Or
(Why My Blood Pressure is so High These Days)
by
John Plucker
[Son of Dr. Robert E. Plucker)
First of all, I would like to point out the little-known fact that I never supported an afternoon departure. For entirely selfish reasons, I gently tried to persuade my father that it would be much better to head South at 3:00 on the following morning. It is important to keep this fact firmly in mind for the rest of this narrative, regardless of any other dumb things I may have done in the next 24 hours.
The weather was really quite balmy as we steamed south
that day. I was laid out in the cockpit
on a heap of pillows, and was well on my way to an afternoon siesta. I remember thinking that it was a shame that
every time I went on extended sailing trips with my family I always ended up
sleeping most of the time. This all
becomes very ironic in retrospect, of course.
The weather went downhill fast as we rounded Seduction
Point. The sun went down and the waves
came up in a matter of minutes. Using a
tiny triangle of the jib, we screamed across the main channel, where we hoped
to find shelter in the lee of Sullivan Island.
There turned out to be no lee, and we turned due south, now going head
to head with the seas. Our progress
slowed to a crawl, causing Dad and me to seriously discuss the possibility of
turning back for Haines. We decided to
continue until we reached a safe anchorage or ran down to a half tank of fuel,
whichever came first.
I think we intimidated the weather with that little
conversation, because both the wind and waves slacked off considerably at this
point. So spirits were high among both
officers and crew as we headed for our anchorage at the South end of Sullivan
Island. In our defense, the Rock which
we were cruising towards in our sweet ignorance was not on our chart, nor had anyone ever stopped to mention any
navigational hazards as they extolled the virtues of this little cove.
(This story would be so much easier to
write if I didn’t have to stop every paragraph or so to explain why we were the
victims of many complex factors other than our own stupidity)
Both Dad and I saw the depth sounder jump up to a depth
of only 15 feet. But in the time-honored
tradition of never-cry-wolf, neither Dad nor I took the instrument
seriously. After all, this piece of junk
had been feeding my family a line of crap for years, scaring us half to death
with patches of warmer water and stray halibut.
This particular time, Dad responded by easing up on the throttle (which
is nothing like what he would have done if he had truly believed what the depth
sounder what reading). I am ashamed to
say that at that moment, I walked to the railing, peered into the water, and
said in a predictably flippant way, “I don’t see any rocks.”
Approximately five seconds later, we struck the Rock. The entire boat lurched as six and a half
tons of sailboat slammed up against an utterly stationary object. Anyone who has ever grounded an expensive yacht
knows how that single moment of impact turns your blood to ice for one eternal
moment. For everyone who has been so
fortunate as to not wreck an expensive yacht, I can only say, try to image the
way the driver of a car must feel when he senses his wheels begin to slip on
ice as he rounds a corner at 70 miles an hour.
IT’S A BAD FEELING, I TELL YOU!!!
So Dad and I spent the next hour or so in a more or less
totally ineffectual effort to free Greta from the Rock. As it turned out, all of our scurrying around
was only paddling us farther and farther up that creek which we all know so
very well. There was no way in hell that
we could have brought Greta out on the far side of the Rock; arse-end first was
our only option. We did not know this,
so ended up doing everything in our limited power to work our keel farther up
on the Rock. At the end of the first
hour, it had been established beyond the shadow of a doubt that the tide was
ebbing, and we had a long wait ahead of us.
As a sign that we were resigned to our fate, Dad and I dropped the
sails. Our angle of heel remained the same,
and morale (which I had previously estimated as being at rock bottom)
dropped. I turned off the depth sounder
then, since there wasn’t really any question of how deep the water under our
boat was at that point.
Dad got on the VHS, calling for the Haines
Harbormaster. He couldn’t raise the guy
for a while, but as soon as our predicament had been voiced aloud on the radio,
the phone started ringing off the hook.
Boats up and down the Canal offered aid, advice, and general moral
support to us. Which was nice. Eventually Matt Davis, my math
teacher/captain/bro, hailed us from his gill-netter, the Windbreaker. It was so good to hear his voice, my blood
almost started to thaw. When he offered
to bring down some Root Beer and chips for the party, I laughed my first
hysteria-free laugh of the entire ordeal.
Dad allowed as to how some company might be nice, and Matt and my sister
Holly were steaming our way two hours later.
While the tide was still ebbing, I jumped out into the
water and shoved some fenders between the cruel rock edge and the hull. I don’t know whether it did a shred of good,
but I felt much better knowing that I had at least tried. Finally, there was nothing productive left to
do. I became aware of this before Dad,
and he walked aimlessly around on the walls until he started making me nervous,
and I ordered him go read a book in the quarter-berth. I had brought my Discman along, and listened
to every single song on the Moulin Rouge Soundtrack. It occurred to me that of all the people
involved in producing that soundtrack, most likely none of them had ever been
in my present situation, and how lucky they were too.
