Page 42 - A Visit with Art Langley Sr.

ISSUE : Issue 22

Published by Ronald Caplan on 1979/6/1

• ,'A This is the Elkhound. This is her being pumped out and coming up. W. N. MacDonald floated her for the underwriters, and then they gave her to him. I did the job for him. I floated her. That's what she looks like when afloat, looking at her stern. And here's what she looks like...see, she's all blown to pieces. You can see in between the bulkheads....She had dis? charged a cargo of gasoline at Newcastle. And just as they finished, she exploded and the whole middle went right out of her. And our job was to get her out of the channel and do what we liked with her. Break her up and have the junk. Her en? gines and everything were working. There was no damage there. Seaied her up and pumped her out and put her on the beach. There she is in the channel, the bows com? ing up. And there she is afloat. Now this one here is a towboat and she's ashore, she's up this side of Halifax. She ran ashore and she was full of water. But that's one I missed. It took so long be? fore we got word from London to go ahead with it. And so we got up there and the weather was fine. It was a Sunday evening. Monday the wind was in. And when the wind was in that was the end of her. She smashed up. It was a very exposed place to the ocean. It's all right when the wind is nor'west, sou'west, or any other way. But when it comes out of the east, it comes right in from the ocean. Oh, I lost two or three times like that. Too late. That goes with it. No cure, no pay, you see? If you don't do them, you don't get any pay. If I could have been up there one day ahead, I would have had ten thousand dollars. As it was, I got nothing. -.'-' This is the schooner Coreau. We are floating her at St. Peters, right in the canal. There's a diver coming up. She was sunk there with a load of coal. First I took half the coal out of her. There were holes in her but we patched them up. We patched her companionways and everything. Then I pumped her out and she floated herself.

Cape Breton's Magazine