A friend of mine recently asked why exactly it is that all crappy things seem to happen at once. An optimistic read might be that it helps get them all out of the way. If that’s the case, then we are in for some damn smooth sailing this summer, after the last two weeks trying to escape the gravitational confines of Puget Sound.
I had envisioned a lovely, relaxing sail up to Port Hadlock, where we would have an easy time finishing up a long list of boat projects with the expansive shop facilities and expertise available to us there. Instead, Mandy and I bickered all the way up from Seattle, and faced minor and major setbacks at almost every turn. When we finally grabbed the ball out in front of my parent’s place, it was hardly clear where even to start.
Our holding tank challenges were only the tip of the iceberg. While wrestling with those complications, I also found that I had ordered several parts of the wrong size for our solar panel installation. The Mercury outboard that had come with our new dinghy (admittedly, thrown in for free) resisted all efforts to restart the water pump. No clear path could be located for a discharge hose for the new bilge pump I had bought. We discovered a fracture in one of our rope clutches.
Meanwhile, every single trip either out or back from the boat seemed to result in some item that was supposed to be aboard ending up ashore, or some extraneous crap from ashore ending up on board. Inevitably, that item would prove to be vital for whatever the next step might be in whatever project we were trying to inch ahead with.
Between rowing back and forth to the boat a bajillion times a day, dealing with increasingly inconvenient tides, and trying to sort out the various self-inflicted equipment problems from legitimate vendor- or manufacturer-created difficulties, we were getting pretty tired out. It was a relief when we turned Rosie over to the boatyard in Port Townsend to work on the hopelessly snarled holding tank project, so we could have a bit of a break. But, when my wife went into the local clinic with a small rash below one eye and came out with nose cancer, it was probably inevitable that the only available specialist appointment for the next three months was going to be back in Seattle, at 0745 the next day.
Fortunately, we had some other errands to run in town; I picked up a loaner outboard from a friend in case we couldn’t get the Merc going, and we took care of some other necessary business. The doctor took a chunk out of Mandy’s nose and promised to call back when they figured out what was going on. We got back to Port Hadlock fairly late, but I woke up early the next morning to fret about equipment orders and small engine repair. I spent most of the day in the shop trying to put the Merc back together again, ultimately chopping off some small chunk of the drive shaft to get the lower unit back in place. It still didn’t pump water.
That evening, we were laying around digesting far too much dinner and finishing up the second half of “Gone With The Wind” (a title descriptive of the state we desperately were hoping to achieve ourselves) when we heard a loud thump from the other side of the half-wall between living and dining room. Then I heard something no one wants to hear, least of all a son of his mother, a series of weak, pained “Ow, ow, ow, ow” coming from the floor.
Mom had fainted while reaching up into a cupboard and fallen backward into the half-wall, doing this to the metal-reinforced corner with the back of her head:
This is what a thick enough skull at a high enough velocity will do to a drywall corner bead
That earned her a trip to the emergency room, ten staples in her noggin, and an overnight stay for observation. It turned out, after a CT scan, that they were more worried about her heart than her head… they weren’t sure why she fainted in the first place but found some suspicious traces on an ECG. They wanted to keep her for the weekend for additional tests but finally agreed to let her come home with a portable monitor on.
I took a quick trip over to the local mailbox place from the hospital and collected a variety of large boxes which I assumed were the parts for the solar panel. Instead, they turned out to be a variety of large cushions… not ours at all. The actual solar panel parts were still sitting on the floor of the mailbox place, which, of course, closed before we figured out what had happened.
So we spent much of that week in and out of and hanging around various medical facilities, while not much of anything was getting done on the boat. We collected her from the outfit doing the holding tank work and trekked back down to Hadlock, failing to notice that much of the other gear we needed to finish up the installation had ended up in their shop and not on board.
When we were moored up once again, I volunteered to drive to Walmart to pick up the prescriptions for Mom, hoping to die in a fiery head-on crash somewhere en-route, but was favored with no such fortuitous change in circumstances.
The weekend was mostly spent waiting, since just about every piece of hardware we needed was either locked up in someone else’s shop or sitting around waiting for the mail to start moving again on Monday. The additional delays only ratcheted up the tension. Fortunately, since Mom had the blood pressure monitor out already to check how her new meds were working, I was able to entertain myself by watching my own pressure ratchet higher and starting a betting pool on when the first aneurysm would occur.
Monday I picked up the newly re-plumbed holding tank and the solar panel parts. Of course, I didn’t notice the missing plumbing parts until after we got the tank back to the boat and tried to put it in… foolishly, we had assumed that once we got it back, we’d actually be able to start making progress. Instead, I ended up having to make another trip back to town to get the rest of the parts from the yard the next day (because, of course, they were already closed again by the time we figured out what had happened), but that was okay, because I found that I had ordered the wrong size of one of the panel parts and had to overnight in the correct sizes, so I could pick them up at the same time from the mailbox place. That little Pyrrhic bit of efficiency was the high point of the week.
We went to take off the cracked rope clutch only to find that the builder had glassed over the backing plates, nuts and all, when they had tabbed in the bulkhead for the aft cabin (aggravating as this was, it’s actually the first manufacturing defect of any significance that I have found on the Freedom to this point). That had to be cut away, and a new triple clutch found; a friend’s shop in town had none in stock, and I was still naively hoping to be gone before a special order could be got. We took the clutch ashore to patch it up as best we could for the time being.
Other than mounting the control panel, I abandoned the new bilge pump project altogether. If all boat projects were wiring projects, I realized, I could be a very happy person.
Bolting the new solar panel into place on the arch
Most of the rest of the days blurred together. At some point, my stepfather and I ran down to pick up a replacement outboard we found on Craigslist in Gig Harbor. Mandy managed to get the holding tank plumbed up correctly. We heard back from the specialist; her nose cancer could wait until we returned, and there was some chance in fact that the biopsy procedure had actually removed most of it. Mom’s head stopped ringing and her heart seemed to continue pumping in a sturdy and workmanlike manner. My friend Maxx arrived from town to help out with other sundry projects and we finished up the solar panel installation and wiring. My stepfather, putting some of his Boat School woodworking skills to good use, finished up and mounted a gorgeous chart holder in our aft cabin.
