Maryk swims to recover the paravane float

Steve Maryk’s swim to recover the paravane float turns a routine minesweeping exercise into a test of nerve, teamwork, and competitive pride. When a sailor drops the float as it is being hauled aboard the USS Caine, Maryk rejects the slower option of using a boat, enters the water himself, and brings the float back despite the darkness and the sailors’ fear of sharks. The rescue succeeds, but its urgency also draws Willie Keith’s attention away from an action dispatch that he has just received.

The recovery effort

The incident unfolds during afternoon practice maneuvers, as the minesweepers launch and recover their gear. The USS Caine’s crew is racing to bring aboard its two paravanes, with the other ships’ black balls serving as visible signals that a recovery is complete. The USS Caine lowers its port-side ball after fifteen minutes and has the starboard paravane in sight before the USS Moulton lowers one of its own. The race is therefore not merely against the clock: the crew can watch its rivals’ progress as it works.

Maryk takes part directly in the labor. Stripped to the waist and sweating, the first lieutenant urges the crew on, noting that they have reached twenty-eight minutes and calling for them to get the “damned egg” aboard. At the last moment, however, the sailor Fuller drops the little red float he is pulling from the water. It bobs free in the ship’s wake, undoing the crew’s careful progress and leaving the recovery incomplete.

Maryk enters the water

Maryk sends word to the bridge, and the USS Caine stops before backing slowly toward the drifting float. Rather than wait for a gig, he decides to swim. He tells the chief to have the captain stop the screws, wraps a line around his waist, and dives over the side. The choice is immediate and practical: the float is still within reach, and Maryk means to retrieve it without losing more time to launching a boat.

By then the sun has set. From the ship, the float is only a red dot on the purple water, about two hundred yards off the port quarter. The sailors line the rail and watch Maryk’s head move toward it, their attention sharpened by the possibility of sharks. One sailor says he saw a hammerhead minutes earlier and jokes that he would not risk being eaten merely to save the captain a few minutes. The danger is not confirmed as an attack, but the exchange makes clear what Maryk has accepted by going overboard: the crew cannot see what may be in the dark water around him.

Willie watches the swimmer rather than the message waiting in his pocket. Maryk reaches the float, thrashes around it, kicking up white foam, and then rises partly out of the water to signal. His shout, “Okay, haul in!”, comes faintly across the wind. The crew pulls the wet line back frantically, drawing the float and Maryk toward the ship.

Return aboard and result

Willie hurries down to the fantail, slips on the wet deck, and falls; a wave breaks over him before he gets up and grabs a lifeline. The soaked float clanks onto the deck as sailors haul in the line. Near the propeller guard, Maryk bobs up and climbs aboard with help from the crew. Bellison tells him he did not have to take the risk. Maryk, gasping, asks instead how long the recovery took.

The answer is forty-one minutes, measured when the float reaches the deck. The other ships still have their black balls aloft, so the USS Caine has completed the recovery first. Maryk grins at the result, saying he would never have heard the end of it if one of the other ships had beaten them. His first response to the danger is thus followed by a return to the contest that prompted the crew’s urgency: the swim has recovered the float and preserved the USS Caine’s lead.

Maryk also deflects concern with humor. When he notices Willie’s bedraggled state and asks whether he dived in too, Willie explains that he was so interested in watching Maryk that he fell. Maryk says he had been looking for an excuse to take a dip. Asked whether he feared sharks, he answers that they do not bother a swimmer who keeps moving, then jokes that he would take a shark over the captain if Captain Sammis’s ship had beaten them in recovering its gear. The banter makes the risk easier to bear without erasing it: Maryk has just crossed a dark stretch of open water, and the crew’s relief emerges as jokes and attention to the time.

The dispatch and the scene’s significance

The rescue has an unintended consequence for Willie. A radioman brings him an action dispatch and explains that the USS Caine is its addressee and that Keefer says Willie has coding duty. Willie glances at the sheet, says he will break it in a few minutes, and puts it in his pocket while he watches Maryk. After the rescue, he changes clothes, leaving the dispatch inside his sodden khakis. He forgets it; the paper dissolves to a pulp as the ship continues through maneuvers for the next two days.

The scene therefore places two forms of attention side by side. Maryk concentrates on the immediate physical emergency and takes personal responsibility for recovering the float; Willie, caught up in watching the rescue, neglects a message entrusted to him. The episode presents Maryk’s competence through observable action—the decision to swim, the return with the float, and his insistence on the recovery time—rather than through a formal account of his authority. At the same time, the dramatic shift from a small red float in the dark to the forgotten paper in Willie’s pocket links the ship’s visible, collective task to a private failure of duty. What begins as a successful recovery thus also becomes the circumstance in which Willie loses the action dispatch.