My 24 hours with the M/V Lotus began at 0600 Feb. 22 as I stumbled sleepily from the back bedroom out into the living room of the house my wife and I were taking care of on the waterfront near Port Hadlock.
Mandy and I had been watching the house and minding the chickens for a couple weeks at that point, long enough to have soaked the cold of January’s snows out of our systems, and long enough that I had become used to the pre-dawn view of Port Townsend across the water, lights twinkling in the distance. That morning, as I looked blearily out to the north, I recoiled and did a double-take: a huge, sharply-contoured shadow was shifting subtly and ominously and right there outside the front windows.
I had first woken at 5 a.m. to a shrieking gust of wind, and had rolled over and gone back to sleep, fuzzily thinking that there hadn’t been any advisories for high winds the night before. Northwesterlies claim their share of victims every year up here.
But this late in the season, there is little damage left to be done by sputtering spring wind storms, and the most I expected to see was the usual random detritus blown down the bay on white-frothed rollers.
As soon as I realized that it was a boat ashore in front of the house and not some briny sea monster rising from the waves to attack, I also instantly knew which boat it was. Lotus was the only vessel that size left in the anchorage. A big, boxy 92-footer laid down in 1908 and launched the following year, Lotus was at the time the largest cruising yacht on the West Coast.
More recently, she was put into a trust and has been a fixture at wooden boat shows around the region, and a delightful reminder of a bygone era of luxury cruising along the Inside Passage as she has entertained at her mooring or ventured out on tours. Any time I look out across the bay at her, I expect to see gay yellow lights arraying her broad upper deck and elegant ladies with parasols being helped down into gleaming skiffs to be taken ashore after an evening of entertainment aboard.
Now, I was seeing a vessel that gave every indication that it was about to be pounded apart against the concrete ramp on the point in front of the house.
I stumbled back to the bedroom to grab clothes and a coat and wake my wife. I doubted there was anyone aboard but wanted to be ready in case there was and they needed to come off. I didn’t know who owned her; I hoped that some of the neighbors did and suspected some other early riser might already have called. Still, I needed to let someone know; after my utterly fruitless experiences with the Coast Guard during previous storms, I opted for 911.
They were pleasant, but completely out of the water, as it were, when it came to nautical matters. Big vessels have big fuel tanks, but for better or for worse, the policy seems to be more about vengeance than prevention in the event of a spill. In any event, the only official response was a state boat that came around 24 hours later to take water samples.
Further down the beach, a neighbor who knows the director of the foundation who owns her gave her a call. In years past, Christian Gruye’s dinghy has washed up on the beach nearby. When she called back, she assumed that was the case again. “No, this time it’s the big boat,” he told her, setting in motion a frenzied salvage effort.
But for the first hour, as the tide receded, it was only my wife Mandy and I and a slightly asthmatic dachsund named Daffy we were taking care of, watching Lotus’ roll period increase as the wind pushed her and less and less water remained below to keep her upright. Around 0700, she went over on her port side. We could hear the crashing as everything not bolted down or braced let go and ended up against the port side. Fortunately, none of the windows were smashed out; equally fortunately, she lay down heeled to seaward, and didn’t come down with her superstructure in the trees and logs and the concrete ramp to shoreward.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzTRlWkG7QU[/youtube]
Shortly afterward, the first rescuers began to find their way down the various driveways fronting the beach. Eric, an engineer, and Brad, a shipwright intimate with her structure, were among the first. I searched out the oars to the house dinghy and helped them launch into the heaving waves so they could get aboard and check the damage. The first reports were encouraging; a mess inside, but not making much water. No electrical, so no pumps.
She began pounding then, as the waves built and her buoyancy failed, but there was little to be done about it. Vessel Assist boats from Port Hadlock and Port Townsend arrived, and there was a discussion down on the beach, the first of many that would occur throughout the day, about getting a kedge out. Christian and her husband, Brion, and another friend, Suzie, showed up. A council was called; we put on coffee, and volunteers congregated in the living room to review the situation and discuss the options.
These were limited. iPhones were produced, tide tables and forecasts were consulted. Depending on whose phone and which app you looked at, the wind was either going to increase or decrease, continue or abate, at some point in the late morning or late evening or perhaps the next day altogether.
The tide tables were more closely in agreement with one another and were uniformly pessimistic: the tide she had come in on that morning was the highest for the next month. The afternoon high would be more than a foot lower; the next highest high would be around 0530 the next morning but would still be lower than the one she grounded on.
Hope that she could come off on the afternoon high faded rapidly as the wind continued to pick up, and options for lightening her receded … no one wanted to try to get the 350-pound main anchor off the bow in such conditions, and when someone broached the idea of off-loading fuel in the heavy swells I broke out in a cold sweat.