Gradually, stuff started to more or less work. I tried not to think about the long-term damage to our bank account or relationship, or to the vast debts of donated labor, assistance, and gratitude I was accruing with friends and family (toward the end, I am fairly certain that much of this assistance was delivered tinged with desperation to finally be rid of us both and our boatload of problems).
Chart holder installed
Finally, one day, we let go the mooring pendant and motored up to Port Townsend yet again. We plugged in for the night and used unlimited electricity and free-running water to scrub away the detritus of two weeks of project mishaps. Time was taken to stow and organize. Provisions disappeared into larders, tools disappeared for hopefully the last time in a long time. And, with a freshening breeze and a fair tide the next afternoon, we floated past Point Wilson, bound for points north.
The former City of Seattle Fireboat Alki was sold at auction this past week for the bargain-basement price of $71,100, pending a closure process that will include verification of the buyer’s ability to safely moor and insure the 127 foot, 86-year old steel vessel.
That latter portion of the process is a laudable one, and it is being mentioned prominently in the wake of reports indicating that the Port of Seattle sold the derelict vesselDeep Sea without such precautions, leading to environmental and financial disasters for shellfish farmers in Penn Cove last year when that vessel burned and sank there. A number of other problematic derelicts wound up in the hands of their current owners through similarly lax process, and the city is no doubt working hard to avoid the Alki becoming a similar story years down the road.
In that effort, they are already ahead of the game, because Alki is a working vessel that has been maintained by firefighters whose lives depended on her and whose resources were backed by city coffers. Most other big, old boats that port agencies find themselves auctioning off are well-past the end of their working lives, and have already suffered years of neglect before being sold. The buyers have big dreams, but rarely the big money required to refurbish the boats to match.
But despite the precautions, it’s all too easy for big, old boats to spiral past the point of easy restoration, despite the best efforts of owners and crew alike.
This was driven home dramatically, and tragically, by the recent sinking of the HMS Bounty during Hurricane Sandy in the North Atlantic. If there is nothing else to know about nautical misadventure, it is that there is always more to the story; on this story, no one has done more to uncover the rest than Mario Vittone, in a series of excellent articles on gcaptain.com covering the Coast Guard hearings on the disaster.
The HMS Bounty during happier times
There is much to critique in the Bounty case that has little to do with her being old, or wooden, or poorly maintained. But it is clear that those factors were ultimately important ones in her foundering, and Vittone details testimony that is fascinating and informative in tracking the progression of decisions that led officers and crew to take to sea in a vessel that was barely hanging together in the first place.
It’s a familiar pattern in the history of disasters, described succinctly by Richard Feinman in the Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident as “…gradually decreasing strictness.”
The paragraph that line is from is worth quoting at length:
The argument that the same risk was flown before without failure is often accepted as an argument for the safety of accepting it again. Because of this, obvious weaknesses are accepted again and again, sometimes without a sufficiently serious attempt to remedy them, or to delay a flight because of their continued presence.
For “flight” you can read “voyage” and find that the same factor is inextricably involved in disaster after disaster at sea. It’s a very human failing; we’re mostly optimists from birth, trying new things, and assuming, often reasonably, that if we’ve done it before successfully, then it is probably safe to do it again. In fact, as sailors, we often speak positively of this experience; we call it “gaining confidence in ourselves and our boats.”
But sometimes that confidence is mis-placed, and the trick is in knowing when you were well-prepared and well-equipped, and when you simply got lucky.
And the complication with old boats is that the circumstances of operation often devolve into a series of trade-offs, which you can get lucky with for a long time without fully realizing that it is just luck. The vessels cost so much to maintain and berth and insure that, for most owners, it is impossible to cover without operating them in some capacity to make money. In making their best efforts to earn more money to provide for a better maintained vessel, they are getting on a treadmill that will have no graceful exit for most of them. Even when they start out with the resources to moor and insure and maintain the boat, as the Alki’s buyer must, there is no guarantee that they will continue to have enough to keep it up, as expenses mount and funds dwindle.
The reality may be that there is only an ecosystem to fund a small percentage of all the surviving big old boats that are out there to the highest standards. The rest will scrape by, making difficult decisions about the distribution of limited funds between a wide variety of safety-related necessities, and hoping that somehow they will be the ones to raise enough money, have a big enough profile, to restore themselves to that pinnacle of seaworthiness. The choices that are made may be life or death, but they are not between life or death. They are between one dangerous possibility and another. If one comes to pass and the other does not, they will either look brilliant, or fatally misguided.
The fact that these boats are coming up for auction and selling for such low prices in the first place points to the problem. It’s easy to arm-chair quarterback these situations and say that owners should either maintain the vessels to a standard or get rid of them. But the fact is that there probably isn’t anyone else with the resources to buy most of them and the scrap value is negative. If government agencies can’t afford to break them up, then it is far, far beyond the capacity of most private owners. They’ve already spent all their money trying to avoid the scrapyard; by the time it gets to that point, it costs more to get rid of the boat than it does to just let it sit. At which point, almost inevitably, it will go on the auction block again, or end up in the headlines as another disaster.
The Duwamish on Lake Union
Perhaps illustrating the difficulties faced by the new owner of the Alki is her older sister, and predecessor into retirement, the Duwamish. Moored today more or less permanently adjacent to the Museum of History and Industry on South Lake Union, the Duwamish has struggled since her own retirement in 1985 to attract the money and volunteers required to keep a big old boat seaworthy. Duwamish was a steal compared to Alki; the current owners, the Puget Sound Fireboat Association, picked her up from the city for a dollar in 1994. Yet, at the time, the prospects looked good for the old workhorse. The foundation had active volunteers, a fundraising effort, and a working fireboat to attract more interest.
