getting one of his companions to rouse the Scoutmaster.
"Must be all right," he decided, giving another glance at the chart. It was about the twentieth time he had done so in the last two hours, and the chart, saturated with spray, was to him no longer a mass of complicated figures, but something more tangible. It was something on which he depended in order to bring the Olivette through the intricate channels between the shoals.
The new course, approximately N.N.W., was now dead in the eye of the wind, and Woodleigh began to experience some of the discomforts his Scoutmaster had endured during the night. Now it was broad daylight, and the white-crested masses of water bearing down upon the boat looked very threatening.
Waves thudded against her bows, throwing cascades of foam not only against, but completely over, the wheel-house. Now and again, as the boat's stern was lifted clear of the water, the propeller would race violently, causing the engineer many anxious moments, until, with a peculiar sensation, the motor would slow down as the blades of the screw met with increased resistance.