I thought you all would be amused, on this rainy morning, to hear the story of our journey last week to the pump-out station.
Our friend Frank, who had offered (or had we begged him? I can't remember) to go with us on our first trip to pump out, was going to be out of town for a week. So the surprising realization that the tank was full, coupled with our desire to have Frank along, caused us to make the three hour journey up and back to the pump-out station rather suddenly, with minimal preparation, all at low tide; a bad time for boats like ours to navigate in this unpredictable waterway. But we had to go. So to speak. Bob started the engine, and this engine loves to start. So far so good! We left the slip without incident as well, Frank helping to keep the boat off the dock, against the incoming tide, then hopping on at the last minute. I always get nervous when Frank does this. It seems like he's never going to make it back onto the boat. The last thing in the world I want is to be on this boat alone with Bob. When it is not securely tied up in the slip, that is. Then, you'll be happy to hear, I'm fine.
So we went. And it seemed right out of the slip like Bob was going to head in the wrong direction for a while; Tommy yelling at me from the docks, gesturing, “St. James is that way.” I nod, comically, and shrug a big shrug. What else can I do. Eventually, the circling came to an end, and we began to make progress in the correct direction.
Going there was just okay. I had taken a little shot of spiced rum before we left, and kept wondering if it had kicked in, or if I had taken enough, or if I should perhaps take more, because from my point of view at least, the atmosphere was fairly tense. At one spot along the waterway, we were in about 6 feet of water, which, for a boat with a 6'5” draft, is not enough. Bob kept needing to get sitting higher, (the captain's chair has not yet been re-installed), and I was charged with finding him cushions to sit on, and then more cushions, because seeing where you're going turns out to be an important thing, and then with locating us on my phone, on the navigation app, which turned out to be amusing, because the app kept trying to get us to make a turn, anywhere, and get off that water and onto a street like everybody else! Then I did things like rub Bob's back, which may possibly have annoyed him, I don't know, and get him water, and get me water (nervousness makes me thirsty-- it's my body's preparation for peeing my pants.)
But we got there, finally. I called the marina on the phone first, to let them know that our arrival was imminent, and that we would need help at the dock-- catching the lines is what it's called. But the phone went right to voice mail. Grr. Then I hailed them on the VHF-- a more sailorly thing to do, anyway-- first pressing the wrong button and speaking into the thing, but somehow intuiting that I was talking to myself. I tried a second, more likely-looking button, and aha! It worked. Someone at St. James actually answered, and said they'd be on the dock pronto to catch lines. This assurance, by the way, made by dock masters and dockhands the world over, is almost never true. It must feel somehow demeaning to be standing on a dock, waiting to catch the lines of a boat that has not yet arrived. So they never do it. The best you can hope for, when you come into the dock, is that they'll be sauntering casually down the ramp, 30 feet away. Well, they weren't on the dock this day, either, and we really could've used their help. Something unexpected happened, or maybe something that should have happened unexpectedly didn't, I'm still not sure. All I remember is seeing the dockmaster, who was now jogging down the ramp, yelling something like SLOW THAT BOAT DOWN!!! Bob had attempted to put the boat in reverse by this time, which is, by the way, how you slow a boat down, there being, unfortunately, no brakes, but it was decidedly NOT in reverse-- it was gliding smoothly along at an alarming rate of speed, everything getting very close very fast-- the dock, the dockmaster, the dockhand. I threw lines to them as we sailed past, and even though we made significant contact with the side of the dock, and the two men were by now pulling back on the lines with all their strength and body weight, the boat still did not stop. It continued merrily onward toward, oh, look! a small powerboat sitting directly in front of us, broadsides to the fuel dock, with two elderly couples in it, wearing mostly white but with cheery colorful visors on the women, all four lifting cocktails just then in a toast to their impending simultaneous death.
Did we get yelled at, when that boat stopped, finally, about four feet from the little power boat. “You could've killed those people! You could've knocked over this fuel pump! I thought that kid (the dockhand) was going to go in the water and get crushed.” Etc., etc., etc. The dockmaster had, at some point, called out to the “kid” to let go of the lines. He didn't yell “save yourself!” but he was thinking it, I'm sure. He went on and on, this cranky old dockmaster, and Bob, who was presumably still trying to shut down the engine and perhaps change his underpants, was not responding, so I finally stood tall at my spot on the bow (where I had successfully, but nearly too late, thrown lines) and pronounced “It's not like he did it on purpose,” and then, immediately following, but sotto voce (“so shut the f. up.”).
That, and the fact that I hadn't been the one driving when we crashed into the fuel dock and almost killed four people, seemed to establish me as the one with sense in the family (which is, I'm sure, the first time for that), and I was commissioned to do all the hooking up of the pumping-out paraphernalia. I doubt that boat owners are normally required to do this themselves, but I think the dockmaster was a bit too shaky at this point to do it himself. He was also still mad--visions of boats cut in half, bodies flying in the air, fuel tanks bursting into flames were still dancing in his head, and not in a nice way. So I got everything hooked up, and Bob emerged from the boat and apologized, and was once again berated for not knowing how to handle his boat, and it was established that Bob remembered now (it had been a VERY long time since he'd driven this boat) that when one shifts into reverse, one must rev the engine first, in neutral, so that the blades will stop spinning the wrong way, and start spinning the correct (opposite, reverse) way. Otherwise the boat will start moving in reverse, eventually, but it will be long after the fuel dock, and the little power boat, and possibly even the dock where the power boat was tied up. The power boat people, by the way, took this incident very well. They never said a word to us, and we were certainly close enough for a few moments. Maybe they were temporarily robbed of the ability to speak.
