Women on the Sailboat

By Dr. Robert E. Plucker

     In 1970 I had my first chance to actually sail on a sailboat, under sail.  My friend in the History Department had a brother-in law who had just acquired a Columbia 22-footer, and I was invited to sail with them several times.  We three men enjoyed ourselves thoroughly.  In those days, before I had read anything about great women sailors, I assumed that women were not much interested in sailing, would be awkward, in the way, and would inhibit the behavior of the men aboard.  We would, at least back in 1970, probably have to watch our language. 

     I was so spooked by the thought of women aboard that I actually jumped ship two-thirds of the way through a three-day trip when it was decided that the wife/sister of the other two was to come aboard for the last day.  My excuse was that four people on a twenty-two foot boat would be more than enough.  But now I have come to my senses and have welcomed a number of women aboard in the intervening thirty-five years.  One disappointment of course, was that sailing on Puget Sound and to the north hardly allows for gorgeous young ladies in bikinis sunning themselves on the foredeck.

     Roxanne was one of three students of mine that I took out sailing one Saturday afternoon.  The boat that I had was a shallow draft vessel built to easily take grounding in mud or sand.  That was a good thing, as our moorage was a distance up the Snohomish River, reachable only at higher tides.  Inexperienced as I was, I was too late to get back before the water got too shallow and the boat came gently to a halt in the mud of the river-bottom.  There was nothing to do but wait for the tide to run out the rest of the way, and then back in, some six or seven hours later.  I didn't worry, nor did the other two fellows aboard, but Roxanne did.  There are few things as dependable as the tide, but Roxanne wasn't so sure.  She told me later, "I prayed and prayed as hard as I could for God to bring back the high tide so we could float free."

     OK, but I doubt that God needed the reminder.

     After the shallow-draft boat, and following a divorce from my first wife, I bought a wonderful new boat, a Newport 30.  I meant to live aboard the boat, sail every time I felt like it, and never look seriously at another woman.  Ha!  Margaret changed my notion of being a hermit very soon by accepting my invitations to go out sailing on Saturday afternoons.  One hot afternoon we had completely run out of wind at Elger Bay, which is always a kind of dead spot on the west shore of Camano Island.  We drifted along for some time, and my thoughts were racing.  My divorce had become final.  Margaret was so pretty and charming.  There was no wind.  Not much to occupy my mind except Margaret.  What to do?  Well, why not ask her to be my wife?  So she said yes, and thus began the second part of my life.

     Communication can be a problem.  This possibly is not true with all women, but my former wife, and now Margaret, many times does not make messages clear.  For example, you are sailing along at about six knots and suddenly you see waves breaking over what is probably a rock that you might not have noticed on the chart.  Wife #1 would yell "yerp!" and then probably "yerp yerp!”  Wife #2 would yell "Oh!" and "Oh!" and so on, getting louder with each "Oh".  Either yell is an alarm I suppose, but the skipper, me, would much rather have heard something more specific.  "Rock, rock!" would do the job nicely.

     After sixteen years of good sailing with "Echappee," the Newport 30, we decided to try living aboard the boat year 'round.  We sold our Camano Island house, and with the trade-in of the old boat, we bought "Greta," an Ericson 34.  This led to some fairly serious sailing, including three trips up the Inside Passage to Southeast Alaska, the result of which was the decision to make Haines, Alaska our home.




Bob, John and girl friend.

     Since living aboard, first in Washington and now in Alaska, Margaret and I don't have as many guests for sailing as we used to.  Years ago we had some interesting ones, like the woman who seemed to spend much of the trip going back and forth to the head (bathroom).  We couldn't figure out why she had to "go" so often.  The truth was revealed eventually, that she was an alcoholic and had her bottle of whatever she was drinking stashed away somewhere and only went to the head to drink.  It seemed like she needed a booster every half hour or so.  Margaret and I were too innocent and ignorant to recognize the signs that she was alcoholic.  We heard later that her husband (who was an Internal Revenue agent, and also rather secretive) got her straightened out, I suppose by going to AA.

