Sailboats @ MindSay

Swirl is floating and at the marina. But it was an anxious few hours. Here's how it went. After our unsuccessful attempt to free her on Friday we agreed to meet at 4:30 Saturday morning to take the tug out to pull her off at the highest tide. The night was stormy. I woke everytime something blew thumping past the house or down the street wondering if the anchor was holding and if Swirl was filling with water or running higher up the beach. I didn't sleep much. I met the tug captain and his partner at the dock in the marina at 4:30 a.m. It was DARK -- very very dark. The wind blew in fits and starts. Rain spattered down. While the tug prepared to get underway, I pumped gallons of water out of the motor skiff we were taking along. They cleared their slip, I brought the skiff alongside, made it fast, and climbed aboard. We chugged out of the harbor, weaving our way between the double handful of boats on moorings. We used the spotlight intermittently to look for buoys, boats, and logs and monitored the GPS to make sure we were going in the right direction. It was so dark out that you couldn't see the waves that kept slapping against the tug. The winter constellations shone bright between the skudding clouds.

At 5:30 a.m. we rounded the buoy marking the shoal that extends southwest from the tip of the island. We motored slowly, scanning the shore with the floodlight for sight of the boat, monitoring the sounder for depth. We went the entire length of the island and didn't see her. Nobody said anything, but privately, each of us was imagining some disaster -- she had dragged the anchor and was beached somewhere else in the sound; she had filled with water and only her mast was above water; she had been towed off by salvagers. We turned around and moved slowely back down the channel shining the spotlight into each little nook and cove and suddenly, there she was like a ghost flickering in and out of the spotlight's beam. She was upright, floating, straining against the anchorline. Without that anchor, she would have been backed up even higher on the beach. We turned in toward her, but the water was too shallow to approach from that direction. The tide had started to ebb. We didn't want to end up with two boats on the beach, so we decided to use the skiff to carry a tow line to Swirl. When we got to Swirl, we checked the depth and decided we would try to motor her out on her own. I started the engine and eased the anchor rode, which was so tight we couldn't get if off the cleat. The mate fastened a float to the coiled rode, and threw it overboard. We'd come back for the anchor later. Right then, the important thing was getting out before the tide dropped any more. We motored out behind the tug, weaving our way around the bars and shoals, and into open water. The wind had risen again, and rain was falling as we motored back to the Harbor. But, it was light, we could see; the boat was free; and all was right with the world.

We tied her at the marina, went to breakfast, and then I came home and took a long nap.

Probably, most of you think of being grounded as a punishment imposed by your parents or other authority figures confining you to your room or home for some amount of time because you broke some rule or other. My grounding is much more impersonal and implacable. No amount of whining, negotiating, wheedling, sniveling, explaining, cajoling, rationalizing, or making excuses will change the situation.

It all started with a phone call at 10:00 this morning. I was drinking my last cup of coffee and contemplating a leisurely day. The voice on the phone identified itself as a representative from the United States Coast Guard. He was informing me that my sailboat was aground on the beach several miles from where I keep it moored. He said the local sheriff's department had phoned them and they were phoning me to let me know. Oh, yeah, and I think he also wished me good luck!

So, I shopped my leisurely day, checked the tide tables, called a friend who owns a tug boat, grabbed my foul weather gear and my dog and headed out to the harbor where my boat should have been safely moored.

I knew I couldn't take my little 7 lb dog with me on this adventure, so I dropped her at my mother's house. Then I headed to the marina where the tug boat was located. It turned out the tug was out of commission; the skipper was in the process of repairing his fuel lines and his boat was going nowhere. However, his partner agreed to come with me in the marina's skiff to check out the situation. I rented the skiff, we jumped aboard, and motored across a gray and choppy sea under an equally gray and sullen sky. We couldn't see the boat until we were almost on top of it. In fact, we had begun to wonder if she had drifted off or the Coast Guard has given us bad information for her location. She was hard aground and listing about 15 degrees to port, bow in to the beach. We arrived at the top of the lesser high tide. We concluded we could not back her off without damaging her rudder. But we might be able to kedge her off. (Kedging is putting an anchor out in deeper water and trying to pull the boat to it.) We unearthed the spare anchor, rigged it with chain and rode, put it in the skiff, and took it out to deeper water. Then we ran the rode from the bow chock back past the mid-ship cleats to the starboard winch and we started to grind ... and grind ... and grind on the winch. Slowly, the rode became taut and the winch became harder and harder to turn, but the boat failed to move. In the meantime, the tide was turning. A security officer and his friend showed up in a fast little work boat. They were called by the local oyster company that was afraid my boat would damage their oyster beds. They put a line on our mast to help pull her over in hopes of popping her keel out of the sand and we continued to grind the winch. The tide continued to fall. We succeeded in getting her turned around so her bow was facing open water and her stern was to the beach, but in the end we had to concede that we were not going to get her to move until the next rising tide. So, tomorrow morning at 4:30 a.m., I will join the tug boat owner and his partner and we will try again.

In the meantime, I am truly and irrevocably grounded.

Ok, I have some pictures ready.  I think I'm going to end up with 4 different entries - 3 from San Juan Island and 1 from Orcas Island.  So I hope you all like pictures :)

This first entry is mainly pictures I took from our room, and a couple others in town or on our way to the island.

So, here we go...

First off is a view looking toward the town of Anacortes while we were waiting to board the ferry heading for the islands.

After waiting like 2 or 3 hours to get on the ferry (we just missed the previous one) and then a ferry ride of about an hour-and-a-half, it was dark when we finally got to the Friday Harbor House in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island, WA.

The room was amazing.  We had a corner room on the third floor with a full wall-and-a-half of windows overlooking the harbor.  Not to mention, we had a fireplace and oversized jetted tub.  Nice!

The next morning was sunny and beautiful, and the view from our room was amazing.  The rest of these pictures, with the exception of the last one, were all taken from our room. 

The ferries are larger than I ever imagined they would be.  There can load two levels of cars.

 

If you look back to my previous entry, you can see a nice little sitting area to the bottom left.  There was a sundial out there that caught my wife's attention.

The harbor was filled with boats, which always make some good pictures, especially when they're surrounded by evergreens.  One of my best pictures of the harbor is the one I previously posted.

 

That's all for now.  The next entry will cover our whale watching trip.  There weren't any whales, but plenty of other wildlife and scenery to make it a lot of fun.