At once the experts summed up the situation. The K.13 with her stern full of water, covered up aft by a dozen feet of mud, was too heavy to raise bodily. She was well over 3000 tons, and up to that time nothing like this weight had ever been lifted from the seabed. The only thing to be done, the sole hope of saving the imprisoned men, was to strive to lift the nose of the craft to the surface while leaving the stern resting on the bottom. Nothing else was possible. “The first thing to do is to get through supplies of food and air to them,” the salvage officer remarked. The divers slid down to the bottom and, disregarding all thought of their own safety, laboured hard and long to connect up with the entombed men. They must have broken the endurance record of the world, for one worked for over twelve hours continuously on the seabed without taking food, without resting. Time was too precious for them to waste a second. They realized the risk, but they accepted it as gladly as Commander Goodhart ran the risk which led to his death. They worked until they were ill and dizzy, floundering in the mud, wrestling with giant steel cables. Forty men were depending on them for their lives. The thought nerved the divers to prodigious things. It was essential to communicate with the imprisoned men, to let them know that everything possible was being done for them, to strive to sustain their spirits. Commander Kay of the Salvage Section found the way. Sending down a submarine flash lamp, he instructed the divers to rig it up in front of the periscope. By peering into this instrument the prisoners were thus able to read the messages that were flashed to them in Morse Code, and were made to understand that they were not entirely cut off from the world after all. With many a struggle, the divers managed to open a valve in the hull and to attach a pipe through which food such as Bovril, bottles of hot soup and chocolate, as well as life-giving air, were passed from the surface. All this entailed long hours of endeavour. The coolness of the men in the submarine was almost unbelievable. “Send us down a pack of cards to while away the time!” one shouted up the pipe. The cards were procured and sent down, and these British seamen played cards while Death peeped over their shoulders. Up to then the men had been carefully conserving their supplies of compressed air, not knowing how long they would need them to keep alive. Now that air was being pumped from the surface, they were able to use what was left of their own supplies to blow all the oil out of the forward tanks. This lightened their craft considerably.