     In the late 70s, there were a number of Arab students who came to study at my school, Skagit Valley Community College.  We invited one young man and his wife, plus another Arab friend of theirs to go sailing.  These people, if I remember correctly, were from Kuwait.  The wind was just right for good sailing that day, but it was chilly, as usual in Port Gardner Bay.  Our guests must have had a Caribbean notion of sailing, as they were definitely not dressed for warmth.  The young Arab lady was a beauty, and her "yachting" clothes made her a stand-out.  She had to stay below for the entire time, as it was too cold on deck.  Her husband could have kept her company, but he was so sea-sick that he spent almost all the time lying down with his head in her lap, not talking.  The other fellow survived the trip from Everett to Edmonds and back in better shape, but you could easily tell he was glad when he could get ashore again.  We could have turned around and shortened the trip a good deal, but we were hoping things would get better, and we had two other friends aboard and did not want to disappoint them.  These last two were having the time of their lives.

     One good friend of Margaret's refused our invitations to go sailing several times.  Her last refusal carried the excuse that she thought her children were going to be sick on the planned-for day.

     Women, but by no means only women, need strong warnings about the excessive use of toilet paper aboard a boat.  Marine toilets tend to jam rather easily when wads of paper are used.  This too often requires the exalted skipper/owner of the vessel to change hats to that of the lowly plumber of the vessel.

     After a lot of red tape and passing of Coast Guard exams, I received my Coast Guard license to take passengers for hire.  Two summers were spent taking as many customers as I could attract, on two or three hour day- sails.  It was fun, and I met some wonderful people at that time.  The Newport 30 was tied to a floating buoy in Utsalady Bay, and the passengers had to be ferried out to the boat in a dinghy.  I was dumbfounded one day when my people came to the beach, got out of their car and proceeded to help a wheel-chair bound woman out to the waiting dinghy.  I must have looked dismayed, but before I could say anything about the impossibility of getting this woman out of the dinghy and up into the cockpit of "Echappee," she told me rather forcefully not to worry about her transfer from the tiny dinghy to the 30-foot boat.

     The only good thing was that the dinghy was one of the super-stable double-hulled Livingston boats that are virtually impossible to upset.  This lady got her companion to boost her just far enough so she could reach the stern rail of "Echappee."  She grabbed it and somehow pulled herself up and over in a second or so.  Just like that, she was seated like a queen on the starboard cockpit seat.  This was one strong, gutsy woman!  Good trip!

     Daughter Holly has given me wonderful memories of those earlier sailing years.  Her territory was the forward V-berth where she held court over her thirty or forty stuffed animals.  Son John was still several years in the future.  Coming back from a week of sailing, some adult asked her if she had ever been sea-sick.  "Yes" was the answer.  Where was she at the time she was sea-sick?  "At Grandma's house."

Holly, Bob and Margaret with Holly's three boys.

     Holly also had an extensive entourage of imaginary employees to run her imaginary restaurant.  I was to be the customer most of the time and always pretended to be dreadfully finicky.  I would send back the imaginary food on all sorts of pretexts and once got her and Margaret to laughing because I sent the water back to the kitchen.  Not wet enough.

     One fine summer day Marilyn and Julia were out in Skagit Bay with Margaret and me.  They had been out with us before and had learned a bit about sail trim and how to make the boat go in different directions.  So Margaret, Julia and Marilyn were to be skippers and crew, but no one was designated to be skipper of final resort.  I stayed below and played galley slave, washing dishes after a fairly elaborate lunch.

     Probably they could have figured things out separately, but they were all too polite, constantly deferring to one another.

     "Do you think we should tighten this rope?"

     "Steering with that long stick is certainly confusing; you have to move it to the left to turn right."

     "I can't seem to fix this sail so it won't flap like that."

     "Maybe we need to come about."

     "What does 'come about' mean?"

     It was a nice day, everyone had fun including the lone male aboard – me.  But I would not want to sail in a strong wind with the skippering done by this committee.  Even if they all wore bikinis.

     And lastly, my dear wife Margaret who took charge crossing the Strait of Georgia in heavy seas.  I had fallen part way down the companionway into the cabin, crashing into the restraining bar that guards the cooking stove.  She was steering.  I had gone below to check our position on the chart and was thrown onto the steel bar by a much steeper than usual wave.  So I had a broken rib and was in great pain, not being able to speak from all the groaning.