As recently as 2006, complete cost to refurbish her was estimated at $3 million. For a few years, and with tens of thousands of dollars invested in her, Duwamish continued to make the rounds in central Puget Sound, amazing viewers with astounding water shows and the sheer brute pumping power that was unequaled by any modern vessel until 2003.
But despite the time, dedication, and efforts of the members of the Foundation, Duwamish has gradually continued to deteriorate, following the same unhappy path as most big old boats. If one magnificent old fireboat could not find enough funding for here for restoration, can two? There are few more dedicated volunteers than those keeping the Duwamish afloat today, and their efforts to raise funding have been heroic, but their situation now is illustrative of the general plight of big old boats… whatever they have put into her over the years, it will likely cost more to fully restore her now than it would have when they started. The choices aren’t easy.
The Alki in all her original glory (City of Seattle Archives)
One hopes for a brighter future for the Duwamish, after the years spent in the desert, just as one hopes the Alki will wind up in good hands and find the means to continue life on the waters of the Pacific Northwest. But the fate of the Bounty, and the Kalakala, and all the other big old boats from our storied past, point to the many whirlpools along that passage. And it takes so long to make that journey that there may be no way for anyone, seller or buyer, to judge how well they will navigate it.
Stepping aboard Lotus is always like stepping back in time. Entering the salon transports most visitors directly into the turn-of-the-century world of Downton Abbey… if the Crawleys had a family yacht, it would be the M/V Lotus. The wicker furniture, the gleaming wood floors, the dark, lustrous mahogany and vintage electric lights in lotus-flower wall sconces all call to mind that earlier era of transitions and compromises, of well-heeled gentility combined with a taste for the novel and intriguing. When she was commissioned, she was the largest private yacht yet built on the West Coast, and she was designed with all the most modern conveniences for carrying her wealthy owners and friends north into the still wild and exotic reaches of the Alaskan Panhandle.
So there is always an Edwardian air of gracious welcome when one steps aboard, a reserved but comfortable vibe that causes a lowering of voices and an increase in formality in conversation. But recent visits have been less reserved for Mandy and me. I found myself standing in the galley one recent evening, glass in hand, enjoying the warmth coming off the stove and listening to the laughter and chatter that brings a boat to life. The white paint seems to glow and light glints from silverware and heavy china plates. Overhead, rows of mugs jostle gently with a passing wake, some tug traveling past late. And I, too, find myself transported back in time… but not quite so far back as most visitors.
The Main Salon of M/V Lotus
Exactly one year ago last Friday, I am standing in this same spot, wedged between the bulkhead and an awkward handhold where the stove used to be. The compartment is heeled at an insane angle, the floor as nearly a wall as the wall is a floor. The only light is the ghostly glow of powerful worklights obliquely hitting the starboard-side windows, over my head, from the bluff nearby, and the pale, darting beam of the headlamp I am wearing. These dimly illuminate a nightmarish, chaotic jumble of appliances, kitchenware, furniture, and equipment, and a yawning cavity leading down into the engine room, which I suspect is still sloshing with the remnants of the powerful waves that had pounded through the side of the boat earlier in the day.
The winds that drove those waves down out of the north, marching in long, serried ranks, have abated beneath a dark sky from which all clouds have been driven, and a glittering, starry chill has settled over the beach and penetrated the interior of the boat. I can see my breath puffing up raggedly in the beam of the headlamp as I play it about the room.
Someone has pointed me in here to retrieve some tool or piece of equipment deemed useful to the ongoing efforts outside, but I can tell almost immediately it is a hopeless errand. Even if I had been familiar with the interior of the vessel, even if the tool had somehow miraculously managed to keep its place as she went over, and not ended up, like the stove, in the chaotic piles against the port bulkhead, the combination of the darkness and the extreme angle makes all directions meaningless.
Lotus on her side
Generators and pumps rattle and whine in other parts of the hull, and I can hear muffled voices outside yelling back and forth, the slapping of plywood sheets dropping onto the beach, and the careful shuffling sounds overhead as other volunteers attempt to negotiate the canted upper deck, looming at a vertiginous 45 degrees over the tide flats below.
I take one last look around, my breath fogging out into the headlamp beam, wondering if there’s any hope at all that this cabin will ever be put together in one piece again. No one is thinking about it much right now, there is too much to do and only a brief window while the tide is out in which to do it, but it crosses my mind during this brief moment of isolation… just how much is going to have to go right for Lotus to survive. If Lotus doesn’t come off at high tide in six hours or so, there won’t be another chance at floating her for two weeks. More storms are coming in that time… how much more of a bashing could she take? And if she did come off, would we have patched her up enough to stay afloat for the five mile haul to the shipyard? Would she come apart, torn between the strain of the tow-lines and the friction of the beach? And if she made it that far, and was hauled out safely, would there be enough time and volunteers to put her back together again before the money ran out? Would she end up having to be scrapped after all that effort?
I turn and make my way back outside to join the others working to patch the holes on the port side of the house, before the tide returns.
Those questions were all answered, and tonight the galley is aglow, warm with heat from the stove, filled with some of those same folks who worked so hard on the beach that night to save her, and with many others who have labored since to return her to the condition she is in today.
Mandy and I have kept up with Lotus ever since. Some of her got into our blood somehow, as some of our blood got in her wood that night. It’s a strange effect that classic wooden boats have on people, an effect that had always mystified me when I saw others succumb to it… throwing years and dollars into beautiful, but quickly rotting, hulls that seemed more like chains and leg-irons than the passage to freedom that most boats offer their owners. While admiring the gorgeous, warm luster and classic lines and history, I couldn’t imagine what those people were thinking… we were happy enough with our modern, plastic tub.
But whatever it was those folks could never explain to us, we understand better now, even as we, in turn, find it impossible to explain to others.
Lotus’ Berth behind MOHAI
Now Lotus is a neighbor once again… not quite right on the doorstep, but a short walk along the bustling shoreline of Lake Union from our marina to her current berth at the pier behind MOHAI, where she will be until May 15th as a part of the Center for Wooden Boats’ Visiting Vessel Program. Open for tours from 11am to 3pm most days, and as a floating lodge with berths starting at $50 per night, she has returned to her old haunts, and occupations, dating back to the early sixties.
