Back in the Water…

The quote above on the fortune cookie is snappy.  John Augustus Shedd was waxing philosophy when he wrote it but I can tell you through experience it isn’t a quote that can stand up to reality.  I find there are so many heady sayings like this that roll off the tongue but quickly under the glare of real life implication are reduced to just a cute-sy saying which your own experience can deem false…I am here to tell you that ships are no safer necessarily in harbor than at sea.  

Six months.  Half a year.  I am adding it to the years of dreaming, buying a boat, painting, sanding, outfitting our Westerly; dreaming some more. Selling a boat, buying another boat…more dreaming…then refitting and outfitting…and sanding, painting, more replacing…moving out, moving in…packing and unpacking…packing again and unpacking…you get the picture…Sailboat cruising isn’t just all about the destination or the sailing or the boat…it is a lifestyle. Just one minute…if by any stretch of the imagination you are picturing clear blue water, exciting destinations, and coronas with lime on the beach shaded by palm trees expand your imagination to include the sweat; long grueling, hot days under the sun working for no paycheck while the fiberglass falls on your damp skin and creates a fine film of itchy, glass chiggers. It isn’t all Hollywood…

So while I had thought that we had done our time…moving out of our house and the remaining bulk of our belongings into the 10×10 storage unit on a muggy, rainy, mosquito-laden Sunday night and having worked for hours and hours on our boats…apparently there was more debt to pay to the Bank of ‘Sailing off into the Sunset’.

On July 1, 2012, we had just been finishing up a deck painting project after returning from the Bahamas on our first long term cruise of six months.  We were anticipating a late Spring and Summer working our way North; stopping on the Chesapeake Bay and enjoying time with family and friends; and sailing on the waters I grew up on.  We had thoughts of sailing all the way to Maine, maybe even Nova Scotia and then working our way South again.

The decks of our boat were painted a medium grey prior to our purchasing her, and without opening port lights it could get very warm down below in the cabin.  So Chris bought a turbine paint sprayer and intended to try his hand at spraying the paint on the deck, at least in the sections not covered by nonskid which we would roll.  This would require the removal of a lot of hardware on deck; taping and masking with plastic so that the paint would not find its way to places we didn’t intend.

Because we were spraying, our marina where we had returned did not want us in our slip for fear of over-spray onto neighboring boats, understandably.  They tried to set us up on the side of the marina, but it would require a 2000 watt generator, and we would have to dinghy back and forth. Not to mention the mosquito haven where the tall grasses were…so we decided to come up with a different plan.

The boatyard we have taken our boat to in the past was four hours down the river which at the time seemed like light years away since we had a litany of tasks to complete before the settlement date of our house.  We had finally in the midst of all of this received an offer on our house after a year and four month wait, and now we were scrambling to be prepared to move the final stuff out of the house.  While we didn’t have much left in the house, it was still enough to require a week or two to deal with.  As well, the house needed its final cleaning.  There also was all the paperwork that needed to be passed.  We wanted to get this deck painted and then focus on the house.  Trying to paint while living aboard was not an easy proposition.

Chris had helped friends move their boat up to a boatyard at the top of the Neuse to be hauled. He had gotten the green light from the yard owner to keep our boat for a few days at the end of the very long travel lift well, between the travel lift rails.  We thought that it would just be a few days, and then we would be finished and return to our marina.  However the amount of paint we needed was underestimated and the few day project turned into a week long job in heat indexes of up to 105 degrees.  It was a tough week and a half to be working outside.

As I was mentally and physically coming down from our direct return back from Abaco in three and a half days to Beaufort, N.C., assessing in my head what was going to be necessary to be completely moved out of the house, and cramming to get this painting job done, I was simultaneously dreaming of the time when we would be settled on the boat and officially call her ‘home’.

It was a steep learning curve with the sprayer but Chris did a surprisingly good job considering how difficult it is to spray. The weather and humidity challenge even the most accomplished painters to mix the right ratios of paint and solvent, dial in the proper amount of paint to be applied, and then the tedious application process avoiding drips, ‘orange peel’, leopard spots…It is an art, and not one I recommend taking up in the heat of a Carolina summer.  Chris of course was ripe for the challenge.

We had started to replace our crazed port lights as well and had just finished placing the last of the new acrylic, and bedding them back in.  The boat was starting to look like new again.