     Margaret was horribly frightened over all this, but did not dare leave her job at the tiller.  Our son John was on board, asleep, but at eight years of age, could not be expected to handle the wheel in seas like these.  But Margaret screamed at him to wake him up to find out what was wrong with me, as I had disappeared from her line of sight.  All he could tell her was that I was on the floor and moaning.  Being assured that I was alive helped her some, and she decided to head for Porlier Pass to get to the usually calm waters in the Canadian Gulf Islands.  After a few minutes I was able to pull myself together enough to get back to the cockpit where I was not of much use but to lend moral support.

     Porlier Pass was close, but we had never before been through this narrow rock-strewn pass with its strong currents.  I might have tried to continue on to Active Pass which was much safer and familiar to us, but much further away.  But Margaret was now the skipper and she made the decisions.  So under power and the mainsail, we headed for this twisty, narrow channel, strong current against us, but with some wind behind us. 

     As we entered the narrow part of the channel, Margaret was getting all the speed out of the twenty-eight horsepower Volvo that she could, and the following wind was some help, but there were times when it seemed that Greta was at a standstill, and maybe even going backward with the current.  Frankly, I had given up on ever making it through the pass and was worrying about what would happen if we crashed backward into a rock.  But Margaret's courage and determination carried the day, perhaps aided by a puff of wind at just the right time.

     We finally got free of the strong current and once through the pass, the water was sheltered and calm.  Later, after the crisis was over, we found that we had gone through the pass at maximum current, about eight knots.  Greta's top speed is seven knots.  Margaret's courage is the only way I can account for the extra knot and a quarter that we needed to overcome the contrary current.

Photos by Matt Davis and Jean E. Straatmeyer

THE RESCUE

By Dr. Robert E. Plucker

Photo by Jean E. Straatmeyer

            Our boat, "Echappee II" had had a spell of engine overheating near Deception Pass, and had been towed in to Anacortes for repair. After it was fixed, I was able to talk my good friend Floyd into going along with me to sail back to our moorage in Utsalady Bay on the north end of Camano Island. It's not all that easy to find a sailing companion in January, but Floyd was my man. Not much actual sailing was done as there was little wind, we had maybe ten miles to go, and we were glad that the little 12 horse Yanmar perked along as if it had never been sick.

            From Anacortes Skyline Marina, we headed back through Deception Pass, south through the Skagit Flats, across Dugwalla Bay and on to Strawberry Point. There was snow in the air by the time we got to Dugwalla Bay. By the time we got to Strawberry Point it was snowing hard enough to form floating slush in the water. I had never seen it snow that hard before. After Strawberry Point the snow pretty much disappeared and we could see across to Utsalady Bay, our destination. We had no trouble finding our mooring buoy among the dozen or so that were there, so we tied up, busied ourselves with straightening up below, left our life jackets aboard for the next sail, and Floyd climbed over the side to get into the tippy (Greta III) dinghy to row to shore. I took a last look around and followed him into the dinghy.

            At exactly the worst possible moment, Floyd rose partly up to change his position in the boat, and at the same worst possible moment my foot came down into the dinghy getting both of us off balance. Of course we were both dumped into the 40 degree water. This is the same water that we had always heard could kill you in twenty minutes or less from hypothermia. This was not a good thing, as the mooring buoy was probably more than 100 yards from shore, and with heavy January clothing on, our chances of getting to shore alive were not good. Utsalady Beach is not in a well-inhabited area, and the chances of anyone seeing us struggling in the water were poor. The one good thing was that there is a boat-launching ramp there, and fairly often people come down to launch boats to go fishing. But of course you can't rely on somebody coming at exactly the right time to save your life from the cold, cold water. Floyd and I did the only thing we could do; hang on for dear life to the dinghy which was upside down. It had floatation chambers; Floyd and I assuredly did not.

            The obvious thing to do would have been to get back aboard Echappee, right the dinghy, bail it out, and row to shore. Echappee had no permanent swim ladder, so we had nothing to grab to pull ourselves back aboard. Somehow we seemed to be unable to reach the mooring line to pull ourselves up over the bow, and the current was bringing us always further away from the boat, but not closer to shore. What to do? We tried to right the dinghy and actually succeeded momentarily, but had neither the equipment nor the sense to try to bail out the water before attempting to climb in. I had actually gotten into the swamped right-side-up dinghy, but there was no stability and down I went for the second time.

            While we were clinging there, Floyd's wife, who had seen us starting to cross from Strawberry Point, figured it was about time for us to land, and so she drove down to the beach, and was mystified by the sight of these two guys struggling in the water, yelling now and then. It didn't dawn on her at first that the two guys were Floyd and me flailing about.

