WHERE CURRENTS RIP 47 



way was lowered until the bottom step was awash, 

 while on the port side, the boom-walk was perhaps 

 of all the most popular and valuable point of 

 vantage. Here we could walk easily along the 

 double duck boards, with a guardian boom on each 

 side, to a distance of thirty feet beyond the side 

 of the ship, and lie down or sit or stand, with as 

 excellent a view of all that went on in the water 

 beneath as could be imagined. 



I was astonished even before we reached the rip, 

 to see logs of wood passing, many of them covered 

 with an ivory mosaic of barnacles. Our pent-up 

 energy had to find a vent in some way, and when I 

 called out for volunteers to help haul one of the 

 logs from the water up to the boom-walk, the in- 

 stantaneous response together with the violence of 

 the several attempts, warned me that this was the 

 time and place where the static energy of my 

 crowd was about to become transformed into 

 muscular action. There is no precedent to be fol- 

 lowed in the matter of getting floating logs on to 

 boom-walks and so to the deck, and doing so 

 without losing the inhabitants of the log. In fact, 

 there had never been a boom-walk before, so it was 

 anybody's method, failure or solution. Six of us 

 began enthusiastically to collect the first log in 

 the world ever thus to be gathered. As instrument 

 after instrument proved inadequate, more material 

 was shouted for and over the rail there poured a 

 barrage of wire loops, boat-hooks, gaffs, nets and 

 bags. One of the most c vithusiastic of the loggers 

 dropped two poles, a gaff, a bag and a net over- 



