Today on my swim, I enter the cove by the more sedate launch ramp. Hot windless morning, 3 days after the gale. I wade into the mighty chilly water. Oh my, it’s up to my thigh, oh fiddle it’s up to my middle. Ventilating now. I launch my crawl stroke. Fast, and breathless. Just a bit of brain freeze. That’s a first. Stroking hard to catch up to the cold. The storm must have turned over some water, and the crisp air since then has not let the water temperature bounce back much. Water is really clear, but also really full of drift kelp. Floating everywhere. Out I crawl, past the first set of moorings. There are my kelp bass greeters. There are the bat rays. Woah there’s a really BIG one. Out past the stern of Siwash. There are our two cages. I can see one sea hare through the mesh on the ceiling, but it is too far away to see all five of them. Maybe the attacking lobsters we put in the two cages ate a sea hare or two. Sure hope so. But they were pretty small little attackers. We’ll see tomorrow when the boys get back. They are off for Halloween weekend, perhaps the most important party weekend for people under 30.
Three days ago, I experienced some new adventures for me. A gale had been forecast for Tuesday night. I was coming out on the USC supply boat early Tuesday morning. The wind in the channel had already started to climb into the teens at 9 AM, so we all knew something was up. Arriving on the dock at 11AM, nothing seemed too off kilter. Siwash was riding on her mooring nicely, maybe 10 knots of breeze. Bring up all the food to the apartment, load it into the fridge. Talk with John and Dan about their recent dives and lab experiments.
I’ve brought a giant laundry bag from home. My wife and I bought it cheap, used, from a sailmaker a few years ago, and it has served well as an outsized tool for dragging lots of laundry to the laundromat. Now I’m going to cut it up to be a draw-string closeable entry into our Cage #1. The boys have pulled the cage out of the water, and we start working on it in earnest. I stitching from below inside the cage, Dan catching my loop and pulling his outside thread into my loop (if you’ve sewed with a sewing machine you will know what I mean; if you haven’t, no explanation will help. I know, cause I just came to the former side of that divide a week ago). In an hour, the half-bag is sewn on and the draw-string works great. John has attached (with zip ties) two pieces of pet screen to the old hatches. It all looks very sea-hare tight. Ok, let’s go deploy this thing.
By now it is around 3 in the afternoon. The wind is starting to blow, and Siwash is starting to buck on her mooring at Big Fisherman Cove. I had planned to help the boys deploy the cage and put in new sea hares in both cages. Now I decided to change the plan. You guys drop me off on Siwash, and I’ll take her over to the more protected Isthmus (Two Harbors) cove, and after your dive, you can come and get me. All ok.
I take a mooring at the Isthmus, but have some trouble getting Siwash secured. I drop my glasses into the water. Damn. Eventually, John and Dan come for me in the whaler. Their dive was a success. I ask them if they’ve enough air to look for my glasses. They do. They execute some perfect expanding squares that we learned in our Research Diving class last June, and eventually find my glasses. I reward them with a couple of quesadillas off of Siwash’s griddle, and we all climb into the whaler and head back to Fisherman’s.
We walk up to the apartment. We are starting to work on the Poster. It’s going slow. I cook a big casserole with some of the food I brought. We hang around.
Then someone notices the sound of the wind outside. Shit. It’s really blowing. Around 8 PM. We’d better go. John asks if I don’t need some help. Nah, I say, proud of my independence, and knowing that taking an inexperienced helper can often get you into more trouble than doing it by yourself. Down to the waterfront. Trevor has already pulled up the ramp from the floating dock. We jump off onto the now rolling dock. Pitch black. Noisy as hell. We have to take the little dock skiff out to the buoy line to pick up my whaler. The boys drop me off, and head back to the dock. Nothing is going easy, cause there is a shitload of seas and slop and wind. Finally I get the whaler free, and they get back to the dock.
All this time, I’ve had my head down, working on the rings and lines and hulls and engines to get the job done. Now, as I leave the semi-protected buoy ring for the open stretch between Big Fisherman’s and the Isthmus, I realize that the sea has been transformed.
The gale has arrived.
I remember reading Stuart Little as a young boy (and then reading it to my kids as a father). In it, the little mouse Stuart Little, gets a chance to sail a human’s model schooner. How cool, thinks he. He knows this little pond very well, and the human wants to win the sail-boat race. So they do it.
Just like Stuart, I think I know my pond pretty well by now, having sailed back and forth across it many times.
But just like Stuart, I find out I don’t know shit. This pond is no longer mine. It belongs to some demon. It is just howling out here. Moon giving me enough light to scare the bejeezes out of me. The seas were reported later to be 8-12 feet. All I know is that I had to use every ounce of my water knowledge to avoid big-ass whitecaps all over the place. Accelerating away from wave faces, searching for smooth backsides. I manage to work my way over to the Isthmus. Soaking wet now, and just a shade spooked. Expecting a protected anchorage there, but nothing of the sort awaited me. The wind was so far out of the North that big seas and wind were marching into the cove, creating a very ugly scene.