So pump-out completed, some token fuel taken on, the dockmaster very gingerly (with Frank's help), backed the boat, using lines, around the corner of the fuel dock. With repeated instructions to Bob to “take it easy,” he gratefully saw us off, away from his marina, no doubt hoping to be retired before the next time we come back. Frank hopped aboard for the second time at a hair-raising last minute. (Now I really don't want to be stuck alone on this boat with Bob.)
And we begin the journey back. What with another well-deserved dose of rum (Frank joined me this time) and the hairy part over, we all unwound and joked and reminisced about the looks on the faces of all the people we almost killed, and the fact that it would have been a real paperwork mess just to hit that boat, let alone cut it in half and wipe out all the occupants. I would definitely have had to hook up a printer. The trip back seemed easier, and I drove for a while, through the non-treacherous parts. I don't mind doing it, out in the wide open spaces, and I wanted to give Bob a chance to recover his equilibrium, since docking the boat at our slip once more was still before us.
Then we lost the fender. Three things were wrong with this fender. One: it was not attached to the boat. But it was lying against the starboard lifeline (where we were going to need fenders, in our new slip) as if it was. So Frank kicked it over the side, like you do with a fender that is attached to the boat, and it hit the water and floated away, like anything that is not attached to a boat. Very funny, actually, but fenders are expensive. So Frank suggests, and Bob agrees, that we have lots of maneuvering room here in the waterway, Bob should practice with the boat in a man-overboard drill. Which just means get back to the thing, and bring it back on board. (There are other fancy kinds of man-overboard drills involving specific regimens that no one can remember when a man is actually overboard and everyone is freaked out. My only solid man-overboard plan is to throw everything that will float overboard after him or her, in the hope that they can get to something and hang onto it for the undoubtedly protracted time it will take me to get back to them.)
Okay. Fender in the water. Big clumsy sluggish boat pursuing it. We actually get to it, and Frank gets a good grab on the rope and, voila! the fender is back in the water, and Frank has a short length of wet rope in his hand. I had not tied a knot on both ends of the fender. I had my reasons, but we all know now they were probably stupid. Knots in both ends from now on. So we continue, in pursuit of this fender, which has now grown very afraid, and is making for the docks and the pilings and the places it knows we can't go. Except Bob has gotten into this, and thinks he CAN pursue the poor thing into docks and pilings, and oh! Looky here! A stone breakwater! We haven't run into one of THOSE yet today!! So for the first time I turn to him, look him in the eye and snarl “Have you lost your mind??” Which cut down on the merriment considerably, and caused him to put the boat in reverse (it worked this time) and withdraw. The very funny thing was that, as we floated away, in defeat, the little fender was happily making its way down the entrance to a marina that looked so much like St. James to me that I somehow, ridiculously, thought that was where it was going-- back to that dockmaster who would surely understand its defection from our boat, and take it in and treat it the way a fender should be treated. BUT WE WERE A HALF HOUR AWAY FROM ST. JAMES MARINA. I should have known, I'd been driving the boat for the past 20 minutes. This little glitch in my thinking would have been fine, if I'd kept it to myself. And it would have been okay-ish, if I'd told only Bob and Frank. But no. I waited till we got back to our marina, and off the boat, and were re-hashing the entire adventure in which Bob starred as the goof-up, to make my move. There, in front of four men who NEVER think wrong things, I DREW A PICTURE IN THE SAND, asking HOW could that fender have been floating down the channel into the St. James Marina, when we should have been OVER HERE-- a long way away from there, by then? And they all looked at me incredulously for a long time, and then my sweet husband, who knows how I think, explained nicely to me that that was not St. James Marina, it was another marina, far away from St. James and in fact very close to OUR marina, that just happened to resemble, from the channel, St. James. Because HOW, in the HOLY HELL, the rest of them broke out, could it possibly have been St. James Marina? How much rum DID I drink? What was I smoking in between the rum?? Did I pass out at any time?? I told them (A) I am very visual, and the two spots looked identical to me, and B) I have a very special kind of brain, where I can know, in one part of my brain, that we were actually very far away, to the west of the St. James Marina when we lost the fender, and yet in the other part of my brain I can also hold the belief that we have just arrived, from the east, to the St. James Marina. And lost the fender. Eventually I got it all straightened out, but nothing short of instantly would do for these guys.
So the re-docking. Before the public humiliation. Tommy and Evan hanging out on the dock, where they have cleared out our new space. And we are so pleased, because we have wanted this space from the beginning. Plans are made, a little powerboat (again!) gets in the way; we can't make the huge wide turn Bob was planning to make, the tide is very low, the wind is coming from the South, there is about 5 feet of mud in this slip and when we get about halfway in we are in a diagonal attitude. So Evan and Tommy pull on lines, with all their might and body weight (sound familiar?), and Frank pushes off from the cement piling as hard as he can, and mitigates the scraping off of about 6 inches of the edge of our cap rail. MY cap rail. My beautiful teak cap rail, some of which is in the water now, as shavings. But they get us in, eventually, and now, as mementos, we have the thick black line, about 8 feet long, on the starboard bow where we mashed the dock at St. James. And amidships, port side, the damaged cap rail. See? I'm learning. I know all the right words for where we messed up this boat.