As occasionally happens with near-catastrophes, the grounding sparked a renaissance for the Lotus Foundation, which owns and manages the vessel, one borne of necessity. As long as Lotus could sit comfortably, and cheaply, at her mooring off Hadlock, there was little urgency to her situation. The necessary maintenance and upgrades happened as money came available, or when someone was free to do them, and the money came when it came, when someone reached out for an event or made a spur-of-the-moment contribution.
Since that day on the beach, all that has changed. In addition to all the immediate repairs that were needed, the ongoing requirements were elevated. By mutual agreement with the state Department of Natural Resources, the Hadlock anchorage was no longer an option. Anywhere else she might drop anchor would have to be bomb-proof… everyone recognized that it had been a combination of hard work and luck that had saved her the first time and no one wanted to roll the dice again. So she would need moorage, and for moorage she would need insurance, and insurance for a hundred and four year-old wooden boat is not inexpensive. So she would also need fundraising, a role to fill that would generate revenue, and for that she would need an audience, and upgrades, and stewardship.
The Chief Steward and Head Bottle-washer, Christian Gruye, already exhausted from the salvage project and repairs, re-doubled her efforts toward marshaling volunteers and finding a sustainable way for Lotus to begin to pay her own way in the newer, more expensive reality in which she found herself. Lotus made the rounds at various maritime festivals and boat shows throughout Puget Sound during the latter part of the summer, but despite thousands of visitors dropping change in the donations jar, it wasn’t going to be enough to pay all the bills.
What Gruye hit upon was the same role her mother had envisioned for the boat when her parents first bought it as a private vessel in 1959: as a floating lodge. With the ’62 World’s Fair coming up, it had been an inspired choice; Lotus paid for herself in two years. The $5000 sale price had been, interestingly, the exact amount for which she had originally been built by the Sloan Shipyard in 1909 on the shores of Elliot Bay, of old-growth Douglas Fir (at the behest of Maurice McMicken, a prominent Seattle attorney and businessman).
Today’s bills are going to be much larger and take a lot longer than two years to pay off, but the response so far has been gratifying. A summer schedule with plans to hit most of the major Puget Sound waterfront festivals, and potentially a stint in the San Juans, boarding vacationers in those old haunts, should serve to increase her exposure and bring even more folks aboard.
With such renewed activity, there has been new energy among the volunteers that fuel the foundation. Efforts to complete the paperwork for federal non-profit status have been spurred ahead. The corking and painting over the summer has been followed by additional electrical and engine work. “Since that day on the beach…” is a phrase that frequently begins many of Christian’s sentences these days, and the changes are indeed remarkable since that cold, fraught evening. Plans to upgrade systems that have been long overdue for updates are well underway, and obtaining federal non-profit status will open up the availability of new funding sources, as well as providing more incentive for donors and volunteers to contribute time and resources.
Nowhere are those changes more dramatic than in Gruye’s own life. Where Lotus travels around the Sound these days, Christian goes with her; scrubbing, painting, serving guests, updating the website, dealing with masses of paperwork, wrestling with ancient electrical and mechanical systems, separated from home and husband in Port Townsend for weeks at a stretch. Volunteers can only take up so much of the slack, and until the Foundation’s fund-raising efforts hit the point where more full-time help can be acquired, Christian fills the gaps with deep resources of intimate knowledge and filial affection. Having more or less grown up aboard Lotus, the effort she puts into maintaining the yacht rival what most of us would only offer to the closest family. It’s as if Lotus were a sibling with special needs, and Christian seems no more inclined to turn her back on the boat than any of us might on a brother or sister with similar dependencies.
The beach itself shows little sign of what happened there a year ago. For weeks afterward, a long, straight crease could be easily seen in the soft sandstone where her keel had been driven in repeatedly by the heavy surf. Gradually, it has filled in. Now, all that remains there of all the efforts of that evening is significant only in the absence: two large boulders embedded in the sand are suspiciously flat now. Lotus’s stern had lain down right over those rocks when she came ashore. That night, in what at the time I considered an excess of exuberance and energy, a rotating cast of volunteers had crawled beneath the transom and, laying in the cramped space between the sand and the hull, had bashed those boulders dead-flat, so she could clear them again coming off. In the event, it turned out to have been a vital contribution… Lotus barn-doored right across where those rocks had been as they towed her free, and indeed caught her rudder on one of the stubs as she came afloat. Had they been more prominent, considerably more damage would have been done.
Whatever measure of dedication it takes in people that drives them to lay in freezing mud beneath a precarious 102-ton boat, hammering for hours at the bones of the earth, is still present in the volunteers of the M/V Lotus Foundation. Since that day on the beach, they’ve been working hard to make Lotus’ second hundred years as historic as the first.
There’s never anything smooth or easy when it comes to boats, and our closing process on Paros has been no exception: at the last minute, our financing fell apart, and we had to scramble to come up with alternatives on a short deadline. A glitch in dealing with one of the conditions of our post-survey counter-offer took longer than expected to resolve. We received an unexpected offer to purchase a sister-ship at a considerably lower price (which we ultimately declined, obviously). The process stumbled along fitfully and stressfully, extending what already seemed like a perpetual state of displacement.
So I was prepared to feel some sense of triumph and celebration when everything was finally all signed and completed and we took possession of our fantastic new boat. Getting the deal done, getting moved in, getting her moored, taking care of all the necessary and innumerable details of boat ownership, had become the uttermost focus of my life over the past weeks and I was looking forward to some triumphant release of all that accumulated tension when the deal was finally done.
But the last weekend before our scheduled closing date, as I was fretting over financing and insurance and bottom paint and whether or not the small locks were going to be open, life happened. Saturday night, we got a call that my aunt had been admitted to the hospital with a dangerous blood clot in her leg. Already faced with some serious health problems, she inevitably experienced complications during treatment. We went to bed uncertain about the prognosis.