            By this time I was having serious worry about our chances of living long enough to be rescued, but it was about then that a car pulled up, towing a trailer with a boat on it. Floyd's wife, having seen to her horror, just what and who was in the water, ran over to the two guys with the fish boat and, Floyd and I presumed, got them to go out and rescue us. It seemed to take forever for them to get the boat actually in the water and the engine started. All this accomplished, they roared off, not toward us, but away from us!

            I never could figure out why they did this, but they made a wide circle, came back, hoisted us unceremoniously over the side, and dumped us into Floyd's warm car. Floyd and his wife lived only a mile or so from Utsalady Beach, and there were two showers in their house so both Floyd and I could stand under a lot of hot water without having to wait for the other. Finest shower I have ever had.

            Whenever I tell this story, I like to say that Floyd could probably have swum to shore, as he was a powerful swimmer. I could maybe have righted the dinghy again and have luck enough to make it to shore. But Floyd could not bring himself to leave me, and I wouldn't leave him, so both of us would have drowned. And maybe that is just what would have happened if it had not been for the two guys who chose that cold snowy afternoon to try to catch a fish, or pull up a crab pot, or whatever they had on their minds.

photo from: www.gillsailinggear.com

            The two most unforgivable blunders that I committed that day were to have left the life jackets on the boat instead of wearing them into the dinghy. This was unbelievably stupid, as I knew the dinghy was a tippy one, and having come that far in the snow, there was no doubt about the temperature of the water. The second blunder was in not leaving something, a short length of line would have done it, but something, dangling over the side that we could grab to haul ourselves back into Echappee II.

Naming the Boat

by Dr. Robert E. Plucker

            It's a common thing among people who own boats, work boats or pleasure boats, to name them after their wives, girl friends, daughters, or even some combination of both their names. Since our boat is named for my wife, I am one of hundreds, probably thousands whose wives’ names are painted somewhere on the boat. But there is some history behind my selection of a name.

            Let's start way back with my very first boat. My former wife and I were attending a play at the Seattle Center, "The Sea Gull" by Chekhov which is an acclaimed play, but which Barbara and I found to be slow, talky, and tiresome. We walked out at the end of the second act, and I remarked to her that the annual Boat Show was on at the Arena (the last year before moving to the Kingdome). We could walk over and see the boats, especially one I had seen advertised as being very inexpensive and brand new from the Reinell plant at Marysville. Skipping over the details, we wound up coming back the next night to put down an initial payment.

            This was not a very well designed sailboat, but I learned to make it go where I wanted it to go under sail, at least most of the time. This boat was named Echappee, which means "Escape" in French. It is also a term for a specific move in ballet and a specific kind of melodic figure in music. A good name for a music teacher's boat. I think this boat was a good one for me because if I could sail it, I could sail anything. Reinell quit producing it rather soon.

            Echappee II followed some time after Barbara and I separated, and then divorced. I was looking for a boat that would sail better than the Reinell (nearly all of them did) and would be suitable for me to live aboard as a kind of hermit, as I had sworn I was never going to look at another woman. I looked first at the Newport 30 Mark II. It was beautiful, and "spoke to me" as they say. The dealer did not have one on hand to sell, but I could order it and it would be ready by the time boating season started. The other advantage was that I could order a dark blue color for the hull and could have a water heater and a space heater installed for comfortable living.

            Yes, I did look at some other boats, some new, some older boats, but none appealed to me as did the Newport, and the Newport man was willing to take the Reinell in trade. The name Echappee still appealed to me, so the new boat would be named Echappee II. So I took the old Reinell down to Seattle one Saturday afternoon in the fall and settled down to wait for the Newport to be delivered several months later from southern California. I was living alone in a trailer on Camano Island and was feeling lonesome and blue, in part because my wife was not going to come back and in part because I didn't have a boat and I was living less than a block from water. A brilliant idea hit me: I would buy a dinghy and go rowing out in Saratoga Passage. A poor substitute for sailing, but it would have to do for all winter and part of the spring.

