All afternoon the sailors paddled for the island, but the devilish currents were not through with them. Every time they came close to the beach a current would sweep them out to sea again. Floating on the same currents were two logs which the sailors tied to the raft. After dark the skipper, still hopeful of finding a boat on the island, set out with Ensign Bales to swim to the beach, using the logs as a crude substitute for water wings. For three hours the two young officers swam, only to bump gently against their own raft again. The currents had carried them in a giant circle, back to their starting point. Hyde and Gregory, tired of inaction, set out for the beach. They were never seen again. That night the sailors watched the flash of gunfire at Hansa Bay, where their squadron mates shot up the beach in revenge for their loss. No PTs came close enough for the shipwrecked sailors to hail. By their very nature, PT sailors were men of action. Their solution to any problem was, “Don’t just sit there, _do_ something.” The inactivity of waiting passively for rescue was too much for some of them. Just before dawn Mitchell set out for the island, and just after dawn Ensign Bales, Fucili, Watson, and Schmidt followed. The others would have gone, too, but they were too weak. Watson returned to the raft in the middle of the morning. He had swum to within 75 yards of the shore, he said, and he had seen Ensign Bales walking around on dry land, but he had also seen Japanese workmen building boats in a shipyard, so he came back to the raft. All hands abandoned the idea of going to the island. After the war, captured documents showed that the Japanese on Manam Island had captured one officer and two enlisted men of the sailors who had swum ashore, but these three luckless sailors were never heard of after this brief mention. That night, their third in the water, the sailors were exposed to a nerve-racking and mysterious inspection. A small boat pulled out from shore and circled the raft at 200 yards. Two Japanese trained a brace of machine guns on the Americans, but held their fire. The shivering sailors looked down the muzzles of those two machine guns until four o’clock in the morning, when a squall with six-foot waves drove the patrol craft back to the beach. After the squall passed, the PT sailors were alone again—more alone than ever, for the delirious Canterbury had swum away during the storm. Barnett, a first-rate swimmer, had chased after Canterbury to bring him back, but had lost him in the heavy seas. That morning the five surviving sailors spied an overturned Japanese boat. It was fifteen feet long and a luxurious yacht compared to their flimsy raft, so they righted the boat and bailed it out. A crab was running about the bottom, and during the chase for this tasty tidbit the sailors let their life raft drift away. Nobody really cared; they had no fond memories of the balsa boat.