That same night, though I didn’t learn of it until early the next morning, a close friend from high school, just off a plane from Minneapolis and waiting for a cab, turned to his wife and said, “I’m feeling dizzy.” Then he collapsed and died.
Nothing to do with the boat seems all that important now.
So the last week of negotiating the final arrangements for the purchase were interspersed with funeral arrangements; a call to the broker was followed by a call to some distant friend or another to break or share news; a visit to the boatyard was trailed by a visit to the crematorium… one last view of the boat before it went back in the water, one last glimpse of Dave before his cremation. I made the final arrangements on the road while driving back from the funeral in Spokane. We took possession the day after we got back to Seattle.
I know I should be excited, but mostly what I feel right now is sad.
My aunt, at least, is doing better, and fortunately we were able to visit her while we were in Spokane for Dave’s funeral.
We’ve been aboard for a few days now and it has been wonderful. We’re almost entirely moved in, and we’re swimming in extra space and luxuriating in unheard-of amenities like refrigeration and an oven and forced-air heat (not that we need it, with the sudden advent of summer). There are supplies to be sorted out, new systems to learn, cables to be traced, electronics to be understood. And the sun is coming out now and the marina is coming alive, and normally I’d be eager to dive into it all to start figuring it out. But I just don’t find myself all that interested in any of it at the moment.
I feel as though I’m being stupid and selfish in this because death is the great universal experience and everyone has lost someone close at some point. I have, for that matter. I suppose that there is an extra cold heaping of reality that hits anyone when the first close friend among their peer group passes away. Dave was a day past his thirty-ninth birthday when he died. While no one would call that “young” (and certainly the degree to which it represented, in fact, “old,” had become an increasing source of mutual needling between us) it was still about twenty years shy of a date that I had expected to be burying high school buddies, barring accident.
To a large extent my friends from high school remain my friends today. Dave and I lived together on and off after graduation, and in fact moved here to Seattle together. In the years since, until I moved aboard the boat three years ago, we had never lived more than about five blocks apart. You don’t think much about these things as you’re living them. But it’s that proximity, and those experiences, that bind you to people, sometimes in ways, and to such extent, that you don’t fully realize until later.
He only came out sailing with us once but he was excited about the new boat. Dave enjoyed new and adventurous experiences but he liked his creature comforts also, and given a private cabin, a three-burner propane stove with oven to indulge in his hobby of cooking, he and his wife would have had a great time aboard this summer. When you have had all those shared experiences, your brain somehow hardwires itself to anticipate more, and sadness is what you get when your conscious mind overrides those expectations with the reality that they are never going to happen again.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Dave’s attitude toward life lately. When I spoke at his funeral, I told a story that he liked to tell, about how he once spent three hours trying to talk me into going sledding on the first big snowfall of the year, and how I never went. He thought that story said a lot about me, and I thought it said a lot about him, and we were probably both right. He was never afraid to go out and do what he wanted to do, when he wanted to do it. I have always been more cautious.
While we both had our regrets over some decisions we made from those different fundamental natures, I suspect he had fewer. Whether it was just his nature, or something he had learned along the way, he had figured out that you can often get away with having your fun and still coming out ahead. He had a successful career, but he wasn’t a nose-to-the-grindstone kind of guy. He always did as well, or better, than I did, even if I spent hours fretting and planning and scheming while he was kicking back in an all-night poker game. He was living proof that the consequences of being laid-back were never as dire as I might have imagined.
When Mandy and I decided to move aboard a boat and take up a life less land-bound, I was fighting that cautious nature, and in some ways I was winning. But it’s not a one-time bout; caution can keep creeping up on you, subtly inclining your choices toward safety and rigor, away from novelty and excitement. I had made a conscious decision at some point to spend more time doing things I enjoyed and less time running on the financial hamster wheel, but that’s a decision you have to keep making. It’s all too easy to fixate on the degree to which your income has receded and to discount the freedom and joy that summers spent cruising have offered instead.
It gets easier to put that balance in perspective again when something like this happens. I don’t think Dave had a lot of regrets in life but he sure wasn’t done living it all yet, either. The knowledge, visceral and immediate, that in one way or another we are all as liable as he was to end up with much left undone is a spur to me, once again, to not put off my ambitions overmuch in favor of ephemeral security. The best security, I think, may be to take a page from his book… find something to laugh about in everything, have fun when the opportunity presents itself, go sledding when the snow is falling.
So it’s time to re-name our new boat and get on with sailing. Paros isn’t a terrible name but we don’t love it and it holds no meaning for us the way it must have for the prior owners. Since the documentation has to be re-filed at time of purchase, it’s an easy time to change it. You’re probably cringing at this point because you think that the punchline to all this is that we have decided to name our new boat Dave. That would have been exactly the sort of incongruous prank I might have played on Dave when he was alive, but it would just seem cruel now that he is unable to retaliate in kind.
Instead, my wife suggested Rosie and that’s what we’ll call her. Rosie was our calico cat’s name; she also died in June, two years ago, and she’s buried on a bluff overlooking the mooring buoy we often use in Port Hadlock. We’ll look up from the deck of her namesake and wave and hope she has found a ray of sunshine to rest in.
A way to commemorate Dave is more complicated and harder to settle. He had no children but left behind both parents, a younger brother, and a shocked and loving wife. My thoughts lately have been mostly for her, but, like all mourners, I have come to realize that there is nothing that can be said and there is nothing to be done that can in any way impact the vast depths of that loss. All words ring hollow, all deeds fall flat.
In time, no doubt, I will want to sail again. Similarly, I’m sure, some opportunity will arise to make my memories of Dave something lasting and meaningful. Until then, the best I can do is look around me at this wondrous new vessel we have acquired, and resolve to use it to take us to all the places we most want to go in life.