That Sunday afternoon, the first day of July, I had checked the weather that morning.  There were thunderstorms predicted for our area, but nothing out of the ordinary.  We had experienced a thunderstorm and/or threat of one all week as is expected in the summer here in N.C.  We had escaped that late afternoon heat down below where we were reading with the Cruise-Air air conditioner going that we had just bought at a consignment shop. The wind was a gentle eight knots and it was calm.

There was no warning.  As I sat on the settee reading…all of the sudden the boat was on her side and the air conditioner came through the hatch, landed on our teak salon table, cracking it down the middle we would later find out, and then went airborne in my direction landing directly beside me.  Expletives fell out of our mouths, as we both bounded for the companionway.  Our calm afternoon was turned into the most hell*atious storm I have ever encountered.  Our boat went from floating upright to being completely blown side ways in the fairway.  My first reaction was, “We have to get more lines out”, which I exclaimed three times to Chris.  There was no time to get extra lines out, nor was it even possible.  The boat was beating against the side of the leeward travel lift rail, and we were on our side. Water was blown out from under us leaving the river a lot shallower than its normal depth, and the windward rail of the boat was now many feet from the port travel lift rail, and an impossibility to reach in any way.  The rain started and the lightening.  Our stern line snapped, the remaining lines stretched like nothing I had ever seen.  It was like a scene out of some Armageddon movie.

Chris jumped off the boat telling me I would be safer down below and that I should stay put. First of all, I was not going to just be idle if there was anything I could do to help save our boat. I gathered the cats and put them in their carrier.  At this point the boat was like a washing machine. Most of our stuff was stowed away fairly well but there was so much motion on the boat that things were falling out of their designated homes.

I popped my head through the companionway and there was so much water and noise that I could not see Chris or hear him.  I was screaming for him but nothing.  My imagination got the best of me and I thought he could have fallen off the rail on his way to do whatever it was he was going to do.  There were three foot waves at this point in a place on the river where I had never seen waves larger than a foot.  Despite losing water under our keel, the waves were washing over the railway at times up to my ankles I would soon find out, and beating up against the transom.

I didn’t want to stay on the boat…there was lightening everywhere, I didn’t know if the rail would give and the boat would end up completely on her side, if the boat would end up holed, the potential for a lightening strike was high which made me worry of a fire and most importantly, I couldn’t see or hear Chris and I was very concerned he could have hit his head and fallen in the water, or gotten his leg crushed between the boat and the rail, and washed away…I have a very vivid imagination, and I know now it is only fed in a situation such as this.

At this point it was emergency mode and my brain was processing my environment at lightening speeds.  I grabbed the cats in their big carrier and I watched the boat slamming into the metal rail.  I knew it was imperative that I not slip or mistime our exit or I could lose a leg, or the cats could get hurt.  I watched the timing and managed to jump on the rail right after the boat had slammed and moved as quickly as I could before the next one. Luckily the cats carrier fit perfectly between the rails and I was able on my hands and knees to push it most of the way except when I had to lift it and lower it in between the tangled genoa lines around the rail.  Our genoa had partially unfurled, the genoa lines had wrapped themselves in a cats cradle of maddness all around the rail way making for an obstacle course of epic proportion. I just kept thinking – I don’t recognize these lines as docking lines…where the heck did these come from…at this point my nervous system was so awash with adrenaline I was micro focused and it was all about the task at hand…such a strange state of an emergency mental state in which to be living in that moment.

In between moments of terror, all I could feel was such defeat.  I had been trying to find the keys to the truck before getting off the boat and I couldn’t.  I prayed that the truck was unlocked because the tempest was terrifying, the waves had washed over the rail way, the rain was saturating and the cats needed a place to feel safe.  I still didn’t know where Chris was and I was very concerned.

I made it to the truck in ankle deep water even on land, that is how much the heavens had dumped on the ground in ten minutes.  The sky was an eerie green and the air was charged.  I got the cats in the truck and then looked out at the nightmare of a scene that I could have never imagined for us…and there was Chris, wedged in between the rail…his feet pushing against one, his back hard against the other, holding fast to the only line remaining at that point on the windward side…a double bow line.  The waves were washing over his waist, there was still lightening everywhere, and our boat tipped away from him as if the mast was being pulled by an evil circus guide wire pulling her rig in the opposing direction.

