The weather held on Tuesday and by noon Joe was satisfied that we were ready to try. We took the rein-forced hose down and clamped it securely in place, lead-ing it through the hole we’d cut into the damaged side above the waterline. We had made no attempt to make her watertight. That was the last thing Palacio wanted.
Bobby Guthrie got his funny-looking pump going. It throbbed, smoked, and stank, but it pulled water up through the intake hose dangling over the side and pumped it down and into the wreck and out through dozens of small openings here and there. Palacio was very nervous. His hands shook as he clamped the small hoses that led from three drums of separate kinds of gunk to the brass nipples on a fitting on the big hose that led down to the wreck. He had flow gauges and hand pumps on each drum. As Meyer had explained it to me, Gunk One reacted with the water, raising its temperature. Then Gunk Two and Gunk Three interacted with the heated water as they went swirling down, and when they were released inside the hull down below, they separated into big blobs and, in the cooler water, solidified into a very lightweight plastic full of millions of little bubbles full of the gases released through their interaction on each other and the heated water. Palacio had the three of us manning the hand pumps and he hopped back and forth from one flow gauge to the other, speeding one man up, slowing an-other down. There was, after about ten minutes, a sudden eruption about forty feet down-current, and a batch of ir-regular yellow-white chunks the size of cantaloupe ap-peared and, floating very high on the water, went moving swiftly away in the slight breeze.
Palacio stopped us and cut the flow. Guthrie turned off the big pump. We went down and found that the ventila-tor on the forward deck had blown out. By the time it was secure, it was time to quit. All day Wednesday there was pump trouble of one kind or another. We thought Palacio would break down and start sobbing.
By midday Thursday everything seemed to be working well for about forty minutes. My arm began to feel leaden. Palacio was gnawing his knuckles. Suddenly Guthrie gave a roar of surprise. The hose began to stand up out of the water like a snake and a moment later the big cruiser came porpoising up, so fast and so close that it threw a big wave aboard, drenching us and killing the pump. She rocked back and forth, streaming water, riding high and handsome. We stomped and yelled and laughed like idiots. She was packed full of those lightweight brittle blobs of foam, and I tried not to think of how damn fool-ish I had been to never even think of what could have happened if she had come up that fast and directly under the Flush.
We wasted no time rigging for towing. We were getting more swell and I did not like the feel of the wind. Be-tween periods of dead calm there would come a hot, moist huff, like a gigantic exhalation. I set it up with short towlines, the Flush in the lead, of course, the sal-vaged `Bama Gal in the middle, and Bobby Guthrie aboard the Mu¤equita in the rear. I broke out the pair of walkie-talkies because the bulk of the `Bama Gal made hand signals to Bobby back there impossible. The system was for him to keep the Mu¤equita’s pair of OMC 120’s idling in neutral, and if our tow started to swing, he could give the engines a little touch of reverse and pull it back into line. I knew the inboard-outboards could idle all day without overheating. Also, when I had to stop the Flush down for traffic, Bobby could keep it from riding up on our stern.
It was early Saturday afternoon before we got her to Merrill-Stevens at Dinner Key, and we had to work her in during a flat squall, in a hard gray driving rain, the wind gusting and whistling. I’d phoned a friend via the Miami marine operator earlier in the day, so they were waiting for us. We shoved the `Bama Gal into the slings and they picked her out of the water and put her on a cradle and ran her along the rails and into one of the big sheds. Pa-lacio wore a permanent, broad, dreaming grin.