About half a mile away from our house on our island is a treacherous rock, which at low tide is about 6 inches out of the water and the rest of the time lurks just under the surface, waiting to rip the bottom out of any boat that goes over it. That rock is just one of thousands that line the waters around where we live. This particular rock removes part of the bottom of four or five boats every year and really ruins the owner’s holidays.
There is a myth here that if a private party puts a warning sign of any kind on it then they will be responsible if someone hits the rock.
Yesterday, the local whale watching boat captain, with 12 passengers on board, changed his course at the last minute and drove his boat high, but not dry, on that rock. The passengers were not hurt and were quickly rescued, but the captain had to sit there until the wee hours of the morning when the tide got high enough again in order to somehow get his boat off. While waiting for the incoming high tide, the captain had plenty of time to try and figure out what he would do for his next job with this on his resume.
Two years ago, a Coast Guard boat raced by our dock at about 50 mph chasing a high-speed cigarette-style boat in an exercise of some kind. Half an hour later the two boats came back and drifted around near the rock for a while, apparently planning their next exercise. Through my binoculars, I watched the cigarette boat driver suddenly jam his throttles forward and by the time the boat got to the rock it was going fast enough to rip off the lower unit (bottom half) of one of the three, 250-horse power outboard motors. This was an expensive mistake.
When a neighbor of mine on Crane Island jumped in his boat to go and help, the Coast Guard officer in charge said, “Don’t worry, we just hit a log.” A few hours later at low tide, our neighbor went out to the rock and retrieved the lower unit and a large stainless steel prop.
The next day there was a knock on his door and it was the same Coast Guard officer who said, “I understand you are in illegal possession of government property. If you don’t turn it over to me immediately, I will have to place you under arrest.”
On another morning, I was headed for Friday Harbor in my small boat when the leader of a fleet of Nordic tugboats was headed right for the Crane Island rock. I tried to wave him off, but he just kept on coming and waving back until he hit the rock and ripped off a propeller and a shaft and completely ruined his weekend. The tidal current was running at about 2 knots and he was drifting toward the beach, when I got a tow line on his boat.
He had radioed for help and while I was holding his boat off of the beach he said, “I can’t understand it. I have been through here a hundred times and that rock has never been here before.”
Wrong.
Hitting a rock can be expensive for a boat owner and hitting a log is not cheap either. On one of our 1,000-mile, round trips to Glacier Bay in Alaska a few years ago, I managed to hit a log and the sound of a propeller hitting a log is an expensive, but muffled, sound. We limped five hours back south on one engine to Campbell River to find out how bad the propeller or shaft or both had been bent.
After we tied up to a dock, we located a SCUBA diver who told us we would have to be hauled out of the water because he thought the port shaft and prop were bent and had to go to a shop to get straightened out. There was no time available on the marine railroad for a few days, so I just sat around and moped about my own stupidity. By the time everything from the log wreck was fixed, we had spent more than $4,000 and were five days behind schedule. A schedule is something you should never have on a boat trip of any length.
Going aground is not always expensive, if you don’t mind getting wet. Years ago, when Laurie and I were first cruising hundreds of miles in our 20-foot runabout (that had been my old camera boat that I used for the film company), we were anchored in a bay on Sucia Island when I woke up in the dark hours of a rainy morning and I could feel that the tide had gone out and we were aground. I slipped out of a warm sleeping bag and into 46-degree water, which gets your immediate attention. Shivering, I shoved our boat into deeper water. It worked and in the morning, another boat that we had been anchored near was high and dry on the beach almost 300 feet from the water and we were barely afloat. Twelve-foot tides can make you look really dumb if you are not careful.
Boats are not like a motor home. You can’t call AAA and have them come and help you. You are on your own, but we like it that way. Every time we leave the dock, it is a new adventure for us.
Warren Miller is history’s most prolific and enduring ski filmmaker. Visit warrenmiller.net or visit his Facebook page at facebook.com/warrenmiller.