I wanted him off that rail way; and immediately.  The wind was blowing so hard that even if I had screamed he couldn’t have heard me even ten feet away.  I walked, crouched over on to the rail opposite of the one I had hatched my escape on.  “Chris, you need to get off this rail, N-O-W…I love our boat too…but this is your LIFE”…he refused.  All I could picture at that moment was losing my husband to a lightening strike.  He wouldn’t let go of the bow line, and he barely spoke to me…he was in a trance and was holding to the line with a death grip attempting to save the outermost shrouds of our rig before they too would potentially meet their demise from the impact of the the rail way.

At that point, I took off running, trying to find someone on the street, in the neighborhood that could convince Chris to get off that rail.  I wanted him in a safe place and he wouldn’t listen to me.  There was nothing I could do at that point to protect our boat…the forces at hand were entirely too mighty, there were no cleats on the railway other than at the very end, no way to influence this situation to make the end result any different without risking life and limb.

I ran down the street like chicken little.  I was soaking wet from the rain, awash in adrenaline like I had never felt in my life.  My shorts were soaked with rain….and W-E-L-L, yes, it wasn’t just rain in my shorts at that point…that had never happened to me…adrenaline to the point of my nervous system charged just as high as the atmosphere that my bodily faculties had failed me…did I mention I have been sailing a LONG time and have been in fifty footers in heavy air and storms…This wasn’t my first round in bad storms, but never 78 mph winds…

Y-E-S, you read that correctly…our little oasis at the top of the Neuse had been turned into Nature’s little testing ground for an isolated, thirty minute storm which was prefaced by what felt and looked like a microburst, it was like what I imagined a hurricane would feel like, without a name…but with every bit of punch despite her identity crisis.

It lasted thirty minutes…T-H-I-R-T-Y LONGGGGG minutes…and then as quickly as she struck, she retreated…like some angry rattlesnake that had been poked with a stick.

I had knocked on the door of a house where a truck I had seen in the neighborhood driving around the last week was parked – there was a diving sticker on the back of the truck and I made the assumption he was a diver, and figured if anyone knew how to handle an emergency, this person did…He quickly came out in the pouring rain along with his neighbor, an employee of the Hatteras boat building company right across the river from where we were.

By the time we got there the winds were dissipating and the green glow in the sky was turning a mustard yellow.  I was grateful we had not witnessed any twisters of the waterspout or tornad*ic variety.  The atmospheric conditions seemed ripe for them.

I was exhausted, rattled, and deeply sad.  As the winds decreased the gentlemen helped us clear the tangled mess of lifelines and stanchions down on our starboard side, untangle as many lines as we could, and most importantly replace our lines that had snapped and get more lines out. We are very grateful to them for helping us when we were both in a state of shell shock.

After they left, we had spent time securing the shredded head sail, and assessing the damage.  As I followed Chris down the companionway, I didn’t get very far, because he fell to the sole of the floor on his knees…it was one of the saddest sights I have seen in my life, and for a moment I couldn’t even feel my own emotions because it was just so hard to see Chris feeling so defeated and sad.  I will never forget that image in my mind.  At that point, I think because of my discomfort and sadness for both of us, I tried to minimize the situation, which I rarely do…but I reminded him that we were both alright, our cats were safe, and while our boat; our home, had extensive damage in the grand scheme of things we were still lucky.

The inside of the cabin was an absolute wreck.  There was the broken hanging veggie baskets that had broken with the motion of the boat….metal links mangled…What little that wasn’t stowed was everywhere…We decided to lock her up and get a hotel room for the night.

I remember as we left, I took a moment and turned looking out to the boat, shaking my fist in the sky, and cursing Mother Nature…probably not the best action after the experience we had just had…but I now knew why they call her, well, the not-so-nice terms they use to refer to her.

We found a hotel room, and they let us sneak the cats in since they understood the magnitude of what we had just been through even though, typically it is a pet-free hotel.  We stayed up and watched the stories roll in about the freak storm.  How it had killed two people not far from where the boat had been when a tree had fallen on their golf cart, and then the man who told his Granddaughter to go in the house while he put away her ATV, and as she made it to the porch of the house, she turned to watch the full size barn collapse and crush him from the wind.  This was not a normal storm.  Four boats were reported to have capsized on the Neuse River that afternoon.  The Minnesott Ferry was run aground in the storm and passengers had to be picked up by a launch to get them back to shore.  One friend of a friend’s sailboat was knocked down under bare poles and took on water before it righted itself again…it was one crazy storm.

