First of all, of course, it was necessary for Tom, Cliff and Nicky to discover the key islands which formed the Dipper. This was not easy, because the channels between the islets were, in many places, too shallow for even their light-draught boat to navigate.
They had no definite idea just where to locate the Dipper, except that the charts had shown it, and the white men had mentioned it as being about midway between the inner and the outer boundaries of the archipelago.
Many trials they made before they found a channel that ran far into the crowded outcroppings which showed above the shallow water.
Every time they would locate what seemed to be a straight and a deep waterway, it would shoal up at one end and they would have to make a detour, sometimes of several islands, to find water they could use.
“I declare!” said Nicky, “it makes me think of a day my New York cousins took me for an automobile ride on Long Island. They were repairing roads, and every fork or crossroad we came to, it seemed, they had a sign, ‘Detour!’”
“And now we ‘detour!’ again,” laughed Cliff, piloting from the bow, “to the left, this time, Tom—Nicky—easy!”
They turned into a new channel, and so, time after time, even retracing their course occasionally to get back to deeper water, they made slow progress.
No delay daunted them; no shoal “made their pluck run aground,” as Nicky explained it. To the continual detouring was added the handicap of the difficulty they had in recognizing what would look like the Dipper constellation from above. “If we had an airplane, now,” Tom argued, “we could spy it in a second.”
“Right, again—pull slowly,” Cliff cut in; and so the morning wore on and they began to feel as though they had rowed half way around most of the archipelago.
But the longest way ’round is said to be the shortest way through, and the chums found it so.