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I write because the pen moves. -- Lora Clarke

LINER IRENE AFLOAT AND NOT MUCH HURT. Freed from Grip of the Sand Bar That Held her Prisoner on Fire Island 83 Hours. WILL REACH HER PIER TODAY. Waiting for Daylight to be Towed Through Ambrose Channel—Rudder Post Damaged—Not Leaking. Special to The New York Times. Sayville, L.I. April 9 — A stiff northeasterly sea blow laughed to scorn the confident judgment of all the sea dogs hereabout at 3:30 o’clock this afternoon, when the high rolling sea which it had piled up along the beach washed loose, to the friendly tugging of two wrecking tugs, the great hull of the North German Lloyd liner Prinzess Irene, which had been kept prisoner on the outer sand bar off the Lone Hill Life Saving Station ever since she lost her direction in the cottony mist at 3:55 o’clock on Thursday morning.

At 4:30 o’clock this afternoon, eighty-three hours after her stranding on the bar, the liner was finishing her interrupted journey to New York in tow of the two tugs that had helped free her—the Relief and Rescue of the Merritt-Chapman Wrecking Company.

It was found, after the vessel was tugged free of the sand, that her rudder post was broken, and her Captain decided, therefore, not to use his  engines, lest the propellers, if started, might strike the loosened rudder and increase the damage. It was also decided to anchor the ship at the entrance of the Ambrose Channel for the night, and continue her trip from there to New York in the morning.

The liner’s escape was witnessed by the Sunday holiday crowd of 1,500 persons, which had streamed over from Sayville and other Long Island  points—and some in autos even from New York—and they cheered her departure. Then they, too, returned home—those who lived in Sayville doing so a bit regretfully; for the sudden fame that had fallen on their little town while the liner tarried, was now drawing away from them. Tomorrow Sayville will be again a “beautiful spot,” a fine little place—to catch oysters. Until the next big ship runs aground in the “Ocean Graveyard” off Fire Island, however, Sayville folk and sea people hereabout will have lots to talk about in telling of the Irene’s brief visit, and in asserting again and again that they were never so surprised in their lives as when, despite all predictions, she pulled loose so soon.

How The Liner Was Freed. At 6 o’clock this morning life saver Bill Reynolds, returning from patrol on the Lone Hill station, reported that there was a bad north-northeast storm starting, with the wind between twenty and twenty-five miles an hour. In the night there had been rain, which bade fair to whip down the expected rise of sea due with the strong southeast wind of Saturday afternoon and night. The rain, however, soon changed to hail, and later snow, which was driving viciously at 6 A.M., covering the sand dunes with a depth of three inches. There was snow in the superstructure of the Irene, too.

At high tide at 4 A.M. the wrecking tugs had made another attempt to loosen her. The lead line dropped from her stern showed that they budged her only slightly.

The effect of the sea wind from the southeast, however, continued long after the blow had veered shoreward, the sea piling up around the ship and running high nearly all day. It was expected to reach its crest at 3 o’clock in the afternoon.

The surf meanwhile was rolling in high from the southeast. It broke so hard and so high that, taut under the strain of the strong shore blow, the thin rope which the life savers had stretched again from the ship to the breeches buoy late Saturday night parted with an angry snap soon after midnight. Capt. Baker of Point o’ Woods and Capt. Goddard of the Lone Hill Life Saving Station held a long consultation on the beach at 10 o’clock in the morning, as to whether they should stretch another lifeline to the ship. They finally decided that the surf was too high to risk launching a lifeboat. The crest of the surf rollers brimmed up on the Irene’s tier of lower deadlights.

A crowd of about 200 persons had gathered on the beach at noon, gay and frolicking as holiday picnickers, to look at the discomfited liner. At 1 o’clock in the afternoon the tugs Relief and Rescue nosed their way about 200 feet astern of the Irene, the former southeast, on her starboard, and the latter at a similar position to port, and began to tug at the hawsers they had thrown upon the liner.

Just about this time Capt. Goddard, who has hobnobbed half a century with the sea—calm and angry and indifferent—along Fire Island, and knows it like a brother, tugged his blue cap over his blue eyes and his gray mustachios to starboard and to port, announced to his men: “Well, boys, I expect I’ll go to the station. They won’t loosen that old woman for a week or so, I guess.”

And, with a deprecating shrug at the tugs, he went.  

A few of the life savers remained, lounging about a large bonfire near the beach cart and around these gathered a fast-growing of shore folk. Other groups lay scattered about the beach, from which the snow, which stopped falling about 7 o’clock, had now almost melted away.

Suddenly at 2:30 o’clock a few persons on the beach cried out that the Irene was rocking. Sure enough, under the steady pull of the two tugs that were bucking their bows into her rollers astern of her, the masts of the Irene could be seen wobbling now to port, now to starboard, and a few minutes later it was seen that the vessel’s stern, too, was swinging slowly from side to side. Evidently the grip of the sandbar was loosening in the high sea about her.