I’m having trouble judging the passage of time accurately these days, but I think it’s been a little over two months since we stepped off Insegrevious for the last time and entered into our state of lubberly exile. In that time, I think we have seen just about everything in our size and price range that we have been allowed to see in the Puget Sound region. With all the various prospects in mind, we made an initial offer on one of the candidate boats we had seen (which shall remain nameless at the moment, as it’s still on the market and, who knows, may be subject to further negotiation), which was rejected.
As much as I would like the whole process to be done with, I think that may be a good outcome. I think it’s valuable to have that mental conditioning to understand that there are other boats out there, and that a few rejections are probably part of the path to finding the right one. With that, however, we’ve pretty much eliminated as a possibility everything currently on the market up here in terms of either price or condition. It’s spring, and brokers are excited, and indeed there have been an uptick in sales, so perhaps they have some reason to be. However, it’s made it difficult to negotiate on price, and we haven’t found the sweet spot of a boat we like at a price we think it is worth yet.
We were somewhat prepared for this, because the local market has a reputation for good boats and relatively strong sales, but when you are looking at specific boats and particular price points, reputation counts for nothing. We are looking for a solid platform to live and sail on for the next decade or more and it’s going to absorb a significant percentage of our savings to buy it, so the boat itself absolutely has to be worth the money, not simply the beneficiary of some presumption that Northwestern boats are “better.” So we were all ready to head south to California to continue our shopping spree.
We hear bad things about California boats, particularly those in Southern California: a climate unfriendly to rigging, dark murmurs of general neglect, aspersions of un-seamanlike conduct. How much of this is the generally negative disposition native Pacific Northwesterners hold toward Californians and how much is grounded in fact remains to be seen, but in general, the pricing for like models tends to be lower than we find up here and perhaps that’s indicative of the common condition.
What I suspect is that you find good sailors and well-maintained boats all over, just as you can find bad ones. If it’s smart to buy the worst house in the best neighborhood, maybe it’s also good policy to look for the best boat in the worst marina. In this case, California represents the worst marina within easy reach. We know folks who have found very solid, well-found vessels at excellent prices down south. So we started looking at airline tickets and packing our bags in preparation to take a late May swing through the Golden State.
Then my wife sprained her foot. Suddenly, the prospect of stumping around the hills of San Francisco and clambering on and off of rough docks and shifting boats seems considerably more daunting and unlikely. It’s too soon to say how soon she’ll be up and moving again, but for the moment, our boat search has slid to a halt into a big windless stretch of water.
Although it’s unpalatable, it may also be a good time for a pause in the process. We fully expect many of the boats that have just come into the market to drop in price the longer they sit, just as their predecessors have, and the longer the owners are making payments and writing checks for slip fees, the stronger our negotiating position. Although sales have ticked up, they have hardly exploded, and the surge is unlikely to last past spring, while financing remains difficult and we continually see deals implode. While it’s too complex of a process to over-generalize, we think time works for us, even as we find it painful to look out the windows on sunny days to watch rippling white triangles cutting across the Sound while we sit firmly ashore.
We also have to do some hard thinking about our long-term plans. While we can still come out ahead by buying a boat in California and trucking it up here, we’ve often talked (never more so than this past winter while our hatch was frozen shut) about wintering in Mexico. If that’s a goal, then it seems a little dumb to pay to have the boat moved up here when we’re just going to take it right back down there.
But what then? If we are going to make that move, we need to start structuring our businesses to accomodate it now; and in any event, we have commitments in Seattle through early fall. It seems equally silly to buy a boat now and let it sit down there all summer… so should we even be shopping right now? And if we’re not, then our decision to forgo leasing an apartment in favor of a quick search and purchase needs to be re-visited, since everyone who has generously been sharing their homes with us so far this spring never signed up for an all-summer stay. Would the cost of that apartment outweigh the shipping costs of a California boat to Puget Sound? And in that case, should we be shopping right now?
Beyond that, what of next year? If we do wait, buy in California, and winter in Mexico, would we come back to Puget Sound next spring, either taking the long, hard slog up the coast or via Hawaii as others recommend? Or would we continue south, heading for the Canal, and more distant goals: the Caribbean, the East Coast, Europe? These are big questions that are suddenly very real and very relevant, and we weren’t really ready for them.
If time suddenly seems a little fuzzy for me, it may be because all the decisions of the next five years are suddenly crowding into the room, creating some sort of wormhole effect, and months seems like years and years like days. It’s my nature to try to understand things as best I can before I make decisions about them, but there is too much that is now unknowable and my feeble brain is having difficulty sorting out what is important. Mandy may have sprained her foot, but I feel like I have sprained my brain. There isn’t enough ice in the world to bring that swelling down.
An acquaintance told me recently to relax and enjoy the process. Either I’m just not wired that way or it’s really a little more fraught when you are searching for a home that can also sink (a more optimistic take on this might be that we’re looking for a home that can also float; seriously, have you float tested your condo lately? No? Perhaps we’re coming out ahead of features), and also deciding on the course of your life for the next decade or so.
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.
The First Glimpse
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.
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.
Too Close for Comfort
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.
All Aboard
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.
Vessel Assist Arrives
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.
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.
Every boater knows that there is a list, a long list, of things they never told you before you bought your boat. It’s like a secret handshake in the nautical world, the unrevealed mysteries of holding tank plumbing, the 0300 anchor checks, the bumps in the night when someone else fails to make their 0300 anchor check… sure, you’ve read articles like this, maybe you even laughed a little bit, but you never really thought it was going to happen to you on your boat, or if it did, it wasn’t going to be as bad as it sounded.
Well, most of those things are pretty universal experiences, and you can have them anywhere from Port Hardy to the Yucatan, and if you mention them in the company of sailors you will get a chorus of nods and a healthy raft of “That’s nothing! One time, I…” replies. But it turns out there is a whole other subset of things they never told us that are exclusively cold-weather related! That’s boating in a nutshell, isn’t it? Just when you think you’ve seen it all….
