A sunken boat

I'll try to get out a bunch of blog posts soon to catch up on events. Pretty much everyone in my extended family has caught bluefish off the sailboat; we've had a few nice expeditions to Monomoy; Lucy got a haircut; Lucy learned to make long ocean passages fairly comfortably; Cynthia, Lucy, and I are currently on a short trip to Maine (and are anchored at an island infested with Monarch butterflies); and my brother's dog Bailey stayed with my mom for a month while his family traveled.

What else.... hmm... ah, yes, there was the line wind, combined with tornadoes, that ripped through the Cape, taking down trees, leaving folks without power for days, and sinking one of the family sailboats. 

On July 23 I drove to Hyannis to pick up Cynthia. In the hour or so before she arrived the wind howled and I had to pull over and simply wait. When we returned to Chatham, most homes had no power and trees blocked many roads. My boat seemed to be in fine shape, at least viewed from shore, but my uncle Bob called to say our family sailboat, a Mariner (19'), had sunk at the mooring and looked as if it were sinking further. We drove over to investigate.

Cynthia, Lucy, and I rowed out in a small rowboat suitable for smooth water and only took water over the side a few times. I snorkeled around the boat and found the current had driven the top of the mast into the sand and that the stern had sunk to the bottom with the outboard engine still attached.

So... attached a float to the outboard and released it from the boat so my cousin Peter and his son Sam could pull it from the water.

Then I tied a couple floats to the top of the mast, fighting the strong current,

and finally getting that loose from the sea bed. The stern, even relieved of the weight of the outboard, still sat firmly on the sea bed. And we were tired of fighting the current. We contemplated...

and resolved to return at slack tide the next day with fresh eyes and new plans. I swam to shore... and found the lost engine cowl about halfway in!

The second day's attack involved adding floats to the stern until it lifted from the sea bed, then using anchors and lines to swing the boat toward shore into fairly shallow water at high tide so that low tide would leave it in shallow water enough for us to empty it of water. This worked: we brought it near shore in the evening at high tide, then emptied it with my mom's assistance at low tide the following day.

Emptied, the boat floated well and we put it back on the mooring. Of course, there was all the cleaning and rinsing and sorting of cushions etc. And one of the companionway boards had floated off, so I fashioned new ones with salvaged plexiglass given to me in NC by Rick, the marina carpenter. And a week or two later, we sailed it around to Stage Harbor, pulled it from the water, and trailered it back to the house. Now the boat is safe, sound, and back in the driveway on it's trailer for the winter. But we really DO need to handle the lack of good flotation in the stern, a problem that caused most of our difficulties in getting the thing back upright.

As far as the rest of the town? Huge effort got trees cut up and power restored within two days. In the meantime some folks moved to hotels or stayed with friends who had generators. Cynthia and I simply moved onto my boat where we still had our solar power and refrigeration.

Having lived through this little storm and lost a boat to hurricane Irma, our hearts go out to those in the northern Bahamas who are going to need months to years to get back to normal.