The Incident

The Incident

This moment has defined our entire trip here, and been a continuous point of conversation and jokes.

It begins with a description of our boat, this being our former boat.

This boat was a 17 foot skiff with a 90hp engine. It formally had been swamped, pulled out of the water, thrown in a junk pile, and salvaged by LSU. In order to get it working and in legal order, the rusted switches were pulled, and jerryrigged. The bilge pump and running lights required alligator clips to work. In order for the bilge pump to work you had to manually connect the alligator clips to the battery. The wires from the engine to the battery were quite corroded.

The boat contained a very serious design flaw, the middle of the stern, where the engine was attached, was cut away, and never left with any sort of water outlet system or holes for stray water to drain out and not run into the boat. The barely floating boat, with gas, and a driver sat less than 6 inches above the water on the back end.

We ran this boat in a variety of situations, all of which it wasn't properly suited for. I heard it's only purpose was to drive across nice calm lakes. Not across 200 feet depth open water, or 1 foot shallow bays.

Oneday we decided to take this boat on a beach for lunch. Dan's background in boating is much more extensive than mine and he felt fine beaching a boat. With my lack of experience I went along with it, ready to see how you do it correctly.

At this particular beach there were small waves crashing on shore, and was fairly deep farther out. The wind was coming from the south east and the waves were coming in from the south west. We rolled on in and got out of the boat once we had hit the sandy bottom, stern facing the waves. Dan told me to grab the anchor and throw it on shore to keep us from floating out at sea from the upcoming tide. As I'm running out to the beach, I turn around, and we notice the waves crashing right onto the back of the boatt. As I walked back towards the boat, a big wave crashed into the back of the boat, lowering the boat, allowing more and more waves to crash into it. By the time I got back, the boat was already straight on the bottom of the sand. We tried pushing the bow towards the waves and tried frantically to bail the boat, but it was useless. The bilgepump was sunk and impossible to connect under the murky water, if that even would have helped. We tried for a couple minutes before realizing the boat the was too full of water, and started pulling everything out of the boat. This included one 5 foot action packer full of our gear, that was so heavy one person could only lift it with the fear of a sinking boat weighing on their shoulders. Luckily it floated, and if we needed help we could drop it in the water for a second to rest. Also included were three 12 gallon gas cans weighing somewhere between 30-50 pounds.

With speed and a lot of effort we brought everything on land, trying to asses the situation quickly. The tide was coming in quickly, meaning more and more water would be getting into the boat. The quickest solution was to try to get help from a beach crew doing work about one mile down the beach. Dan ran off as quick as he could, in full waders and boots, while I stayed with the boat and equipment.

As he approached the crews, one of the boat captains recognized an emergency and met him about a kilometer from them in the boat. He jumped onto the boat and began to explain the situation. When the captain attempted to leave the shallow water, his boat just shuddered as the waves pushed it into the sand, beaching them as well. So Dan and the crew got out, and had to push this boat out to sea.

About 30 minutes went by before the boat showed up, refusing to go very far into shallows. They sat offshore for 10 minutes before deciding on anything to do. The crew members refused to help us, believing the boat to be sunk and a lost cause, famously saying, “That boats sunk”. Luckily, the captain was more optimistic and decided to try. I was forced to wade out into the deeper water to try to understand the crews hollers. The truth is I never heard a word they said that windy day, I just caught the rope they threw to me, and tied it to the bow of the boat by guess.

With the rope tied to the bow, the captain began to drive off attempting to pull us off of the shore. After many attempts, the bow finally pointed into the waves and I held it there while Dan jumped into the water and joined me. At this point the waves had gone way over my chest, leaving my waders completely full of water, and me soaked. The wind was blowing 10mph and it was 50 degrees outside, but the adrenaline kept me from feeling any of this.

Dan jumped in the boat and attempted to start it, but the battery completely covered in water, just sparked and refused to start. Luckily we had a trolling motor battery. The battery shocked dan twice as he tried to switch the battery. The new battery luckily worked, and we drove off. Dan kept us on plane while I used a manual bilge pump to pump all the water out of the boat. After about 20 minutes, the boat was empty of water and we returned to shore. This time I held the boats bow into the waves as Dan carried half the stuff, then switched as he became too tired from the haul. It's one thing to do this in a swimsuit, but with waders filled with water, and a heavy float coat life jacket on, is quite another. I was told later that a dolphin jumped 30 feet behind me as I held up the bow, Dan just explained, “I didn't tell you because I didn't know how you felt about large aquatic mammals”

The hour trip home was quiet and cold, as the adrenaline wore off leaving the cold, water, and wind to eat into me. Once home, I sat in the shower for 30 minutes trying to warm up my body. It was after that we began to really talk about what had happened.

There were many things we did wrong, and many that were destined to go wrong.

For starters, Dan had never beached a boat with waves breaking so close to shore, and truthfully we never should. That section of beach has two very close sandbars. One before the wave break, a deep section, than an abrupt sandbar as the waves break. This forces you to go to the second sandbar before jumping out and leaving you in a very dangerous situation.

The second thing was where the anchor and bow should have been pointing. The bow should point into the waves, and the anchor should generally be dropped in the direction of the wind. The wave action and wind was so strong that day, that I don't believe either of these would have worked that well. As we tried to pull out the boat the first time, we would fail as the intersecting forces would push the boat to the side, beaching it again. While pointing the stern towards the waves was a bad idea, it feels like we were just weren't supposed to land on that beach.

The last thing wrong was our boat and gear. With the back end so close to the water, anything approaching the back end is a danger. This boat simply wasn't made to take any waves coming. The salvaged boat had lost many of it's safety, with the battery situation and wiring a hazard for any emergency situation. The bilge pump connections admist a mess of other exposed wires, and connections that were already corroded. The next day we took the boat out, I tried to start the engine, and again it failed. I tried jiggling the wire and the battery connection literally broke off from corrosion. Had that happened the previous day, we would have been sunk. Which is maybe where that boat should have stayed. What a piece of junk.

There are many times in history when flaws are only discovered when something goes wrong. The size of the gear box, requiring two people to carry, never was an issue till we needed to carry it by ourselves. The next day we moved everything into a smaller, lighter, box and can now be carried by one person easily.

The whole ordeal is now joked about openly by everyone on the other crews. Being in the shallows, we never almost died, we simply almost lost everything and a boat. It was a physical ordeal, leaving us sore for days, and quite a test. I never can full explain the helplessness and naivety I felt when it happened. Not sure what to do, and figuring out there is nothing you can do. I couldn't even make proper suggestions at the time, not even sure how the boat worked. I now make a strong effort to learn to handle the boat myself, and know everything about it. I became so complacent with our roles, Dan as the driver, and me as the birder, that I never cared if I didn't know how the boat worked. That's not actually our roles, it was just the easiest ones playing to our strengths.

Since then, we gained two new boats, one 27 foot Carolina Skiff, and a 20 foot mud motor. Both doing very well at their respective roles. Our boat was given to another crew, where I heard they almost swamped it as well just trying to get it in the water. What a piece of junk