New on our list for winter:
– Winter storm forecasts made with the benefit of the expensive new coastal radar are no better than the summer ones made without it
Sliding Hatch
– Snow piled up on deck in front of your sliding hatch will make it difficult to open. Snow, topped by a glaze of frozen rain, will weld you inside your boat like you’ve been sealed up in a space ship about to be shot off on a six month voyage to Mars
– The drip-lip inside your deck-accessible anchor locker that tends to accumulate water in the summer will freeze that hatch shut in a solid block of ice when it snows. If your water tank fill happens to be located in the anchor locker, you will run out of water at just this time
– That doesn’t matter, because the faucet at your slip will be frozen anyway and you’ll have to hike up to the restrooms to fill up your spare water jugs
– Hatches with ice and snow layered atop them shed condensation at approximately 300 times their normal winter rate
Frozen Fender
– Frozen, ice-encrusted fenders banging against the hull in a windstorm are every bit as annoying as squeaky fenders are in the summer
– Marina access streets are not high on the city’s “to be plowed/sanded” list
– Dock carts do not come in an “all wheel drive” version
– Ice in the rigging really does increase the roll period of the boat so that a 20 knot breeze at your slip feels like crossing the Strait on a bad day
– All that long expanse of dock you appreciated in the summer because it kept you away from the hustle and bustle near the ramp has become an impassable wasteland of treacherous ice, snow drifts, and frozen heron crap
– Despite all this, when you finally reach the head of the dock, you will feel like Roald Amundsen and your sense of triumph will outweigh all the hardships
As winter advances, and other folks dream of sugar-plum fairies and Yuletide cheer, my thoughts once again turn to earthquakes and tsunamis. I’m not quite superstitious enough to subscribe to the “disasters come in threes” rule, but I am sailor enough to feel a little uncomfortable that each March for the past two years has seen a great earthquake along the Pacific Rim with an equally devastating tsunami accompanying it. In the wake of last year’s Tohoku event in Japan I sketched out some of my thoughts on dealing with a potentially similar event generated off the Washington coast by the Cascadia subduction zone. Those thoughts have never entirely faded, and, disappointed with the data and predictions I could find on local effects of a similar tsunami, I’ve kept an eye open for better information on what we can expect in the waters and along the shoreline of the Salish Sea.
So I was intrigued when I came across the website of the Cascadia Region Earthquake Workgroup. CREW is a non-profit organization of representatives from the public and private sectors working together to envision and reduce the effects of earthquakes and related hazards. They have put together a number of good resources for understanding the effects and preparing for them; most interesting are the scenario papers discussing the most likely local quake effects from a big-picture perspective. They factor in not just the first-order effects but also many of the likely secondary effects, such as major passes being blocked by landslides, ferry service disruption from terminal damages, and state-wide economic effects from port disruptions.
Unfortunately, like every other source, they either haven’t calculated or haven’t published any detail about Puget Sound tsunami effects or timing. It shows how far our region has to go that even the basic data isn’t available; without it, planning is going to be haphazard at best. So I’m left with my original speculation, which is that there just isn’t much time to react if you live on the water and significant event occurs. The warning time could be so short, and the shaking last so long, that it could prove impossible to get up the dock before it hits. Should we make it that far, there’s no guarantee that the ramp up to the parking lot would still be attached shoreside; the recent remodel here at Shilshole beefed up our docks quite a lot, but they don’t look to me like they were designed for lateral sheer. If the ramp is out, the seawall would be insurmountable in the time available. But, if even after all that we made the parking lot, high ground still requires a 100 meter sprint across train tracks, through brambles, brush, and weed, and finally onto a hillside that might well be coming down to meet us at the same time we headed up it… local landslides are predicted to be extreme.
I’m beginning to think that our best option may be simply to stay with the ship, as it were. While it’s true that a lot of boats are demolished in tsunamis (particularly those in marinas with lots of stuff to bash into; concrete floats, pilings, other boats), it’s equally true that a lot of them stay afloat for quite a while after the waves. Most sailors are familiar with the axiom that one should always step up into a liferaft; maybe it’s also best to step up ashore in the wake of a tsunami. Certainly our hull would fare better beating against other boats and debris than our frail carcasses would. Getting rattled around during the ride would be unquestionably dangerous, but it’s not entirely unlike getting bashed around in heavy weather, which is something we’re reasonably equipped to cope with.
This seems a little unorthodox and runs contrary to every published bit of advice I can find. On the other hand, none of the published advice seems to contemplate the situation faced by boaters here in Puget Sound.
Staying aboard has other virtues as well: you retain all the resources of home. Emergency management people suggest a gallon of water per person per day for three days, but as long as we have the boat, we have about thirty, along with fuel, limited electricity and generation capacity, communications gear, regular and emergency food stuffs, and tough, warm clothing and footwear. In fact, we will have pretty much everything we have now, with the caveat that it may be damaged. But damaged is not missing entirely, as it would be if we abandoned it for high ground. A run for the hills precludes much more than a backpack, if that.
Even if the hull is breached, a dinghy or liferaft to get ashore with plus the ditch bag still probably provides most boaters with a more complete emergency kit than most lubbers will have in their homes. If you’re equipped to deal with sinking off-shore and surviving in a life-raft or on a desert island, you are certainly equipped for sinking right in the marina and living in a parking lot until help can arrive.
What I have realized is that I was looking in the wrong places for answers about preparing for disasters as a liveaboard or cruiser. For one thing, there just aren’t enough of us to make it worth the while of any official or agency to look specifically into the matters that most affect us. But more importantly, this is a lifestyle that requires self-reliance. There is a great community of boaters, most of who will go to great lengths to help one another, but at the end of the day you have to be able to count on yourself, your boat, and your crew in tight spots. If you don’t have the resources or cannot make the decisions yourself when disaster strikes, there is little chance that anyone else can do so for you. That is a lot of responsibility, but it goes hand in hand with the freedom that comes with the lifestyle.
