Arriving off our destination some three hours later, a party, shivering in the misty rain, was sent ashore to ascertain the trouble. After careful tests it was found to have been caused by a submarine landslide which had crushed a part of the cable, laid by necessity on a steep hill under water.
So for a whole day we grappled there near Iligan, "fishing for bights," as the punster on board called it, and surely even Izaak Walton's piscatorial patience would have been tried on this fishing trip. Once after having successfully hooked the cable, it broke as we were drawing it in, and only one end came on board. It was the shore end, and through it we spoke Iligan, finding the cable satisfactory in that direction. So we buoyed the shore end and continued our fishing with the heavy tackle. For hours we unsuccessfully lowered the massive grapnel iron, where our charts indicated the cable should be, but without success until late in the afternoon, when the strain on the dynamometer indicated another "bight."
Then it was pulled up very slowly, for we could not afford to have it break a second time, when suddenly it slipped the grapnel and was again lost at the sea-bottom. As it was getting dark we put lights on our two buoys, one placed where the cable had slipped the grapnel, the other, as I said before, attached to the captured end. Now it is by no means easy to jump from a small boat to a buoy in such rough water as that in Iligan harbour, and we watchers on the ship felt some little uneasiness until the lights from both buoys proclaimed that it had been accomplished by the young native who always did that work.
In the morning our scientific fishermen were rewarded for their patience. They had a bite, and everyone on board watched with interest the heavy machinery as it slowly and steadily pulled the sea end of the cable out of the water. It was hooked at half after eight, and not until an hour later was it landed, the dynamometer showing a strain at times of from one to two tons.
Immediately after getting the cable on board, Cagayan was called over and over again without response, which would have indicated that the trouble was farther out at sea, had not tests shown the resistances were what they should have been, from which it was easily inferred that the operator at Cagayan was not attending strictly to business. "Gone to Sunday school, probably!" ironically observed the Powers-that-Be, chewing the end of an unlighted cigar, as he always did when worried, and, Sunday though it was, we felt the sarcasm to be a just one, Sunday schools not being a chief industry of Cagayan.