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TELESCOPE Page 161 meals eaten aboard the Charles Dick, was beautiful, tasty, and well- prepared; the quantity, variety and aroma reminding one of a threshing dinner or a church supper. At each meal I took the oppor- tunity to slip in a question and in- variably the diners of both tables would worry it around, disect it, reconstruct it, and bring forth pro- found, humorous, and remarkable viewpoints. Finishing this first breakfast I again went forward to the wheel- house and the captain hied himself to his office to keep even with his interminable paper work. At all times one complete watch is on duty with one mate in charge on the bridge and one engineer stat- ioned in the engine room. Not until we were abreast of the lighthouse of the Cleveland pier- heads was the captain called. When the captain enters the wheelhouse he automatically takes command of the ship. "We'1ll be giving you the grand tour of the Cuyahoga river this morning," he told me when he came up. "We're going all the way up to the Corrigan turning basin." Other captains may call for harbor tugs to negotiate the continuous twisting of the Cuyahoga river chan- nel. Not Captain John Leonard. Peer- ing casually out the open wheelhouse windows he lined up his markers, counselled his wheelsman, signalled the engine room on his telegraph, pulled down the lever sounding the stentorian steam siren, stepped out on the bridge deck to wave a cheery greeting to each and every bridge tender, inone continuous and smooth- ly Shakesperian performance. When a straight hundred yards of water be- tween the twenty-five or so overhead lift, suspension and bascule bridges did not require his attention for the next twenty seconds he would turn to the chart desk and insert a word in a cross word puzzle in an opened newspaper spread out there. The ticking of an ingrained clock seemed to tell him when to turn, to give further direction, with split second timing. We didn't brush a bridge, touch a wall, and we turned in the up-river basin without plac- ing a snubbing line ashore. It was a fantastic demonstration of ship- handling. It takes about five hours for the Charies Dick to tie up, unload, un- tie, and get underway again. It takes her five hours to run from Cleveland, four hours from Lorain, and seven hours from Toledo, to re- turn to her digging ground in the vicinity of the Old Dummy, a couple of miles off the tip of Point Pelee. While I was aboard, her loading time varied from two and one half hours, during which time she with- drew her sizing grates and retained all sizes of sand and gravel her pipes sucked up, to as long as four- teen hours when she had difficulty separating silt from a good grade of cement sand. On our one trip out of Lorain we steered for the International Bound- ary buoy. Once across the line, the captain came on deck and began to prospect. This 'prospecting' is upon the recommendation of the Ontario government that sandsuckers seek other sources of supply than off Point Pelee. All afternoon and evening the in- take pipes were lowered to the lake bottom at intervals and the ship was backed up slow for half a mile at a time. Deckhands lowered paids be- neath the flumes and brought samples of the collected sand to the captain who walked endlessly from one flume to the other. He would thrust his hand into each bucket, take a hand- full of sand, rub it between thumb and forefinger to determine grade and texture. Just once, during the afternoon, from the International Boundary north to the southern bor- der of the shipping channel below the Southeast Shoals, did he buoy a likely area. Daylight or dark makes no diff- erence to the crew of the Charles Dick. One watch starts at eight in the morning and works until twelve