  

Thanks to www.sailboatlistings.com

            I bought the dinghy in Mount Vernon on the morning of December 31. The salesman said he would deliver it to Camano Island that very day. In the meantime one of my men students, his sister and a couple of her friends planned to come over in the early evening to take me out to dinner for a New Year's treat. They came a bit early and I was not changed into my going-to-dinner clothes. I went into the little trailer's bedroom to change, and while I was there, the man came with the dinghy, a nice double-hulled extremely stable Livingstone boat, 7 feet. Kent, the male student had gone off with his car to get a forgotten camera, and so that left me in the trailer with three attractive young college women. What must that man have thought as he saw me coming out of the bedroom, buckling my belt, looking a bit unfinished! How does this guy handle all these women at the same time?

            As it happened, in the next couple of days, when my telephone was finally installed, I became aware of a young lady who had been singing in my church choir for a time. She was the one who chirped right up with her telephone number when I was complaining about not knowing anyone in the 387 calling area. "You know me!" she said, brightly.

            My resolve to never look at another woman seriously broke down about as fast as the walls of Jericho in the Bible story, and I began to wonder if there really was a married life after my previous married life. When it came to naming the dinghy, I puzzled over it and decided that it was premature to name it "Margaret", because I was not sure of my feelings toward her, or hers toward me. It would be dangerous to name it for an ex-girlfriend. But I wanted to honor Margaret in some way, and although I was unwilling to commit to the full name at that time, I thought with my German roots, I could call it Gretchen, or Gretel like the famous Australian racing boat, or maybe Greta. Yes, that was it. I liked the name Greta, and although I would know it was named for Margaret, probably no one else would know.

            So I rowed it around every now and then in the mornings and late afternoons, and enjoyed it. I may even have given Margaret a row or two in it, I don't remember. In May my new Newport 30 was delivered, and I was satisfied with the Echappee name for it. This was a wonderful boat, and I loved it for the next 16 years.

            During the winter, I kept Greta, the dinghy, on the beach at Utsalady Bay, as it was nice to have it on hand instead of having to go down to the Everett Marina where Echappee was docked. During one of the first couple of winters, somebody came with a pickup truck, I suppose, and stole it. There was a rumor that it had been sighted under a dock at Ketchikan, but I was not about to go up there and look for it. So I had to get a new dinghy, just like the old one. This became Greta II.

By this time, Margaret and I were married.

            We used this dinghy for a number of years, and then one day it disappeared. I thought it had been stolen. This time I replaced it with a truly classy little tipsy dinghy with beautiful wood trim and wonderful rowing characteristics. The Livingstone boats are extremely stable, but they are hard to row. This little boat was not stable, but was a dream to row. Greta III.

            One day while I was walking on the beach one of our neighbors on the island asked if I could load up a beat-up old Livingstone boat on my truck and carry it to the dump. It had washed up in front of her beach house, and it looked as if someone had deliberately tried to sink it. So I hauled it up on shore, took a long look at it, and decided that I could probably repair it so it wouldn't be too much of an eyesore, and it would carry a lot of stuff. It was a 9-footer. This one became Greta IV, but it was finally sold for $50.

            Greta III was lost through my own carelessness in tying a knot in the towing line. We lost it on a rather stormy day sailing between Victoria's Oak Bay and Roche Harbor on San Juan Island. The line did not part, but the knot came loose. Somebody in the Canadian Gulf Islands probably wound up with a very pretty little Greta III.

            But all was not lost. Somewhere in there, I forget just when, Greta II was located back on Camano Island, not so far from where I thought it had been stolen. Now I believe that it simply floated off, but I am still rather upset with the fellow who took possession of it for not attempting to track me down. My name was painted inside the hull. Anyhow, I got it back, and much later it got sold to a fellow in LaConner who said he could restore it.

            So all this dinghy gain and loss took up the space of the 16 years we owned the Newport. After thinking about it for maybe twelve years and several false starts, Margaret and I decided to get a new, bigger boat, and we would live aboard. Daughter Holly was off to Philadelphia in college, and our young son John did not object, so we sold our house and started to buy the boat.

            I recently read an article that claimed the boat chooses you and you don't have a chance to resist once the boat has made up its mind. The boat in this instance was an Ericson 34. It was a year old but had never been privately owned. Of course Margaret and I looked at a number of new and used boats after seeing this Ericson, and we had been devastated when we heard that the company had gone out of business and there would be no more E 34s. What joy when we heard that Pacific Seacraft would resume production on the 34, and I believe the boat we bought is Hull#2 from Pacific Seacraft. This is the boat of our dreams; after 12 years I still drool over it.

