My Losing Battle with the Hood Canal Bridge

by

Dr. Robert E. Plucker 

         

            Not long before Margaret and I got married, I traded my old not-so-wonderful sailboat (plus a bunch of borrowed money) for a wonderful new sailboat, a brand-new Newport 30 with a special order dark blue hull finish. Perhaps all new owners think their boats are the prettiest in the harbor; I was convinced of it. This was the terrific boat that I planned to live aboard as a virtual hermit for the rest of my life, until the charming Margaret changed my mind, at least about the hermit part.

            In late l976 when I was trying to get a loan to buy the boat, banks had been quite competitive, and the advice current at the time, was to go to several lending institutions and shop for the best interest rate. I found that I got as good a deal as anyplace from the bank where I had my checking account. I considered it to be "my" bank.

            "What's going to be on this boat?" asked the loan officer.

            "What do you mean?" I said, "There has to be a deck, a tiller, a mast, the usual stuff for a sailboat."

            "But what special goodies?"

            "Well, not so much, hot pressure water for a shower, a toilet, kerosene stove, cabin heater, you know."

            "How about sails? What kind of sails will there be?"
                               (Since when have bank loan officers been interested in sails?)

            "Main, working jib, and a l50 percent genny, each of these with one reef point."

            "Don't you want a spinnaker?" asked the banker.

            "No spinnaker, they're much too expensive, and meant only for racing. I don't intend to get into racing."

            Says the banker, "You'll regret not having one, and you can pay for it by adding the cost to the mortgage on the boat. If you had to finance it separately, you'd never get around to it, and it would be much harder to get a loan for a single sail."

            Says I, "I don't need it, I'll be just fine with what I have."

            Banker: "If you wait, later on your wife won't let you get a spinnaker."

            Me: "But I'm not married."

            Banker: "You'll get married, and then your wife won't let you have it."



A spinnaker sail

            What kind of banker is that, who talks you into frivolities that you don't want or need? This bank officer, it turned out, did not own his own boat, but had done a good bit of crewing aboard a friend's boat in Seattle, another banker who had a 40-footer. So obviously, I needed a spinnaker, and this loan officer was not going to let me leave the bank without it being included in the mortgage loan. I never did get into a formal race with that boat, but I suppose that all sailors attempt to get as much speed out of their boats as they can. Margaret and I found that a spinnaker is a great sail to have for just going from place to place when the wind is right, and going fast is more fun than going slow.

            There are three floating bridges that I know of that cross parts of the water in the Puget Sound region. They have at least one high-rise section built up off the water, usually close to shore, but in deep enough water so that good-sized ships can pass underneath it. The floating part of the bridge would stop all shipping if there were no high section built in. Margaret and I had an encounter with the floating bridge across Hood Canal, a finger off Admiralty Inlet which is a part of the Puget Sound area. We had done some sailing in this place and were acquainted with the wind patterns, tidal currents, and areas of submerged rocks and shallow water. I had owned the previous sailboat for a year and a half, and thought I knew what I was doing. Margaret had had some experience sailing, and knew a good bit about boats in general.

            So the first summer we were married, we took off from Everett Marina on a sail south down the Hood Canal and all went pretty much according to plan. When we got to the floating bridge across the Canal we had a light following wind, and were able to sail under the high part of the bridge which is next to the eastern shore. No difficulties at all, the wind just pushed us through. We had fun looking up at the top of the mast thinking that it surely looks as if the mast is too tall and would catch on the roadbed far above. But this is just an illusion, and the charts tell you how much clearance there is. We had perhaps fifteen feet more space than we needed.

            After spending a day or so at the far southern end of the Canal, we headed north for home in Everett. We were making rather leisurely progress, as the wind was coming at us, and we had to beat our way. When we got to the bridge the port tack that we were on led us straight to the bridge high-rise. The current was against us at maybe two knots. But we were making some progress in spite of the wind and the current and I thought with my skill as a sailor, and the boat's very good upwind sailing characteristics, I could sail right under the bridge as before. The course we were on put us nicely through the "gate" of the bridge, but it meant an immediate change to the opposite (starboard) tack once past the bridge, or go aground on the east shore of the Canal.

            Sure enough, we got under the bridge, through the "gate," came about smartly to the starboard tack and two things happened. The wind died, and the current took over. With no wind we could not charge off in this new direction, and I was horrified when I saw that the current would bring us broadside to the floating part of the bridge and pin us there. There were murderous looking bolts sticking out from the side of the road-bed, six to eight inches long, just waiting to punch holes in the side of my beautiful special-order dark blue hull right where we would surely hit. What to do? Why, turn on the engine, of course. In my panic, I twisted the key much too strongly and broke it off in the lock. So we were doomed. We did have presence of mind enough to use the last few seconds of freedom to stuff life jackets, cushions, whatever we could find including the dinghy between the dreaded bolt-heads and the dark blue hull.

            This saved us from having the holes punched in the port side of the hull, and we were OK temporarily. If I had been less panicky, I suppose we could have stayed put until the tide reversed the current and we could float free, but no. I had it in my inexperienced head that it was imperative to get away from the bridge right now! I don't remember taking the sails down, but I suppose we did. I had never hot-wired an engine before, but after some tinkering, I got the little Yanmar 12-horse-power engine fired up, and tried to plan how to get away from the bridge without getting terrible scars all the way along the port side, as the current kept pushing us toward the bridge deck and its awful bolts.

            We settled on a plan of getting the dinghy placed so that it was between the bridge and the boat close to the stern so the boat would be able to back partly away from the bridge deck instead of parallel to it. I was so inexperienced that I didn't know that almost all boats are near-impossible to back where you want them to go. I didn't know that a single screw boat most often backs to port, which would have been right into the bridge instead of away. By an incredible stroke of luck, it turned out that the Yanmar was set to use a left-handed propeller, and so would back to the starboard. Of course I didn't know that either at the time. So at full power, Echappee would have a fairly strong pull to the starboard, away from the bridge deck, as well as backward. Pure luck!

            So that part, no thanks to me, went fairly well and we got away from the bridge with only two minor scrapes in the gel-coat. But here we were, going backward in a circle, gaining speed all the time, Margaret nervous as she could be, at the tiller. Now moving astern in a circle with a tiller can be a terrible problem as the water pressure on one side of the rudder becomes so great that it is well-nigh impossible to straighten it out. I was hollering at Margaret to slow down, SLOW DOWN, but her nerves and reflexes seemed to be at a standstill. The boat kept backing in a circle until it was headed stern first directly at the so-solid floating part of the bridge where we had been pinned. It dawned on me that at that speed, Margaret would be unable to straighten out the boat or turn it in a different direction. I dashed frantically from the bow where I had been pushing away from the bolts, across the foredeck and into the cockpit, grabbed the shifter, shoved it to "ahead", the Yanmar still at full power. Echappee must have gotten to within six inches of crashing stern first into the same place where we had been pinned, then took off forward away from the bridge. If we had hit it at full throttle, more than five knots, we would surely have crushed the stern and probably sunk in maybe ten fathoms of water.

            Moral of the story, do not sail upwind under a bridge with the current against you.

Photos by Jean E. Straatmeyer