At 2:50 P.M., with both tugs still pulling at the same angle at either side astern, the Irene’s bow was seen to rise slowly. Even there the sand was losing its hold. A few of the life savers, confident in the judgment of their old sea barking Captain, still declared cheerfully “she’d stick” for all of six or seven days, tugs or no tugs.

A few minutes later, the little tugs John J. Timmons and John Nichols swung across the Irene’s bow ashore of her, and began to shove her, with their little noses against her huge steel bulk.

“By Gosh! She’s Loose.” And then, at 3:03 o’clock, the Irene’s sea anchor cables began to slacken, showing that she was really backing, loose and free. Slowly her kedge anchors were hoisted aboard. There was a gathering roar of hurrahs all along the beach, in which the cheers of the life savers were given with just as much gusto as if they hadn’t been preluded with a surprised half-whispered chorus of: “By gosh! She’s loose.”

The Irene, free at last, replied to the cheers ashore with two long blasts of her siren, and moved in tow of the tugs slowly out to sea.

At 4 o’clock, still towed by the Relief and Rescue, and with the Timmons astern, the Irene was standing about a mile off shore, just opposite the Lone Hill life-saving station, in the lookout of which Capt. Goddard gazed skeptically through his telescope, muttering again and again and yet again that he sure would “be blowed”—a windy fate that is sure to beset Capt. Goddard almost any day, whether he will it or no. He said later that even if he was surprised, he was pleased, too; and well he might be, for he and his men worked untiringly.

When the Irene turned westward on the last lap of her interrupted journey she ran down the red signal, which spelled “Haul away on your cables,”  and ran up the German ensign. The crowd on shore broke into cheers.”

A little later, when the vessel was well under way, her skipper wirelessed to the line’s office the best message he ever sent there: “The Prinzess Irene is free, and is being towed by tugs Rescue and Relief. She is undamaged.”

With the departure of the Irene and her rescuing tugs, there remained at the scene of the stranding only the Government revenue cutter  Mohawk. The derelict destroyer Seneca, which had stood by the grounded Irene from the start, having departed earlier in the day, presumably to hunt a derelict she had heard of further east.

Some of those in the crowd of holiday spectators, hovered about the beach until darkness was settling and the Irene had become a mere toy ship on the western horizon. The rest trudged back across Fire Island to Great South Bay, where thrifty boatmen who for three days had found passenger ferrying much more lucrative than oyster dredging slung them one by one upon their backs, and carried them, with their feet dangling just clear of the water, to waiting flat-bottomed dory's and thereon out to waiting motor boats, oyster boats and sailboats, further out in the bay. It was night when the last of them reached Sayville.

NOW RIDES AT ANCHOR. Prinzess Irene Will Come Through the Ambrose Channel This Morning. The Prinzess Irene anchored off Scotland Lightship at 10 o’clock last night, waiting for daylight to be towed through the Ambrose Channel and the bay to her pier at Hoboken, which she will reach at 10 A.M.

When the liner got into deep water from the sand bar, where she had rested for eighty-three hours, Chief Engineer Schmidt examined the machinery and reported to Capt. von Letten Peterssen that, so far as he could see, there was no reason why the ship should not proceed slowly under her own steam up the harbor. After a consultation between the Captain, Chief Engineer and the Inspector Koevenick, from Hoboken, it was decided that as the wrecking people had reported that the rudder post appeared to be damaged, it would be advisable not to use the propellers, and the tow tugs then started to tow her along at three knots an hour. She was not leaking, and there was no sign to show that the hull had been damaged during the time she was ashore.

The North German Lloyd officials said yesterday that when the liner arrives at her pier divers will go down and examine her hull to see if any of the plates have been started, and then she will proceed to Newport News under her own steam, if possible, to go into dry dock for necessary repairs.

The Prinzess Irene was to have sailed next Saturday for Naples, and had 160 first and 100 second cabin passengers who have been notified of her inability to leave on schedule time. The next North German Lloyd vessel to leave for the Mediterranean is the Koenig Albert on April 29, and if she arrives in New York in time her sailing date will be advanced, it was said, and the Prinzess Irene will take her place.

Officials of the company and the seafaring friends of Capt. Peterssen said last night that the ship having got off safely, with comparatively little  damage, they hoped that he would not lose his position in the service, as it was his first accident during a long career, which included eleven years in command. So far everything went to prove that he had done his duty as navigator and a commander in time of emergency.

Capt. Moeller, formerly commander of one of the company’s South American liners and for several years the Marine Superintendent, of the North German Lloyd at Hoboken, was sick in bed when the Prinzess Irene went ashore on Thursday, and in order to be in touch with the ship he had a telephone line hooked up beside his bed so that he could get the reports coming in from Inspector Koevenick, his assistant, who went on board the stranded liner.

It was stated that 200 tons out of her general cargo of 900 tons was discharged from the Prinzess Irene before she was floated.

  An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision. --  James McNeill