When it comes to earthquakes and tsunamis, then, I need wake up and check my own lifelines, just like the rest of the time. Hunkering down or running for high ground isn’t a decision I can expect anyone else to make for me; I can debate it with others, look for every bit of relevant information I can find, and put some consideration into the options and consequences, but if the moment comes, it’s just as surely my sole decision to make as if I were facing a storm at sea. Unorthodox or not, I’ll have to come to terms with rolling my own dice and taking my own chances if this winter brings the third in the set of Pacific Rim mega-quakes.
I don’t mean seasick, although boats are obviously popular sites for that malady as well. No, I just mean plain-old, stuffed-up, head-achey, nose-drippy sick. Which I have been, for the past week.
When we were in high school, some friends of mine dubbed this sort of illness “The Mongolian Death Flu.” It’s the one where you start to sound like Boris Karloff in “Frankenstein” and fluids begin to emerge from every bodily orifice in prodigious quantities that no earthly box of Kleenex can hope to keep up with. This sort of cold laughs off common medications, reducing NyQuil to a quivering, half-hearted fraction of an hour of relief so shallow that it seems like a hallucination. As you lay prone on the settee waiting for death to take you, hallucinations may be your best form of relief, in fact.
I usually get this once every couple of years but this is the first time it has struck while I have been living aboard. As miserable as it always is, being on the boat has magnified the suffering immensely.
For starters, it’s just not possible to go lay someplace and pass out until you either recover or pass away. As long as there is more than one person aboard, the ineluctable Laws of The Sea dictate that wherever you are, is someplace that eventually they will need to be. So rather than rest in peace, I am forced to slump about the cabin, muttering ungraciously, as my wife finds necessities located in lockers beneath or behind my current berth.
All that hidden storage works against me in other ways, too. Should I need rapid access to medications, toilet paper, or more Kleenex, I am flat out of luck… it’s all stowed with varying degrees of inaccessibility, each little puzzle exacerbated by my diminished mental capacity and badly reduced dexterity.
Dexterity is also in play when it comes to something so simple as moving about the cabin. Balance is a great necessity for graceful movement in an always-moving structure with unpredictable and curving decks, and sinuses clogged to overflowing with green slime badly inhibit proper functioning in the inner ear. As if that weren’t bad enough, all the cold medications add their own flavors of loopy, causing me to crash about wildly during any ambulation requiring more than three steps.
If this were all taking place on one level, that would be one thing, but there are also ladders to be negotiated, lifelines to be crossed, and berths to climb into. I like to think I am pretty flexible for my age, but with every muscle aching and my head pounding, it is now utter agony to clamber out the companionway without first removing (and then replacing; it’s cold out now!) every single hatch board. After doing that, I have to rest in the cockpit (in the cold) for a good five minutes to recover before I dare to attempt to step over the lifelines and onto the dock. And god forbid it’s been raining and made things slick along the way!
Oh, being on the boat like this is not entirely without its advantages. I’m always close to the head, for example, and should I succumb to the attraction of an early exit, I can always throw myself overboard into the sweet, compelling throes of hypothermia. So far, though, the thought of having to negotiate the companionway ladder again to get out there has been keeping me alive.
If last month’s tsunami wave was less than threatening to boaters in our particular corner of the Pacific Northwest, don’t get too complacent just yet: a subtler, more ominous wave is still approaching. The enduring image of the disaster in Japan is of a massive wall of water churning implacably inland, sweeping everything loose and man-made before it like a ravening monster chasing fleeing inhabitants up the littoral plain. Less shown in the media was the slower retreat of those waters, moving more slowly back toward colder depths… and taking with them much of the rubble they had created.
Aerial view of 2011 Japanese tsunami debris
That massive, unprecedented debris field, driven by ocean currents slower but every bit as implacable as the tsunami wave itself, is now headed inexorably our way. Still fighting to control other after effects, searching for dead, and working to distribute aid to the injured and displaced, Japan has neither the time nor the resources to attempt any cleanup, if such a thing were even possible on such a scale. Spreading out as it comes, the detritus of disaster is forecast to reach our shores between one and three years from now, with lighter, smaller objects arriving first and larger, semi-submerged debris coming later.
While the density won’t be anything like it currently is off the coast of Japan, you have to imagine that a pile of junk that is causing concern for nuclear aircraft carriers and massive freighters is going to pose some increased risk to the recreational boater. Something that is going to put a dent in a freighter prop traveling at speed is going to do a lot worse to the hull, keel, and other hanging parts on the average cruiser.
Enough study has been done on ocean currents and the so-called Pacific Gyre of late to attach a fair degree of confidence to the prediction on the timing of the arrival. Even without all the science, the not uncommon finding of intricately blown Asian glass fishing net floats along our shores is enough to tell you where items lost at sea in the Orient eventually end up. What is less certain is what a debris field of such magnitude and variety will look like once it arrives. There is a lot of research that has gone into what happens with the odd bit of styrofoam that gets tossed into the ocean; none that I am aware of has looked seriously into what happens when a whole intact house goes in the water.
A house adrift
Houses might show up on radar but it seems more likely that by the time it all gets to us, it’s going to be in smaller, and more waterlogged, pieces. In some ways, this is bad news. A semi-submerged dishwasher is harder to spot than a whole roof.
Fortunately, we here in the Pacific Northwest have been well-trained for this coming onslaught by the natural features of our region. If you haven’t had to slalom through a field of massive logs in poor visibility around here, you’ve been staying tied to the dock too much. I don’t know how it is in other parts of the country, but slash and debris are such a regular feature in the waters here that keeping watch out for them often takes precedence over watching out for other vessels; that is to say, we watch out for other vessels while we’re at the helm, but the real concern is crab traps, deadheads, loose nets, and the like.
Still, household items are unusual and may prove more difficult to spot until our eyes are trained. Beyond that, sailing in poor visibility may become much more risky than it ever has been. There have been passages we’ve made at night or in heavy fog where we could count on radar to keep us clear of other vessel traffic, but where we’ve simply had to play the odds when it came to debris… in the inky blackness, there was no spotting logs and we could only hope not to run across any. Those have been reasonable odds in many places at many times in the past here. Starting next year, particularly out along the coast, they may be much worse.