The kedge conversation happened again. Costs and benefits of using Vessel Assist versus a private vessel were debated. Someone brought up the idea of calling the Elmore, an old tug that had fared poorly in last year’s storms. She had been repaired and was moored nearby and had plenty of power, but I knew her transmission had been acting up recently, and tied onto a grounded vessel while working off a lee shore is no place to not be able to shift into forward.
It became clear at last that little was going to be decided so early. While she was still partially submerged, there was no way of accounting for damage to the hull; a hole below the water line might well mean she was better left where she lay than towed into deeper water, at least until a patch could be fashioned. Preparations could be made for de-watering, rigging a towing bridle, and making emergency patches.
While time and tide may wait for no man, the reverse is not true: it turns out that men and women are pretty much stuck waiting on wind and tide … no one who has been through a hard grounding in a broad tidal range can easily understand how little action there is versus how much waiting must be done. We brewed more coffee and made more sandwiches and people brought pizza and waited.
When the tide dropped enough, someone brought in a ladder and we rigged it at the bow on the shoreward side to allow easier access. Going aboard was every bit as surreal as seeing her for the first time heaving out there in the dark. She was canted at 45 degrees, so nothing about boarding her and moving about was in the least bit normal. After ascending the ladder and clambering over the rail, you clapped on to a line lead across the foredeck to a short ladder up to the upper deck. A hatch cover was the only footing until you reached the ladder, which you then ascended sideways, grabbing at the upper deck railing along the way. Once in front of the pilothouse, you grabbed another rope and pulled yourself up to the high side, where you could finally lean against the pilothouse and catch your breath for a minute. After that, you tried to scrape sand off your boots and keep your footing on the non-skid, holding onto the rail or a safety line that was later rigged leading aft to the entrance into the cabin.
Inside the cabin was even worse. Appliances, cabinets, dishes, tools, equipment of every type and description, all had come loose and lay piled against the port bulkhead. Footing was precarious and every handhold bore examination as loose joinery was ready to give way when weight was applied. The carnival funhouse angle induced vertigo and made some folks nauseous. “I didn’t think I was going to need Dramamine on a grounded boat,” one guy quipped.
As the morning progressed, more people started to show up. Uncertain about the condition of the hull and the need for manpower to ready her for towing, Christian called in friends from the crew of the Adventuress, currently hauled out in Port Townsend. Students and staff from the Northwest School of Wooden BoatBuilding, who had a fine view of the proceedings from their building across the bay, came to help. One student, a fellow named Greg, happened to be renting the guest house on the property we were taking care of; he opened up his bungalow as freely as we had the main house and worked tirelessly to help out. Vessel Assist put in at Port Hadlock marina, just down the beach, and came over with pumps and equipment. Daffy was confused, and then, when the pizza showed up and kind-hearted volunteers started sneaking her table scraps, thrilled by all the excitement.
But as the tide began to rise, the wind continued to scream down the bay, and Lotus began taking on water. We had already hoisted several electric pumps aboard and a generator; now, I rushed to get another generator aboard before the waves blocked off the ladder again. I filled my boots and a wave sprayed the generator with salt water. Wiser men, Brion and Brad, set up a tagline to ferry more pumps and fuel across safely. We ran an extension cord from the house to the boat, first across the beach, then overhead as the tide rolled in. Later, we added a second cord on another circuit. I lost count of how many pumps went aboard. But they could not keep up with the water, and Eric and Suzie on board could not find where it was coming in. I worried that she had come down on a rock, piercing the hull out of sight of the beach and inaccessible from the interior.
But once it had become clear that there was no pumping her out and no righting her on the afternoon high tide, there was a sudden sense of focus. To the extent she was coming slightly afloat, she was simply getting pounded by the heavy surf, driven into the sand and against the sandstone shelf where she lay; better to let her flood and keep her stable, and to know that everything rested on the chance at the 2300 low tide to get her patched and ready to come off on the next morning’s high.
There was a period of calm, then, in the afternoon. Eric and Suzie stayed aboard to man the pumps and stabilize her. The mooring ball was still attached at the bow and a long length of chain disappeared back toward her original mooring; a plan was devised to retrieve the ball and chain to avoid further entanglements when she came off. Christian and Brion finalized arrangements with Vessel Assist; they would be on station at 0400 with three vessels, including the 50-foot Cascade, ready to pass a line and pull.
There was time to chat; Christian, who had inherited the boat from her father, regaled us with all the other adventures they had been through as she was growing up on the vessel, frightening scrapes in storms, previous groundings, sales and re-purchases. Lotus, it became clear, wasn’t simply a historic vessel with a storied past; she was part of the family. Every decision Christian was making that day involved soul-searching with a raft of memories attached.