As I come alongside Siwash, I find myself looking DOWN on the deck as the whaler is up on a wave, and Siwash is radically rolled. Down the whaler comes with a “crash”. No fingers missing, though. I manage to get on board, shoving out the whaler before she does more harm. I find some dock lines to tie together to lengthen the bow line holding the whaler, so it will trail far enough behind so it won’t bang into Siwash’s stern. Siwash is hobby horsing like a little toy. The bow is dipping under water about every two minutes. The wind is HOWLING. Ok. Better check the hawser holding the bow to the mooring. Shit. When I moored the boat an eternity ago (actually less than 8 hours), when I lost my glasses, I forgot to move the hawser to the steel chock, where it can run back and forth on a steel wheel that rolls. Instead the line is just over the wooden rail. And now it is pulling so hard, you can’t even conceive of it. I am quite certain that it will wear through in this position. I look at it and scratch my head, and a big sea comes over the bow and totally soaks me again.
I realize that I am getting cold. I realize that Siwash is in a bit of a pickle. I realize that if I fall overboard with these clothes on, I will sink before I can get the clothes off.
So for the first time in my life at anchor, I grab a life jacket. I go down below and put on all the layers and foul-weather stuff. I put on the life jacket. Now let’s go work on the line. Up I go, and now I am a bit intimidated. It is pitch dark. The harbor patrol guys are cruising upwind looking at all the moored boats, then turning downwind, and surfing past me. I flash the ok sign. 4-foot breaking seas are everywhere. Now and then a 6 footer flies by. The other boats are pitching crazily, as is Siwash. The tension on that hawser is just as scary as can be. Knowing that it isn’t led right makes me really nervous.
So here is where I start swearing at myself. I can’t do what I’m supposed to do, because I don’t have an extra pair of hands. What I need to do is start the engine and push it forward hard, and give the hawser on the bow some slack so I can lay it over the chock, properly. But the whaler is going crazy back there, so I can’t do it. Every 6-foot wave yanks the whaler back and then it races forward toward Siwash. There is enough line so it doesn’t hit Siwash, but it is that slacking line that prevents me from starting the engine. That line will almost certainly get wrapped around a turning propeller if I try that operation. A fouled propeller is NOT what I want on a night like this. I can’t risk it.
Had I said yes to John and Dan, all this would have been solved. One of them would tend the line, keeping it out of the water as it wildly tenses and slacks, while I put the engine in gear and go fix the goddamn line.
But instead, I start jury-rigging things. I run an extra line from the winch on the mast, out to the chock on the bow, and make a loop around the outboard part of the hawser. I take up the slack and slowly grind on the winch. The line is stretching like crazy. But it this action moves the mooring hawser farther forward, so that a different part of it is pressing on the rail.
All this time, I’m not kidding here, green water is regularly coming aboard as we slam into wind driven, steep nasty waves.
I’ve never seen such waves while moored. Not even close. I’m thinking, “this really isn’t ok. Something is going to break.”
I look up at some shouting just a ways away, barely discernable above the howling wind. “Cut the fucking line, now!” “What?” “Cut the line.”
I can see a sail-boat, with its bow sickingly headed toward shore, two harbor patrols buzzing around it.
But then I bring my attention back to my boat, and shove a fender under the hawser, pushing it just a little more off the rail. The wind catches Siwash sideways, and she tips 40 degrees. The boat is bucking and rolling like a wild thing.
Ok, that’ll have to do. Now I just have to be lucky. I look for the distressed sail boat, but can’t find it. Lots of lights on the shore though. I hear on the radio that the boat ended up on the beach. I hear later that they just towed the mother off. If Siwash ends up on the beach, there’ll be no towing her off, she will stove her ribs and all will be lost.
But I will survive. I’ve got my life-jacket on!
Nothing to do, now, but go down below and monitor the conditions. I call my wife and tell her I’m fine. And then hang up and listen. It is now well after midnight, but it is very hard to sleep. Around 3 AM, the wind has slowed noticeably, making my worry lessen a lot. I sleep.
Still windy when I wake up at 11 AM, but completely normal. I find out later that the anemometer at Fisherman’s registered a gust of 56 miles an hour during my ordeal.
Holy shit. That’s a bucket load of wind. A new world’s record for me at sea. Perhaps because there just happened to be such an instrument, but still, worth marking. I also hear that somebody got “lost at sea” cause he put his 12 foot dinghy out to sea to help a friend (the whaler is 15 feet, in case you were curious). Then this morning, a search helicopter and airplane collided while searching for this guy, and 9 people were killed. Jeezus.
The next day, the wind is flat. The ocean is a very different beast. I bring Siwash back over to Fishermans. Our research goes on.
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