June 19 2016: The Bathtub is where?

This day was stormy. Whenever I hear running footsteps to my cabin, I start to worry. This time the worry was well-placed. It was Jeff, telling me that it looked like the Bathtub drug anchor and was resting up on the beach.

At first, I underestimated the issue and thought that he and I could right it alone. Jeff is so easy going, even though he thought I might be just a little bit crazy to think we could do it on our own, he was game to try. (Really, it's OK to say to me, "I think you might be just a little bit crazy right now.") Luckily, I gave it another thought and asked for the help of the crew.

This is the kind of day where there will be no pictures because everyone has everything they've got focused on solving the problem. The problem, it turned out, was a broken anchor line. Eeeee! I'm so grateful that the Bathtub tends to come to shore when it breaks loose. Not all our skiffs do. It wouldn't either, in the right wind. But when it has a choice, it stays near home.

I kind of kicked myself when I saw that the anchor line had broken. I noticed it wasn't much of an anchor line when I first got back from Anchorage and started to organize a replacement for it. I'd even gotten as far as tossing the replacement anchor line into the skiff, waiting for --- I don't know what --- before I untied the old one and replaced it with the new one. Well, I waited too long and the thing I was afraid of, happened.

It was Oksanna who noticed it. Jeff reports that she came calmly into the cabin and quietly mentioned that Bathtub was at the edge of the water. Despite its gentle delivery, the information got Jeff's immediate attention, and he came back to get me.

When we got to the Bathtub, we could see immediately what had happened. That meant that we didn't have an anchor. Well, we actually did have an anchor on the shore and I threw it into the boat, but it didn't have a chain so its effectiveness would have been questionable... but better than nothing. Running without an anchor is against my rules. My rules remind me that we need a way to go, a way to stop, and a way to get the water out. I also have a rule about life jackets, but those are more about the people than the boat. Despite not having much of an anchor, we still needed to get the skiff out to deeper water because we were in stormy conditions and beached in the swamp-zone (the steep part of the beach).

One of the problems with weather like this is that we must keep our bow to the wind and the waves to reduce the chance of taking water. But when we do that, the surf break lifts the bow, driving the stern into the water, and the outboard with it. There are big rocks on our beach this year, and in a contest between the big rocks and the blade of the outboard's propeller, the rock will win. So we have to get the boat in pretty deep water so that if a breaker lifts the bow, the water under the prop will be deep enough that even if there are rocks down there, the lowered outboard won't reach them. But to do that, anyone pushing the boat from outside will probably be in too deep to stay dry -- and probably too deep to control the boat as well. That's where the running line comes in. On a day like this, it's our pull-out line.

The boat had come to shore close to the inside site, so were were in a good position to maneuver it to the running line, jump in and pull. Fast, before taking too much water and swamping. This is a very hard experience to prepare new crew for. How do we explain how the water can pick up the boat and knock them over with it? And that the best defense against that is to hang on to the side of the boat and go with it. (This is why you never put yourself between the boat and another hard thing - like another boat or a dock or, if you're close to the shore, the ground or a truck. In that case, if you go with the boat, you may become the bumper between two hard and heavy objects that are colliding with each other.) If a boat knocks you down, the best thing to do is get out of the way, fast. Matt got knocked over and he didn't get out of the way, but he did stand back up fast and then he held on. We finally got it to the running line and got the running line between the fairleads. When the wind is blowing that hard, it will be very happy to rip the running line out of our hands and shove us back onto the shore. So we hang on and we get some additional help from the fairleads.

Three people pulled out (learning the benefits of pulling as a unit) while the rest of us bailed all those gallons of extra water out of the boat. Water is a particularly dangerous substance to have a lot of in a boat because of the way it will shift so fast to whatever side is a little bit lower. Suddenly, it becomes a lot lower, maybe dangerously so. So, as long as someone else has the boat under control - by pulling or at anchor or underway, bail.

Once we were out of the breakers and deep enough for the outboard to be safe if a roller hit us, Jeff lowered the outboard and got it going. It isn't running as smoothly as it has in the past, so I was even more uneasy about not having an anchor. If the outboard died, then all we'd have would be was half an anchor our bailing buckets as we drifted... wherever. We had been worrying about the possibility of the other skiffs taking too much water in the storm, so we figured that since we were out there anyway, we'd drive by to see if we needed to jump in and bail.

They seemed OK so we turned our focus to figuring out where we would leave the Bathtub... without an anchor. We decided on clipping it to the outside buoy of the inside site. So, first step is to go back to shore, drop off most of the crew, pick up the row boat and take two of us out to the buoy. The wind didn't stop blowing, so it was still hard to hold the running line. We had it between the fairleads and were trying to get to calmer water without the surf break... when one of us must have loosened our grip, the running line shot forward out of our hands, pulled a fairlead out of its pocket and threw it overboard, and sent the skiff hurtling toward shore. But Jeff is fast! He got that outboard down and started before we'd lost much depth, and just came around to get the rowboat, without the help of the running line.

I thought it would be wisest to bring the rowboat in on the running line after securing the Bathtub... but always take your paddles. Jeff and David D volunteered to take the skiff out. As we were waiting for the row boat crew to make it back in, Matt remarked that he's never had a job this exciting before. I was glad to hear that, since I also knew he was wet and maybe cold. I was glad he found excitement in that. I do too, actually. It's something about trying to see how far you can push yourself, and still keep going.

I wished so many times for a camera during that whole operation. It would have been great to get a photo of the skiff standing on its stern as we were trying to get it off the shore, and when David D and Jeff were coming back in, I'd have loved to get a picture of them in the little boat. Much of the time, because of the height of the waves, we could only see their heads, not the boat under them.

After the tide went down, David N took the ranger out on an anchor hunt... and they found it! One of the photos published in an earlier post helped him know where to look for it.

In other news, we realized that we didn't have Sarah's permit yet. Since Roger couldn't come this year, we decided to transfer the permit out of his name and into Sarah's. It's a process that requires the permit holder to file an "Intent to transfer" 60 days before the transfer can take effect. When Roger told me in March that one of the conditions of his promotion at work was that he couldn't be gone for the whole summer as he's done before, I asked him to send in an "Intent" and he did so. Then in May, he and Sarah did the next steps of getting the permit transferred. This seemed lime plenty of time so that it would easily be here by the time Sarah was, on the 16th. Really, I thought it would be here earlier and I was a little worried that we might miss some early fish. When the permit didn't show up in our PO Box here, I figured they must have sent it to Sarah in Seattle. But no... they hadn't. And we're fishing the next day? Yikes! We'll have to start figuring out where it is and get it here.