The next morning we woke up and the yard owner came down, completely dazed that our boat was so damaged.  Where he lived twenty miles away there was not nearly as much wind he reported.  This was a very localized storm.  We heard that a large forty-some footer at our marina just a few miles down the river had ended up on top of the dock even in a very protected place normally.

We were towed out of the slip by TowBoat since the water was still low after the storm.  We went to the other side of the river at a different dock and made arrangements to take her down to Sailcraft Service, Inc. in Oriental, N.C. where we had been many times before.  I moved as many of my belongings off the boat in the scorching heat since I knew it was going to be a long while before we could move back aboard.  Chris took the boat down the river without me, so that I could get home and start the process with the offer on the house, and because it was dangerously hot outside for the cats.  I did not want to take a chance that we could get stuck out there without wind in the scorching heat…it is easy for us humans to make sure we don’t suffer heat stroke but cat’s little bodies don’t do as well.  As I drove, the exhaustion and mental weariness set in.  I was still in a bit of shock.

I had a hard time leaving Chris by himself.  I was worried there could have been some damage we were not yet aware of.  I felt strange leaving him, in times of trouble like this I want to be present for him…but there was just too much to get done, so it was ‘divide and conquer’.

So here we are six months later…s/v Alchemy has been made whole, and we have a lot to be grateful for.  First of all we witnessed how well made our boat is.  Henri Wauquiez, David Merlot, and team built a very strong boat and a few people who know boats have told us if we had a modern day production boat she probably would have been two seventeen and a half footers. Thank you to them for building a boat of structural integrity.

Many ‘Thanks” to our insurer BoatUS.  While the process was very stressful simply because that can be the nature of the process, BoatUS came through for us.  

We are grateful to Sailcraft, Service Inc. for their skill and professionalism, and for making it even fun at times to get her back together again.  

The town of Oriental, N.C. has been a friendly, kind environment in which to move through this. We have made some good friends whom I sure we will be friends with for many years to come. Of course, our friends in New Bern and Beaufort have all been sources of support and help.  When there was some challenge to deal with many individuals here networked or assisted to solve the challenges. In many ways, even when I was dealing with frustration, sadness, or anger…I felt in my soul that this is where we were meant to be for a little while.  A sweet little town by the water, inland just a few miles from the salty Ocean air where you feel like ‘everyone knows your name’, and they have the time to ask you how you are…and they really want to know.  It feels a lot like the Annapolis that I once knew, where I grew up in the 1970′s and 80′s.

Some have asked me, “Is there anything you learned from the experience that you can pass along?”  Sailors like to learn from other’s experiences, hoping to stack the deck in their favor if ever presented with similar circumstances, or want to know how they can avoid it in the first place.  It is like the brotherhood, it is what we do…share the war stories, not just for entertainment but to maybe save the next person six months of their life in the boatyard, or worse, sunken on the bottom of the Ocean.

The main points below are lessons learned or reiteration of those already established by our past experience:

1)  While I have realized for a long time that local conditions can vary tremendously from a forecast, I never quite dreamed that without some kind of warning that a storm of hurricane force wind proportions could materialize so quickly.  It is important to note that heat generated storms can be as damaging as a hurricane, in a lot less time, and without warning.  I believe it is important to have a working barometer on your boat, and get back to basics when checking the weather every morning.  I had a routine in the Bahamas, every morning I was awake at 6 a.m., listening to Chris Parker and the marine forecast planning our day around what the weather had in store.  When we got back to the US we relied on using the internet to find weather reports. That morning I had checked our cell phone for a metereologist’s page.  There were just the ‘normal’ thunderstorms predicted for the average hot Carolina summer day on July 1st.  All the modern day science of metereology is beneficial but Nature is here to remind us that local conditions can vary greatly, and with extreme temperature differentials mixing with land effects, our computer models still may not reflect ‘local conditions’ accurately.  Keep your eyes to the skies, and check throughout the day on the conditions.  Learn how to read clouds, study meteorology, be aware of extreme temperature differentials and keep an eye on the barometer.

2)  Whenever you are docked, do not become complacent in any way just because you are ‘in port’.  I had been adjusting and readjusting lines the entire time we were at this location.  Doubled dock lines are not just something I will use when a hurricane is predicted but I will use as a matter of course anytime, anywhere.  Know the area well, know local conditions, know prevailing winds, and understand the tides or lack there of.  On the Neuse it is wind driven tide, so there are times that if the wind blows hard enough and in the correct direction there can be a significant drop in depths fairly quickly.

