Day 256, Year 10: Striding (then dragging) into Summer
Date: Tuesday, June 23, 2015
Weather: Partly Sunny Day, Really Stormy Evening
Location: Quissett Harbor, Falmouth, MA
Those of you further south are in mid-summer, but here in the North Country summer is just arriving. Today I had a PT appointment at the hospital and the bike path is close-by. So I dropped Mark and Ollie off for a bike path adventure while I did went for my physical therapy appointment. Ollie was on his strider (like a bike with no pedals) and gave Mark a run for his money for about a mile and half. My appointment was for 30 minutes, and by the time I caught up with them they were sitting on a rock having lunch. So slowly we are striding into summer.
As I write this log we are having quite a thunder and lightning show outside. I just checked Weather Underground and saw that severe thunderstorms are triggering tornado warnings though the Northeast. “The threat of severe thunderstorms and tornadoes will continue well into the evening, along with large hail, strong winds, and heavy rain.”
Well, I had literally just finished writing the above when all hell broke loose. Sometime between 9:15 and 9:30 the wind started howling. Mark turned on the instruments and we watched the wind go from 20 to 25 to 30 to 35 to 40 to 45 to 50 to 55 to 70 and then the instruments started reading all zeros. So we have no idea how windy it really was. Mark saw that we were at an odd angle to the boat that is closest to us and by the time he got the engine started we had drug our mooring into a shallow part of the harbor. I totally lost it when it started sounding like a freight train was roaring through the boat and things started flying. It was obvious that we were dragging through rocks, not soft sand, but finally the wind slowed down enough to give us a chance to think. What to do? The depth gauge was reading just under 5 feet and we draw over 6 feet. Obviously we were aground but we had no idea if there was serious damage. I wanted to call TowBoat US and expected that the number was posted at the nav station, but no such luck. I went through Mark’s wallet, and there was no TowBoat US card. By this time I was screaming at him, and at the world, and decided to call Jed and ask him to call for me. I was just not acting like a rationale adult. Thankfully Jed answered the phone and said he would call TowBoat US for me. He then called back to tell me that he reached them and that they would be on their way soon and would call us with an ETA. They also told him they would call the Coast Guard due to the fact that we were obviously in rocks. The fear is that we would start taking on water. Mark had me check the bilge and I could see no water coming in, so I turned on the VHF radio and called the Coast Guard to let them know that TowBoat US was coming and that we weren’t sinking. They wanted to know the color of the boat. Then they wanted to know if the boat was federally documented. Yes. But they wanted to know the documentation number. That is in the folder with all of our important boat information, but I had to ask them to wait until I could find it. They wanted to know if all persons on board were wearing life jackets. I could honestly answer yes to this as Mark had made sure we put on life jackets when we started dragging. I had adjusted mine to let Sam wear it a week or so ago and couldn’t get it buckled or even think how to loosen it. Add to this the fact that I could barely hear the Coast Guard due to horrible static on the radio. They had good copy on me, but I had to ask them to repeat everything a couple of times and then piece words together to guess at what they were saying. The first TowBoat US boat arrived within 45 minutes and the Coast Guard was right behind them. It was obvious that we were in a very tenuous position, so a second TowBoat US boat was called in. While we waited, the first boat helped us get our dinghy turned right-side up. Somewhere along the line, it had flipped over, motor and all. Rick and Weatherly Dorris own the Quissett Boatyard and somehow Rick found out we were in trouble and he arrived in his tender as well. Rick was in a very serious, life-threatening car accident last week and just got out of the hospital. He is definitely not supposed to be out on the water, but if he heard the Coast Guard “pon pon” calls re Windbird aground in Quissett Harbor, it probably scared him as much as it did me. By 11:15 the two tow boats were ready to try and drag us into deeper water. We dropped our mooring line and one boat pulled us and the other stayed tied to our starboard side to keep us stabilized as the other pulled. We scraped and bumped over rocks, but we made it back into deeper water and were pulled to another mooring. The Coast Guard boat then approached us to check to make sure were not taking on water. We are so appreciative of the fast responses by both the Coast Guard and TowBoat US. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Tomorrow we will have to start assessing the damages, but for tonight we are just thankful that we are afloat. Never expected this kind of drama in Quissett Harbor, but as always, we are so thankful that Windbird is so tough. As the last TowBoat US boat was leaving he stopped to say that we should be grateful that our boat is well built. We couldn’t agree more.
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| 150623 Day 256 Cape Cod, USA–Striding, Then Dragging, Into Summer |
