‘We are as beached as’, I said to myself. I turned to see Marty’s (aka Martin Lloyd) reaction. Stressed was the first word that came to mind.
Six hours earlier…
I awoke to a lovely morning. The bird song was calling me to rise. I quickly made a cuppa in my travel mug, grabbed the dogs, their life jackets, my iPhone and jumped on my kayak to go for a paddle. It was lovely high tide, about 20 degrees C and perfect conditions to go up the Foxwell Island inlet to Jackson’s place. A beautiful spot where our friend Daniel Cooke buried his dog Jackson.
We had a magical, chilled paddle which I captured on a Facebook live post… We paddled and drifted, and I answered questions as they popped up on the live post and sipped my tea. It was bliss. All too soon, it was time to head back to the boat.
4.5 hours earlier…
I was back on the boat, and our friend ‘Jazzy’ phoned saying she would be there in 45 minutes for a coffee. I grinned. We had not seen Jazzy in about a month. We love hanging out. Time to wake Marty. I turned and looked out the cockpit. ‘Interesting; the land was a little close… I went up upstairs, too close, I felt a slight roll, turned on the instruments and waited for the depth to come live. It was 0.0… still waiting… It flashed 0.1m meters… and flashed back to 0.0. Shiver me timbers, we were touching the bottom and it was not yet low tide.
We were not yet ‘beached as’…
I started the engine, woke Marty, he threw on some clothes and we set about finding a deeper spot. We checked the wind, it was going to pick up and they were strong gusting northerlies. We decided the passage opposite Santa Barbara Park for better shelter. As we motored around the corner, we realised everyone else had the same idea and were there before us.
We turned and headed back. Saboteur is solid, she is heavy in the water and in rough conditions we can barely feel it. We both did the calc’s. How much longer did we have before low tide (it was going to be super low (0.2m))? At what time and how much further would the water drop? We both came up with the same answer. (This rarely happens). Our calculations told us that we needed to anchor with .7 meters of water under us and we would be fine.
We found the spot a little further into the deeper water of the channel than where we were previously. Ping, I received a text from Jazzy, she was at the café. We jumped in the dinghy and headed in. Had a lovely breakfast at the @Quarterdeck Kitchen & Bar. Seriously good.
3 hours earlier…
We said goodbye to Jazzy. We did a visual check on Saboteur and we thought she might be touching the bottom, but we were not worried. The bottom is soft sand and we were already at low tide. Saboteur has a solid keel and a full skeg protecting the rudder. And touching a soft bottom occasionally is par for the course in the Moreton bay area.
So anyway, we jumped in the car. We headed to the Dive Warehouse where I grabbed myself my snorkelling gear. Happy dance.
All in all, it had been a lovely morning.
We headed back to the boat, parked the car and jumped in the dinghy and around the corner…
‘Beached as….’
Oh my God we were ‘beached as’. Seriously ‘beached as’.
We saw a dinghy circling our boat. It turned out it was our friends, Steve and Jane who were taking photos to send to us. It would appear that we had our calc’s wrong, but how? We would work that out later. Our subsequent discussion revealed how. Jane said low tide was 10 minutes ago. It couldn’t be… and with that we realised that we had done our calc’s on the wrong tide data. We had calculated on the mouth of the Coomera river not the end of it… Easy mistake.
Our baby was looking like a beached whale. We were seriously beached as. She was at 30-40 degrees. I said to Marty let’s go back to the café. There really was not much we could do until the tide turned.
As we pulled up at the café in the dinghy we hit our propeller prop. Bugger. Martin decided to go back to the boat and put the fresh meat we had bought in the fridge and come back. The dinghy outboard was now useless with the prop free-wheeling. He pulled out the oars and rowed. He shouted as he passed, ‘order me a coffee.’ I went to the café, ordered him the largest flat white they had and me a glass of house red. I figured I needed it. Marty returned, and told me about the mess in the boat… All things considered it was not too bad.
I sipped my wine, while Marty sipped his coffee.
We saw our mast slightly starting to rise. Maybe 25-30 degrees now. It was time to head back to the boat. The challenge was that with the rising tide and the strong winds, they had pushed Saboteur further into the shallows. While we were away, the wind had turned the boat against the current as it slackened at low tide, and by then both the wind and the incoming current had conspired to push Saboteur further ashore.
First decision: We had to put the second anchor out to stop us from being pushed further onto the shallows. The anchor line was securely attached in the anchor locker and we manually feed the entire chain and line out, carried it around to the beam of the boat and secured it to a cleat.
Marty jumped in the dinghy (remember, we had no outboard motor) and rowed from the swim board into the current, then grabbed the side of the boat. I lowered the anchor to him followed by the chain and the warp (line). He rowed the boat out as far as he could and dropped the anchor.
He rowed back, secured the dinghy and climbed back on board via the swim deck and back into the cockpit. We took up the slack of the second anchor warp around the starboard sheet winch. We put a good amount of tension to that anchor to prevent the boat being pushed further ashore.
And so our ‘beached as’ afternoon settled down…
We were able to gradually regain control of Saboteur by taking up the slack on both anchors with the rising tide. I grabbed some red wine and Marty put on Talking Heads, ‘On the road to nowhere.’ And we sang, danced and laughed the afternoon away. When we were close to level again and we could start the clean-up.
When we were off the bottom, we moved the boat for the third time that day.
We were truly happy to have rescued ourselves from being ‘beached as’ and having mastered using two anchors to get out of trouble.
A crazy afternoon but we were happy… now we had to get organised, as we had guests coming for dinner…