Taking advantage of the lull, I reconfigured the electrical cabling and set up floodlights I found in the shop to illuminate the beach, ramp and ladder. Patching supplies and additional pumps and tools began to show up and were stacked on the ramp, waiting for low tide. A supply of headlamps, batteries, and waders materialized. Darkness fell, and the hull finally stopped pounding as the tide receded again.
As soon as it was practical to get at her port side without filling our boots, we were looking for the hole. Several of the Adventuress crew, some of them previous graduates of the Boat School, duckwalked awkwardly along in the surging surf, minutely inspecting every seam and butt that wasn’t obscured in the sand. Although I don’t know the first thing about wooden boats, I joined them and made my own survey.
We rendezvoused on the beach at the bow and compared notes, mostly favorable. One woman found a seam that she thought might have lost the caulking; another spied a suspicious butt that seemed sprung. I’d found a spongy patch above the sponson where the plywood seemed to have sprung out. “But that’s above the waterline,” someone said. “Not today, it wasn’t!” I replied.
We walked back to take another look and show one another our findings. Although she had been taking on gallons and gallons of water, far more than the pumps could keep up with, nothing we had spotted seemed likely to have been the source. We crouched along the port quarter, squinting down at the drips coming from the butt, debating the likelihood of the waves leaking in behind the guard, while a few feet further aft, a gaping hole in the guard that we had all missed on our first two passes yawned over our heads. In the movie version, I could imagine the camera panning up from our debate and focusing on that obvious gap, bashed in by the afternoon waves.
Of course, sharper eyes soon found the damage. That entire section of the guard had been the suspect all along; while the rest of the hull above the sponsons was heavily timbered, financial considerations had forced a cosmetic patch with plywood in that particular area. As luck would have it, it was slated for more permanent repair later this summer. But for now, it was going to get more plywood and battened tarps.
A human centipede of volunteers conveyed boards, tools and tarps over the beach and floodlights were set up to illuminate the area. Another neighbor from down the beach, CJ, who had a long career in commercial salvage down in the Gulf, appeared with his son Carlos and more buckets of tools and gear. The kedge conversation happened again. But the tide window was open: it was time to get her ready for the morning pull.
What followed was like an intensive, compressed master-work course in rigging and salvage from some of the most experienced nautical minds on the West Coast. My own repertoire consists of the usual recreational sailing knots, bowlines, figure eights, a few different modest hitches. These folks were tying exotic knots and indeed entire systems of knots with variants and sub-variants and as much complexity as the opening moves of grandmaster chess players. Unfortunately, their fingers moved too fast for me to follow any of it and it was no time for giving lessons. Brion was kind enough to attempt to explain his bridle rig off the stern post, but the various yippees and whoopies and whatnot went right over my head, although the Boat School students in attendance ate it all up.
Neither am I much of a carpenter, but I dug in and helped roll battens into tarps and pound them into the hull and sponson, and found myself hammering nails inexpertly into plywood sheets to make a sandwich over the hole and other vulnerable areas.
Toward the stern, in a feat of endurance and strength, several people had crawled in under the hull and were using sledgehammers to bust apart two large rocks that threatened to hang up the rudder or keel if she were dragged that direction in the morning.
Brad and CJ supervised the patch work. When they were satisfied, we piled most of the remaining salvage material aboard, tucking it away in the jumbled galley off the after-deck, where it promptly got lost amidst the other debris covering the sole. CJ warned us to get our heads down for a few hours and get some sleep. But part of the battle was to be fought that night, as the tide came in … if the patch didn’t hold and the pumps couldn’t keep up again, she would have too much weight to come upright and off the bottom at high tide. Eric and Brad settled in for a long night in the dark, canted vessel. The rest of us trudged back up the ramp to get a couple hours of rest.
I counted myself fortunate to have a bed; everyone else was relegated to couches or the floor in the main house and Greg’s bungalow, or, in Brion’s case, to his car. “He sleeps great in there,” Christian said dismissively as she claimed the living room couch.
I was up at 0330. I had gotten a couple hours sleep but woke up around three and finally couldn’t take the strain of laying there without knowing if she was coming upright with the tide or not. I threw on my wet, dirty clothes and headed outside. It was frigid; I looked up and the stars shone clear and bright overhead. A spotlight was crawling south from Port Townsend. Initially I thought it was, finally, the Coast Guard, who had made some vague noises about being present for the pull, but in fact it was the Cascade coming in. The two smaller Vessel Assist boats, Gabriel and Negotiator, were putting out from Hadlock, their own lights flashing eerily in the dark.
When I got down to the ramp, Greg was already industriously ferrying people and equipment back in forth in the dinghy. The tide was already over the base of the ladder, and they were hauling it aboard. To my immense relief, it was dead calm out, and Lotus was beginning to come upright on the tide.
