"Can do," I said. "We'll take a chance. Turn out the hands; I'll call the pilots."
The weather had been so unpromising the night before that no early morning Duty Pilots had been warned off, so I hammered up Dickey for myself and Cuckney and Clayton for the second boat.
Cuckney was a stout fellow, who had been doing the two-trip-a-night stunt in carrying bombs from Dunkirk to Zeebrugge.
He was over the Mole one night at a low height in a Snider, a small float-seaplane, when his engine stopped. He pushed and pulled everything he could think of, but the engine would not start again, and he landed in Zeebrugge harbour. Searchlights blinded him, and the Huns let off everything that would bear. The enemy then saw that his engine had stopped. Fire ceased, and two launches raced out from the dock to capture him.
They were right on top of him when he found the trouble: he had opened the magneto-switch with his elbow. He started his engine, and ran along the water in front of the launches. And then he zoomed into the air, followed by howls of disappointment and a hurricane of high explosives.
After working some time at Dunkirk, he felt a bit weary, and somebody, who mistakenly thought that flying-boat patrols were a rest-cure, sent him down to Felixstowe.
Quickly despatching breakfast, we got into our two boats, and pushed off for the Spider Web, Cuckney taking up station on my port-beam, a quarter of a mile away. The water was invisible, and as he was travelling at the same speed and in the same direction, he looked to me as though he were standing still, suspended in the air by an invisible wire. It was an odd optical illusion.
The farther out we got the thicker got the mist. We could only see any distance by looking up the molten pathway made by the reflected image of the sun on the little waves.
After sculling about for two hours, I balanced the boat on the controls, and quickly climbed out of the first pilot's seat. Dickey was ready, and popped in. I now devoted my whole energies to observing. Turning my back on the sun, I tried to pierce the blank wall of fleecy white.
I saw something sparkle.