Crossing the Atlantic and going through the Mediterranean to the Adriatic under their own power, they weathered storms that distressed many a big steamship. But these little 110-footers had some thrilling experiences. Disabled in a terrific gale Sub-chaser 28, manned by the French, seemed doomed. The other chasers pulled through, but this one was missing, and after days was given up as lost. A month later we were surprised and delighted when the news came that it had reached the Azores. How did that little boat, disabled and alone, manage to make its way 700 miles to port? It was a thrilling story Alexis Puluhen and his men had to tell. Storm tossed, their engines broke down and the boat began leaking. Salvoes were fired and distress signals hoisted, but no relief came. Lubricating oil was exhausted, and all the salad oil and butter aboard were used in an effort to start up the engines. All motive power gone, table-cloths, sheets, bed-spreads and blankets were rigged up as sails. Rationing the crew to the smallest amount of food that could sustain them, doling out the drinking water, the little boat headed east. With a favoring breeze, she could sail about four knots an hour. For a month the sub-chaser kept plodding along, laying its course for the Azores. Occasionally a steamer would be sighted far away--four in all were seen--but only one came close enough to see or hear the S. C. 28, and when seven guns, the distress signal, were fired, that vessel ran away. At last, after a struggle of thirty-three days, Puluhen sighted land. It was Fayal, one of the Azores. He hoisted the signal "YP"--"I need a tug"--and not long afterward a tug steamed out, and towed him into Horta. The sub-chaser was repaired, continued across the Atlantic, and took its place with the other American-built chasers which served on the French coast. Three days at sea and three days in port, many chasers steamed an average of a thousand miles a month. "You people on yachts and cruisers don't know what it is to live in a sub-chaser," one seaman remarked. "Tossed about on ocean swells, swept by seas, with decks leaking and things below wet; gas fumes from the engines filling the interior, sometimes half the crew were seasick. The destroyers, I know, were no pleasure palaces, and they had no easy time, but none of you had a harder job than we fellows on the 110-footers." But they took things as they came, with unfailing cheerfulness and good humor. Some of the sub-chaser squadrons developed codes of their own and got a lot of fun out of them. "Quack! Quack! Quack!" was one sub-chaser signal. The first time that queer call was heard over the wireless telephone in European waters it mystified our English friends quite as much as it did the Germans. And when the call was answered by an outbreak of strange words and phrases, listeners at the radio phones in all that area were plainly puzzled.