            No doubt after all these years of marriage to Margaret and the raising of two children together, I could have come right out and named the boat Margaret, as any right-thinking boater would do. But I had become fond of Greta as a name, and so that is the story of Greta I, Greta II, Greta III, and Greta IV, but now we are calling our Ericson just Greta, not Greta V. It seems appropriate.

Our present dinghy has never been blessed with a name.

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

AGROUND

The events of May 31 to June 1, 2002

By Matt Davis

[The Son-in-law of Dr. Robert E. Plucker]

First off, you need to understand that I hate sailboats, especially white sailboats.    And that’s why I erased the rock from Bob’s charts when I knew he was heading to Sullivan for the night. Alas, some plans are destined to fail.

A year after Greta's grounding, John went back to the site and took this photo of the rock in question.
He very graciously sent it to me so I could use it here.

Holly had just started to re-alphabetize the books and I was settling down on the couch with my laptop to check the news.

Then the phone rang and Davy Gross the harbor master was on the line.  Sweat started to bead up on my forehead. My first thought was, “Oh, no.  He wants me to get my trailer out of his yard, and I still don’t have an air pump, or a jack.”  I was a bit relieved when all he had to say was that Bob and John had run aground in the Greta. 

That was a close one. 

He added that the Fjordland and a few other boats had talked to him and that they were in no immediate danger.  Holly was very worried.

Holly and I headed straight to the Haines boat harbor, and to the Windbreaker to look at the tide-book.  It was seven when we’d gotten the call, so our first concern was for the height and time of the next tide.  After seeing that Friday evening’s tide was 14.1 feet and Saturday’s morning tide was 14.4 feet, we knew they’d have an additional 0.3 feet of water on the next high tide; we breathed a sigh of relief.  Thank goodness it wasn’t an 18 foot high tide they’d run aground in, or they’d be stuck on the rock until the 23^rd of June.  If that’d been the case, they could possibly have been in very dire straights, as the bi-daily rising and falling of the tide would leave ample time for the boat to be dashed on the rocks.  Immediately, Holly wanted to know the exact time they’d gone up on the rock.

Matt Davis' fishing boat "Windbreaker"

We got on the VHF, “Greta, this is the Windbreaker.  Greta, this is still the Windbreaker.” We switched to channel 12.  I really wanted to take the boat out for a spin and needed a distraction, so I was eager to head out.  Holly definitely wanted to go too, because she’s always ready for a fun-trip.  The next high tide was going to be at 5:32 am, so we had plenty of time to get there and take a picture for the paper, offer some moral support, perhaps give them a brush to scrub the underside of the boat, then get back to town by 9 am for the Saturday morning garage sale rush.  We made a quick decision to head down to Sullivan.  I offered Bob, “Do you want us to bring down some Root Beer and chips?”  He declined, without even a hint of a smile in his voice and we said we’d be leaving town within the hour and would see them shortly thereafter.  I forgot to ask about the exact time they’d run aground.

We needed sleeping bags; Holly needed her contact supplies.  The boat was fueled up and ready to go.  We didn’t bother with any extra food, but brought along the radar, the chart-plotting GPS, and the binoculars, so we could get set up to navigate in case it got foggy or otherwise nasty. 

As we headed out of the harbor it was getting dark, black clouds were starting to pour over the eastern mountains and it was starting to rain.  We passed by what looked like a commercial charter boat at the transient dock with the owner and his family aboard.  He opened the window and flagged us down.  Concerned, I started to pull alongside to hear him out. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Oh, nothing.” He said, “I’ve been listening to the VHF and I was just wondering, are you Matt?”

“Yes.” I said.  “Has anything else happened?”

“No.  But good luck out there.  I’m going to stay tuned in.”

“Thanks,” I yelled back.  And we headed on out of the harbor.

With all the local people listening in on VHF channel 16, and with all the scanners out and about, I didn’t want to call Bob and John every time we rounded a new corner, pulled in a dock line, or used the bathroom, so I decided just to call him when we got past Seduction Point, if all went well.

Holly was very brave of course.  I hadn’t thought about it at all until I noticed we were both being drenched as we plowed along into the small waves that seemed to be growing by the minute.  I looked down at her on her cushion as we motored along and said, “You’re really brave.  You know that?”

