Daily Archives: May 10, 2017

That sinking feeling

The pressure on Yours Truly had been building for quite some time. As crew repeatedly informed me, all the skippers are doing it, nothing could be easier and it’s free! What could go wrong? The list boggles the mind, but I’m man enough to know when it’s time to give up. Tomorrow morning I was resigned to doing something that I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to avoid. I would pilot our beloved home Escape Velocity over to a shallow spot on the beach and run her aground. Well, with any luck at all it would be more controlled than that but that’s pretty much what it adds up to. The plan was to hold EV over the Golden Spot with anchors and chains and slowly sink down with the ebb tide until she was resting on the bottom of the bay. We call this careening which avoids expensive marinas so that bottom can be scraped, protective zincs can be replaced and even those with an excessive over abundance of energy can slap on anti fouling bottom paint. This golden spot had to be really shallow with only a meter and a half tidal range so we’d lose the anchor and backup to the, oh let’s just call it the GS. Things went pear-shaped pretty quickly when, as we fought to back up to the GS, the depth sounders jumped from the expected four feet to fourteen feet. No, no this won’t do. A fourteen foot hole could cause catastrophic damage, bad enough that when the tidal flood waters came back we just might stay on the bottom of the bay. Sounds like an old blues tune where the guy sinks to the bottom and drinks himself up dry! 

Now where was I?

This was pretty much reasons 1 through 7 on my list of why we shouldn’t do what sailors call careening. After three tries, unsure if the problem was technical or if there really were unlikely deep holes in an otherwise benign shallow beach, we decided to poke around in CatNip with a boat hook. So it was back to good old number “14” mooring ball and a fair amount of good natured ribbing at sundowners that evening.

Now my Dutch was up. I don’t like it when my Dutch is up. I become determined, driven, and not the fun-loving guy you might think of me as, plus it can lead to…damage. The following day I found the new GS quickly and backed up until we felt that EV was aground! I hopped down into chilly water clear up to the thermometer, stumbled around to the front of EV where Marce was lowering our main anchor down into my waiting arms. It was a case of, yeah I have it/no I don’t have it kind of thing. You can’t imagine how difficult it was just to walk through this stuff and adding a fifty pound anchor and heavy chain made it nearly impossible. This is how we would later kedge EV off the beach, with any luck at all. Finally I gave a push to the thing, just missing my feet and wobbled back to the stern to run a stern anchor back farther up the beach. I was exhausted!
Now to await the ebb tide. Too soon I thought I’d better get started. I could see about a foot under the water line. It was tough scraping even with my heroic efforts in Blackwattle Bay. Every step threatened a lurch and fall back into the water. Hey, shouldn’t there be less water by now? We seemed to have sunk down into the soft bottom so instead of sitting proud of the bottom EV had sunk down into it, putting pressure on the saildrives. I couldn’t even see the propellers. That would be reason three of seven on my list of why we shouldn’t careen the boat. I had to lie down face first in the water and dig sand away from the blades just to scrape them. With Marce’s help we cleaned everything we could see. Periodically passers-by would come down the beach for a chat. I was a man on a mission so I just told them where the scrapers were. No takers. 

Eventually the flood waters caught up to us and it was time to collect all the broken scrapers and wait for Escape Velocity to swim again. As I climbed the swim ladder I thought my god we haven’t taken one photograph. All I would have to do, Dear Escapees, is climb up into the cockpit, grab the camera, climb back down and stagger across the rapidly flooding soft muck without falling into the water with the camera, take the snap, safely wade back to the swim ladder and climb back up into EV. 

I wasn’t able. You’ll just have to take my word for it.

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