CHAPTER I
The Guardship
"It's going to be a dirty night," remarked Mr. Graham, Scoutmaster of the 9th Southend-on-Sea Sea Scouts. "Not very promising for the first day of our holidays."
"You are right, sir," agreed Desmond, the Patrol Leader. "We are safe enough here; and, after all, the weather isn't everything. We're jolly lucky to be afloat."
"Although we've nothing much to go to sea in," added Pat Hayes. "This part of the coast is very different from Southend, isn't it, sir?"
"I can hardly believe we're miles from home," chimed in Ted Coles, the tenderfoot or "greenhorn" of the troop. "My word, that shakes the old boat up!" he exclaimed, as a vicious blast of wind bore down upon the side of the lofty superstructure of their temporary floating home.
It was a stroke of good luck, or perhaps good management on the part of Scoutmaster Graham, that five members of the 9th Southend Sea Scouts found themselves in the Isle of Wight.
They had that afternoon "taken over" the guardship of the 6th Wootton Bridge Sea Scouts, the latter having accepted an invitation to take part in a "jamboree" on the other side of the Channel at a place called St. Valerie-en-Caux.
Before the Wootton Bridge lads left, their Scoutmaster, Mr. Tweedie, wrote to Mr. Graham—they had been brother officers in the R.N.V.R. in that distant period "when there had been a war on"—offering to lend him the Wootton Bridge Sea Scouts' guardship for the latter end of July and the greater part of the month of August.
Scoutmaster Graham put the proposition before the lads. They simply jumped at it. A holiday in the Isle of Wight was far different from knocking around the Essex and Suffolk creeks in their open whaler—an old tub that could not be trusted to go anywhere under canvas unless the wind was abaft the beam—and rowing, although good exercise, is apt to become a tedious business, especially when it comes to propelling an unwieldy eighteen-foot ex-Service boat for miles and miles.