She smiled up at me nodding her head, “Yup!”

“The weather’s not too great out here.  Did you notice those clouds?”  I pointed off to the southeast.  “As a matter of fact I can’t imagine a worse night for this type of a trip.”

 “Oh, I can.” She said.  “We could have a strong south wind with pouring rain.  It could be pitch black or foggy too, like when we went fishing on that Sunday in September.  This isn’t so bad.  This is wonderful.  I like being out on the water.  It reminds me of when I was a girl and we’d go out in the sailboat.  I Like that.”

“Hmmm.  I guess you’re right.” I said

“Yup.  It’s perfect.  I’m not worried at all.  Lots of expecting mothers would be staying at home, ‘I’m not going out there with my baby! I’m staying right here where it’s warm and safe.’ But for me, I’m not afraid of the water at all.  The boat is safe, the water is reasonably calm.  They’ll be glad to see us.  It’s going to be a great trip.”  She smiled again.

Then I thought to myself, “Yes, Life is good.   It’s at times like these when things could be dark and morbid, that I look at Holly and ask her what she thinks.  She smiles and talks for a while, then again I think to myself, ‘Matt: You’re a lucky man.  She’s a special girl, with a neat family.  Keep her happy Matt, just keeeeeeeeeeeeeepppppppp her happy.’  Life is amazing.  We go for MONTHS at a time and when we look back, it’s all a blur; same old, same old.  Then BOOM, something happens and you know you’ll remember it forever.  Good or bad, you’ll never forget it.

We got to the boat around 11 pm. And it was so dark we could barely see any of the details of the hull. But what we could see looked very, very sad.  Here was Bob’s beautiful sailboat up on the rocks, and from where we were at a very low tide like it was quite far out of the water.  Looking up at Greta on the rock like that, we couldn’t help think to ourselves, “What in the world were they thinking getting up on the rocks like that?  Look at all that beach and all those rocks.  Look at the angle of the boat; the angle of the mast.  Wow.  What were they thinking?” 

We asked them where we should spend the night and they explained how to get to the place they’d been trying to get to. So we went there to anchor up. We found a nice safe semi-secluded spot on a gravel beach in about 24 feet of water.  I dropped the anchor and we decided to get back to them at about 4 am. 

At about 12:30 AM I heard a loud BOOM or a CLANG.  I was instantly awake and soon up out of bead, out of the v-berth, and looking around out the windows in the cabin.  Afraid that we’d run aground too, I quickly realized the chances of that were slim, as the tide would be rising now, instead of falling; the low tide being at 12:06 am.  I jumped up and down, like I’d learned to do when the boat was on the grid, to see if we were floating. It bounced reassuringly.  I’d tied the anchor securely.  Checking the radar, our position relative to the shore hadn’t changed.  The soft rain was still tinkling on the boat.  It was peaceful and nice.  I relaxed.  Then I remembered that I’d left the bucket off of the exhaust so I donned my boots and climbed up to the mast to replace the bucket and keep out the rain.

The alarm on my wristwatch hanging from the electrical panel in the starboard v-berth blared annoyingly at 3:30 am for twenty seconds, 40 bleeps.  I counted them like I always do, I counted 38, so it had taken me a second to become alert.  Then I woke up Holly.  She saw the bright diffuse morning light pouring in the cabin windows and was quickly alarmed and alert. “Matt, Matt, what time is it?  Are we too late.  Have we slept too long?”

            I hadn’t rolled over or opened my eyes or touched my watch or done anything but wonder, how was it that I came to think this was going to be an enjoyable trip, heading out away from town like this.  Without opening my eyes or pulling my head from the bag I said, “It’s 3:30.  Why did we have to get up two hours before high tide, if it only takes 45 minutes to get down there?  I want to sleep till 4:15.”

            She was out of bed looking around out the cabin windows.  “No, no, no.  We need to go right now.  They’re probably already awake, wondering where we are.  Let’s get down there right away.  Are you sure it’s not 7:30?  What if we missed them?”

            I rolled over, and without opening my eyes reached out of the bag and unclasped my watch from the wires.  Looking at the watch, I said, “3:31.  Do we really have to get up?”

            “Yes, Yes, Yes!  Let’s go.  Let’s go.  Pull up the anchor.”  She was already getting out the cereal to eat some breakfast.  “Pull up the anchor!”  I crawled out of bed.