The water continued to ebb from the Rock until we were
lifted completely out of the water, and soon Greta was laid out on her side at
about 50 degrees, her bow pointing slightly upwards. The pair of pants I had worn into the water
earlier that evening were hanging from the door of the head at a ludicrous
angle, and Dad and I watched water stream off the cuff and splatter against the
stove. Now we could finally get a good
look at the cursed Rock that had imprisoned us.
We were run up on the very corner of a gnarly looking reef about the size
of the infield of a baseball diamond. It
was HUGE, covered with pointy outcroppings, and seemed thoroughly malevolent.
So we waited, and watched, and worried, and waited some
more. Matt and Holly arrived on the
scene around midnight, just after it had finally gotten dark. Everyone except Dad was terribly disappointed
that there wasn’t enough light for Matt to snap off a roll or two of
embarrassing pictures. My feeling was,
seeing is believing, and I would never get the appropriate amount of sympathy
without visual proof of what dire straits we were in. But no pictures were taken that night, and as
a result, I am still waiting for sympathy from my hard-boiled friends.
 |
| Sailboats look desolate when not upright in the water.
|
I didn’t sleep much that night, which came as no surprise
to me. As Greta had lifted out of the
buoyancy of the water, and more and more weight came to rest on the Rock, both
Dad and I fully expected the hull to crack under the strain. Either the Rock would punch through the side
of the hull (in which case we would
sink), or the keel would snap off (in
which case we would first capsize and then sink). As I lay in the V-berth, I had been seized by
a totally irrational fear that if I moved any part of my body farther towards
the bow, the entire sailboat would lean that way like a teeter-totter, and some
vital structure would finally give, and Dad and I would find ourselves treading
water, hanging on to the remains of our beloved boat. So I scrunched myself into as tight a ball as
possible, and spent the rest of the night with my knees pressed firmly into my
neck. It is entirely possible that I
drifted off for a few minutes every now and then, but for the most part, I
remained wide awake, patiently waiting for the shit to hit the fan.
(Incidentally, that little expletive was
regularly employed on board Greta that day.
I’m quite sure that both Dad and I heard the other use the “S” word more
in the space of those twelve hours than in all the previous years of our entire
lives combined.)
Surprisingly enough, the proverbial “S” never hit the
“F”, and morning found Dad, me, and Greta relatively intact. Matt and Holly were circling our Rock by 4:00
that morning, so Dad and I rolled off our respective walls and went topside to
say hello. High tide was scheduled for
5:32AM, and was only supposed to be four inches higher than the one during
which Dad and I had run aground. Dad was
fairly pessimistic about our chances for rescue (although he didn’t share the
full bleakness of his outlook with me until later).
I took a realistic stance, and figured that there wasn’t
much chance that the Windbreaker couldn’t drag us off. In my mind, the only question was how much
damage Greta would sustain as she was dragged bodily off those wicked
rocks. Even though Dad and I had very
different attitudes towards the whole rescue operation, we were both champing
at the bit to get things rolling.
Matt and Holly had other ideas, it seemed. They were frolicking about, exulting in their
rock-less boat. Being intellectuals (not
sailors), they naturally assumed that they should wait until exactly 5:32AM to
pull us off. Dad and I, who were a little
more in touch with how thoroughly bad our situation really was, wanted to get a
towing line passed to the Windbreaker as soon as possible. If Greta didn’t come off the Rock on this
morning’s tide, we would be stuck there until the high tide three days later. Both Dad and I knew that neither Greta nor we
could survive another 72 hours on the Rock.
The best we could hope for at that point would be some compensation from
the insurance company.
Eventually I was able to throw the tow line from Greta to
Holly on the Windbreaker. The first time
Matt put some serious tension on the line, Greta rolled hard left, and I could
see the pain in Holly’s eyes as she shouted at Matt to stop pulling. Suddenly I realized how tough the whole
experience had made me. Twelve hours
ago, I would have cringed at least as much as my sister, but at this point, I
was willing to do whatever it took to rip this fat cow off the @#*%&^ Rock!
Dad and I shouted down Holly’s pleas for mercy and Matt
gunned the engine again. Greta was
lurching all over, pivoting in place, leaning way over, and flopping on the
keel from side to side, but we weren’t making any discernable progress against
the Rock. Finally, on what must have
been Matt’s eighth or ninth run, we broke free, and slid down into the
water. Horizontal had never felt so
beautiful before. There was a current
pushing us towards the Rock, so Matt kept on the throttle, dragging us a few
hundred yards out of harm’s way. We were
all so excited to be mobile again that I think Matt would have hauled us
backwards all the way to Haines if Dad had let him.
I untied the towing line, and Dad tried out Greta’s
engine. The silver lining of this
particular cloud seemed to be that our prop and rudder had been spared by the Rock. Almost all of the stress had been taken by
our keel, and I fully expected it to sink like a chunk of lead at any
moment. But it didn’t, and we made it
back to Haines under our own power.
Then a bunch more stuff happened, but it’s all pretty
anti-climactic, so this is the end.
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