Vessel Assist put a couple crew aboard, and Brion, Eric, and Suzie were joined there by some of the Adventuress crew, including one of her captains, Joshua Berger. Josh went aboard by dinghy and stopped off briefly on the ramp. He’d brought fresh poppyseed muffins. In addition to being, by all accounts, a superlative captain, he also bakes a mean muffin.
On board, they had a quick safety meeting, and with a little yelling back and forth we coordinated disconnecting and retrieving the tagline and the electrical cords that were connecting her to shore. One of the two smaller Vessel Assist craft ran in the main tow line from Cascade and they connected her to the bridle rigged from the stern. Gabriel took a second line to the bow to assist. At around 0445, they took a strain and started gently pulling.
I stood on the ramp with Christian and watched as the Cascade put on more and more power. Lotus rolled to port, but didn’t budge. The process was repeated, then again, then again in tandem with Gabriel hauling on the bow, and each time the top rail on Lotus dipped out toward the water, I could feel Christian tensing up a bit more.
Finally, I turned to her and said, “Are you sure you want to watch this?” She turned, looked at me for a beat, and said, “No!” then marched directly up to the house and parked herself in a back room, where she sat waiting for news in a state of private torment which I could not even begin to imagine.
For 45 minutes, they rocked Lotus back and forth on the sandstone shelf where she lay, with only one very slight bit of movement. Cascade and Gabriel, pulling in tandem, weren’t making any headway at all, and despite all the considerable discussion beforehand and the clear safety protocols that had been set up to maintain her structural integrity, I was worrying they were going to break or spring something. And indeed, as they switched the bridle to the bow and took up strain there, Brion yelled out to stop–the capstan had begun to shift on its mount. They slacked off, inspected it, then took a strain again more slowly. It held. But still the hull would not budge.
As high tide passed, I was sure it was done … she was not going to come off, and the storms predicted for the coming week would surely beat her to pieces there without extraordinary measures … a crane, perhaps, or a thorough gutting to lighten her enough to come up on a lower tide. None of the options would be cheap or pretty. You could hear in their voices on the radio that after another few pulls, the Vessel Assist captains were getting ready to come to the same conclusion.
Then, on a surge with both boats pulling, the bow shifted a couple feet out.
Instantly, hope returned. “We’ve got movement on the bow!” Lotus called out dramatically on the radio. “Lotus is coming off.”
With slow majesty and accompanied by loud cheers rising over the rumble of diesels in the pre-dawn murk, she came free and headed for deeper water.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lGmQkC4G5s[/youtube]
Her rudder hit something as the stern dragged off and shifted a few degrees starboard, causing her to tow oddly and Negotiator nearly got caught in the tow line. They halted the tow and let her drift a bit while they inspected for damage below, got the steering gear straightened out, and rigged for a hip tow for the five-mile stretch up to Boat Haven in Port Townsend.
Back in the house, Christian was shaking, Mandy was smiling and Daffy was still asleep. It seemed very empty, suddenly, with everyone gone and no huge boat sitting out front. Christian thanked us graciously for the hospitality (I find it’s easy to be hospitable when it’s someone else’s house) and headed for Port Townsend to meet Lotus when she came in. Mandy and I listened to the radio traffic as she made the slow, hour-long transit north, gathered up the odd bits and pieces of gear left around and ate cold pizza in celebration.
And now, the real work begins. Lotus was both amazingly lucky in where she came in, and very fortunate in her friends. The expertise and dedication that materialized around her were what saved her, from Brion’s rigging knowledge to Brad’s familiarity with her structure to Eric’s knowledge of her systems (it was he who pumped free the water tank forward that lightened her bow up enough to slide off despite being several feet higher ashore than the stern) and the general but deep expertise of the Adventuress captain and crew in all matters nautical.
In retrospect, it is even more impressive. Not only did everything that needed to happen, happen, but it was done safely and in a seamanlike manner without argument or yelling. The only amateur out there was me; and even that was not without value, since none of the other luminaries out there had probably ever been so lubberly as to have grounded and flooded a boat before, whereas I had. So even my lack of expertise resulted in the availability of some hard-won experience, which I hope was not utterly worthless.
Part of that experience is the knowledge that getting the boat off, as difficult as that may be, is actually the easier part of a salvage job. Putting her back together again is the long, arduous, unromantic part that grinds against your soul and forces you to question your dedication to boat ownership. And particularly with a wooden vessel of Lotus’ age, without insurance, it’s sure to be an expensive proposition.
So, I urge you to stop by the foundation’s web page when you are done reading this and make a contribution. Someday soon again I hope to look out and imagine those elegant ladies and their parasols enjoying a sunny day on Puget Sound aboard the Lotus.