3)  Understand what protection from winds and waves you have in regards to the local conditions I referred to in #3.  Just a bit of significant chop or wave action beating against your hull can cause extensive damage to your docked boat depending on its direction.

4)  A friend of ours with her Captain’s license, and many years of cruising under her belt, said in regards to where we were docked and the storm, ‘No one could have ever imagined it getting that bad where you were other than in a named storm’…we now know it can be that bad.  As if I wasn’t already the one constantly anticipating the worse case scenario in order to be prepared…I will always in the future be looking at where we berth our boat, getting as much local knowledge as I can before being there for any significant time over a few hours.

5)  It is very important to have a ditch bag aboard with all your valuable papers, put your purse or wallet, and keys in the same place always, and have an exit plan in case of fire or emergency. In the heat of the moment, you will need your focus on the situation at hand…not on how you plan on handling the logistics of finding valuables, gathering pets and/or children, or where your first aid kit/fire extinguishes are.  There are few of us that actually enjoy dreaming of catastrophy, but it is important to not let your discomfort with imagining it get in the way of your planning for it.

6)  Building on the advice in #5, when in an emergency situation attempt to clearly and calmly assess the situation and hatch a plan to deal with it.  Communicate your intentions to your crew members and their’s to you, that way you can all have an idea where the other is, and you can keep an eye on each other.  Chris wasn’t sure what he was going to do to manage possible damage to the boat.  He got off the boat without me knowing his intentions and when I couldn’t see him it led me to assume the possible worse case scenarios and built on my anxiety levels.

7)  If you are a cruiser you will find a duality to the pain you feel if your vessel is significantly damaged – of course there is the pain you feel watching your beloved boat get destroyed, but then on another level she is also your home…and well, that made the situation for me even more difficult to stomach.

8)  I would never operate or live on a boat without insurance.  There are just too many possibilities for weather events, accidents, engine failure, the list goes on.  The cost of repairs can be high and if you do not have insurance you may have to walk away from your boat.  Of course this is a personal choice, however I believe liability insurance in the marine environment is a necessity.

9)  Choose the name of your boat carefully.  We have renamed both of our boats and before taking either on any lengthy trip we have said the Christening prayer and baptized her with champagne.  The longer I am in the boating world I see the meaning of boat’s names reflected in their realities.  s/v Alchemy has certainly lived up to hers in regards to transformation now.

10)  Don’t minimize any ‘gut’ feelings you may have.  Intuition can be a strong ally, especially when you are out on the water. If you sense impending doom do not dismiss it.  Talk about it and have open lines of communication with your crew mates.  Of course, you do have to frame your feelings in a context because it is easy to let these run away from you and feed an over eager imagination…there is a balance.  Practice though and be open to answers that come to you through awareness that is not only logical.

11)  Last, but not least, even if it is 105 heat index always wear a bra (if you are a woman) if it is daylight because you don’t know when you might be running down the street like chicken little with your hair on fire while it is pouring down rain; and well, trying to convince someone that it is a true emergency when you look like you just walked out of a wet t-shirt contest can cause one to look at you with less credibility I imagine. (trying for some comedic relief here)

I have learned a lot in the last year.  All the worry I had of possible emergencies while we were underway and at anchor in the Bahamas turned out to be unfounded.  The one issue we did have, while disconcerting, we handled well and fixed ourselves out there.  That is material for another post.  We picked our weather windows with care.  We were attentive and careful.  For our first season cruising, and our first long distance Ocean sailing we ROCKED!

That which I was least worried about – being in port in my hailing town – feeling safe, close to land, ended up being my most challenging experience ever on a sailboat so far. I never dreamed we would experience something of such intensity while in port. It has made me more aware of the fact that I can strive to always anticipate every scenario, read everything I can get my hands on, log more and more hours,  and even get licensed professionally to operate a boat however there will always be the possibility of the scenario I could have never imagined unfolding. While I would think that would shake my inner girl-scout-wanna-be to its core…it has actually given me a sense of solace that I only have control of so much, that I can only do my best to be properly educated and prepared, but after that, it is in the hands of a higher being; and oh, yeah, that witch of a Mother, we call Nature sometimes wins.