The morning was bright and clear with friendly little tufts of fog and clouds on the nearby mountains, the dark ominous clouds of yester-night were gone, the water was as calm as a street puddle in the rain; millions of drops forming concentric expanding circles on the grey surface.  The sound of the nearby waterfall was steadily droning on into the still crisp morning air blending with the rain tapping on the cabin roof.  Out on the deck, at 3:50 am, with the anchor up, the boat running smoothly, and rain gear bundled all around us, we headed south again to see what there was to see.

At the first glimpse of the Greta I cut our speed down to a near idle; Holly and I were astonished at how far it was from the beach and from any appearance of rocks.  The thought came to mind.  ‘What in the world is that rock doing out here in all this water?‘ 

On closer inspection, the mast was still at quite an angle.  Getting out the binoculars, I could see that no one was visibly up and about. 

Then our own wake hit us. Being nearly at a standstill, we began to bounce around quite a bit.  I thought about calling Bob and John on the VHF right then, but decided against it.  They’d deduce it was our wake as soon as it hit them. Who else’s wake could it be at 4:20 am, after all?

Then our wake hit the Greta.  We were quite alarmed!  The mast started to rise and fall dramatically against the mountain, time and time again.  Holly grabbed my arm, “Look what we did to them, they’re starting to sink!  Look at the mast!  It’s going down with each wave.” She got quiet.  “It’s getting lower and lower.”  A bit taken aback, I looked at the mast.  Sure enough, she was right; the Greta was sinking deeper with each bounce.

I said, at nearly a whisper, “Do you think we should call them now?” Holly was silent.  Then I thought better of it.  “No.  Let’s not bother them now; they’re busy enough as it is.  Going down that fast, they’re surely in a panic over there. Let’s hope they find that damned leak.  They must be going crazy over there…”

“Yeah, just leave them be for now.”

After a few minutes of morbid silence, I looked at the hull, rather than the mast.  We’d moved on down-current of them quite a bit, and the hull was still fully visible.  “You know,” I said in a quiet tone, “maybe it’s just an optical illusion, or a geometric illusion… or whatever?”  Picking up the binoculars again, I was sure.  “Yeah, we’ve just been pulled along by this tidal current.  They’re not sinking at all.  It’s just the mast and the mountains playing tricks on our perception.”  Thank goodness.

Soon after that, we relaxed and hailed them on 16, then switched to 12. 

My first concern was to NOT get on the rocks myself. So I gingerly floated up next to them with my eye on the fish finder and Holly’s eye on the fathometer in the cabin as a back-up.  John and Bob told us that the rock was almost entirely to their starboard side, and that they wanted to be pulled off stern first, rather than by going forward.  Making a quick mental note, I backed away from them and got on their port side.  Then we pulled away and started doing an informal ‘chart’ of the waters nearby, in attempt to find a safe route of egress, and also to get used to the current in the water.  If what they said was true, we’d have to be careful about maneuvering around them and about pulling them off the rock because the current would naturally want to pull us directly onto the rock.

After about 35 minutes of exploring the nearby waters with the sounders, it was clear, with John and Bob standing on the deck with ropes in hand appealing to us to come near enough to throw a line, that there would be no waiting for the high tide.  They wanted us to start pulling right away.  They wanted a line thrown now.  They wanted us pulling on them steadily.  No more fussing around.

It took John three tosses for Holly to get the line, then about eight failed tugs to get the job done.  It was necessary to set up a quick way to change cleats in order to steer the Windbreaker, and John came up with a quick method that we wound up using.  After that, it was all fairly simple.  We steered the boat with the rope and the cleats and the current, until we were straight off the Greta’s aft then gave a quick hard burst of the throttle to the Cummins diesel.  The combined efforts of the Greta’s engine and the Windbreaker’s, along with the rising tide, all worked together to haul them free. 

It was a wonderful site to see John and Bob, smiling with hands in the air, and victorious hollers all around, as she came off the rock.  I kept pulling them for a few minutes at quite a high rate. And I had no intention of slowing down until we were all safe and back in the main channel.  Shortly, Bob started yelling for me to slow down, and John announced he was unhooking the line.  They didn’t need me anymore, they claimed.  Holly pulled in the line very quickly so that it wouldn’t wind up in the props, and we were off for home.

Photos by Jean E. Straatmeyer and John Plucker