BLOG SLOG, Part 2: BOAT
“Look, Jane, look!” Dick said in my first-grade reader. It may have been something his silly dog, Spot, or his baby sister, Sally, was doing.
It was something like that I said to my husband driving from the flybridge, slowing guiding PineAweigh through the narrow channel as we left Blake Island. Actually, I said, “She’s riding nicely.” Then, as suddenly as Dick might have noticed that Spot was mauling the kitten, I yelled, “STOP!”
This is part two of a blog slog. Part one wrote easily yesterday after many weeks of not writing, of not wanting to write, of feeling I couldn’t. This part? Part two is a blog slog. It resembles the story I’m about to tell.
PineAweigh is a forty-one-year-old boat a bit longer in feet than her years of age. She’s a broad. That is, she is broad, which gives us a roomy interior. It is good to be aboard PineAweigh. Usually. It is usually easy to write about her adventures. Many are recorded here on this blog.
“STOPPPP!” I yelled from the cockpit within seconds of having said how nicely our dingy was riding, line-tied to our starboard side. Suddenly, things went sideways. That is, dingy did.
Secured by two rightly crossed lines, our 11-foot Boston Whaler rode nicely from Dock #2 into the marked exit channel before it bolted, twisted all restraining lines, spun 90° perpendicular to its towing vessel, lifted its starboard gunnel toward the sky, hung briefly from its lines like a puppet on strings, dropped, half-burying its port side into the Sound, then jumped back up filled with saltwater, its attached motor and propane tank shock-rocked off kilter, akimbo, if things other than limbs can be akimbo. Loose items, fenders, a chest cover, and two ancient, wooden oars, things it had carried for us since 1997, floated off with the flooding tide.
“Stoppppppp!” Surely you can hear the cry.
Thank goodness Boston Whalers refuse to sink. We managed in frantic style, and with only one swim-step bump against a channel piling, to free twisted lines, clear the channel, secure the water-filled dingy from its nose-ring to a single spring-line tied to a PineAweigh stern cleat, and in rough water, high winds, hopping ferry wakes; with enough rain to remind us that boating season was over, we covered twelve miles between an island and our winter slip at a requiring speed of no more than 4.5kts. We could have pulled the dingy from the shore faster. Like this blog, it was a slog.
In the first draft of this posting, I wrote about the starboard starter that at the beginning of this cruise wouldn’t. Wouldn’t start, that is. Eventually, it did. Then, at our departure from Blake Island (dingy secured starboard, ha, ha, ha) it didn’t, again. But then did.
I explained why we happened to be towing the dingy rather than having it secured in its place on the flybridge. How we towed it with a bright yellow FLOATING line, made especially for such use, guaranteed not to foul engine props, but how, as I was backing PineAweigh onto dock #2 at Blake Island, our port engine’s prop apparently reached up, grabbed that floating line, pulled it under, and wrapped enough of it to itself to cause the prop to choke. The sound was sickening.
In an earlier draft of what you are reading now, I confessed to calling a boat-tow company three times in a matter of not many minutes then cancelling all three calls. Frantic times call for frantic measures.
When, finally, at the end of this tale, PineAweigh was tucked into her winter slip, as we readied to leave her, David said, “Look, Barb, look!” In his hand he held a short, curved length of yellow floating line.
“What the heck?”
Frayed, as my feelings have been of late, and finally freed from the prop around which it spun from an island to a bay, through Rich Passage, through Washington Narrows, under two bridges, and around several points of land, it finally popped up (remember, it is floating line) in the still water of our slip, port-side of PineAweigh. It hangs now on the handle of my office door.
David uses a sump pump to drain the dingy
