Suddenly Overboard

by Tom Lochhaas

  So much to do, so many details to take care of, but at least the weather was cooperating. The day dawned cloudless and warm, and the sky was the color of a robin’s egg. “God,” he thought to himself. “I love autumn in New England.”

  Even after more than 80 New England autumns, he still stood tall and strong. Muscular and weathered from a lifetime of sailing these waters, he could easily pass for a man 10 years younger. By all accounts, he was the perfect sailor: experienced, passionate, knowledgeable, patient, and perhaps most important, cautious.

  “My father was the invincible iron man,” his son wistfully reminisced a year later. “He wasn’t careless or reckless. He thought things through. He was adventurous but cautious.” His voice trailed off as he thought about what might have happened that fateful late September day.

  The day started out just as hundreds, maybe thousands, of other sailing days had begun for the couple. The day before, they had completed their last cruise of the summer and picked up a mooring not far from their house, then relaxed on shore that night for the first time in several days. In the morning his wife drove them to the dock and dropped him off so he could take the dinghy out to their sloop and motor in to pick her up for the final day sail to the marina where the boat would be hauled out for the winter.

  “Don’t worry, honey, I’ll be fine,” she later remembered him saying. After all, he had done this hundreds, maybe thousands, of times before. It was really second nature for him: step down into the dinghy, give the priming bulb a couple of squeezes, set the choke, and start the outboard motor. When he was satisfied the motor was sufficiently warmed up, he’d cast off the painter and be on his way.

  And, just like hundreds, maybe thousands of times before, he didn’t bother to put on a life jacket.

  “To be honest, my father never wore a life jacket in the dinghy,” his son said later. “He was a strong swimmer, very athletic. Even well into his seventies, he would take off his shirt at the bow of the boat and just dive into the ocean and swim.”

  So today she parked the car and walked up to higher ground to get a better view of her husband and their boat. But even though she tried from different angles, she couldn’t see the dinghy tied up to their sloop. She began to feel concerned but wasn’t panicky; maybe the dink had drifted around to the side she couldn’t see. But when she suddenly saw the empty dinghy drifting on the incoming tide up the harbor between other moored boats, she ran to a nearby house and called the local police.

  “I suppose only the eyes from above truly know what happened that morning,” his son recounted. “We’ll never really know exactly how my father ended up in the water, but once he did, between the shock of what may have happened, the currents, and the water temperature . . .” and his voice trailed off again.

  A search-and-rescue effort was mounted immediately, with the Coast Guard, state police, and environmental police joining in. The dinghy was found with the engine still running. Officers located his body not far up the harbor, where the tide had carried him.

  What had started out as a perfect late-summer season-ending day of leisurely sailing ended tragically in an instant. As in so many unwitnessed accidents, no one truly knows what happened.

  This narrative was contributed by Richard Joyce of Newburyport, Massachusetts, after several detailed conversations with the victim’s son.

  Briefly

  Northern California, December 2010. The couple had completed their short voyage and were securely anchored before sunset, which came startlingly early as the winter solstice approached. The air temperature plummeted with the sun, so they went below for dinner and drinks. He sometimes drank more than usual after a day of sailing, and tonight perhaps even more because of the early dark and cold. Still, he took his boat responsibilities seriously and a little after eight o’clock he went back up on deck to check the anchor. Cleaning up in the galley, his wife paused the clatter of washing dishes to listen, then smiled as she heard the steady splash as he urinated over the rail. She went back to washing dishes and waited for him to come back. After a few minutes she called up the companionway, but there was no answer. She ran up the steps and stood on the cockpit seat to look over the dodger but he wasn’t there; he wasn’t anywhere. She went up to the bow and checked the water all around the boat—nothing. She yelled his name. She saw how the current was sweeping by the boat and realized he could be some distance away already, so she ran below and called in the emergency. Search boats, divers, and a helicopter arrived and searched all night, knowing he could not survive the 50°F water long without a life jacket, but unwilling to suspend the search too soon. By dawn, however, everyone had accepted the inevitable. He was gone, the fatal result of perhaps simply tripping over a line on deck.

  Lake Michigan, north of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, October 2011. On a cool fall evening, the fisherman on the pier finished packing his gear and paused to watch a sailboat approaching the pier. It had slowed to a crawl, and the only sailor visible on board climbed out of the cockpit and made his way forward along the side deck carrying a coiled line. He looked to be about 60 and was moving somewhat unsteadily, which the fisherman first thought might be due to arthritis or an injury. He put down his tackle box to go over to take the man’s dockline, if that was what was needed, but before he got close he saw the sailor try to throw a loop of the line over the top of a piling. He missed by some distance and fumbled when he started pulling it back in, and just as the fisherman realized the man was more likely intoxicated than injured, he saw the man lean out too far and fall into the water. He ran to the edge of the pier near where the man was flailing his arms. Others nearby were shouting, and he heard someone phoning for help as he reached down and was just able to grab the man’s hand to keep his head above water. The sailor was not wearing a life jacket and was too heavy to pull out, even with the help of officers who arrived almost immediately. By then hypothermia had already set in and the sailor was a dead weight; they could only keep him high enough in the water so he could breathe. When the first diver in a dry suit arrived and jumped in the water beside the victim, even he couldn’t get a harness safely around the man to hoist him out. Ultimately it took three divers in the water to get him out, and then he was rushed to the hospital. The sailor was lucky to survive. It all happened unexpectedly and so fast; if the fisherman had not been right there, if there had been even a minute’s delay, the outcome could have been very different.

  CHAPTER 5

  Run Aground

  It is surprising to some that even in this day of inexpensive GPS units, boats still go aground on rocks, beaches, sandbars, reefs, and other shoal areas. But really, should this be any more surprising than the fact that boaters still drown in an age of inexpensive PFDs? As in most areas of boating safety, the issue is often that sailors who are not expecting a problem are less prepared to cope once it happens. As the stories in this chapter suggest, good seamanship is needed both to prevent grounding in the first place and to manage the situation if it does occur.

  Tidal Estuary

  This estuary area on England’s east coast is notorious for its tidal shallows, and all three men on the sailboat knew they should be doing this crossing on a rising rather than a falling tide. But it had been a long voyage home from Spain, made even longer by earlier headwinds that had slowed their progress even under power. They’d planned to reach this area of shoals well ahead of high tide at 9 P.M., but it was after 3 A.M. and they still weren’t through. They were too tired to hold off and wait for the next tide, though, so they watched the water and kept their fingers crossed.

  Sadly, negatives always seemed to happen in multiples. They were late, they were tired, and visibility was poor. One crew watched forward into the fog, one studied the radar, and the helmsman followed the route they’d programmed in long ago on the tiny chartplotter.

  Another problem was that their vector chart for this area was set to the wrong scale. And someone had forgotten to bring a large-scale paper chart to consult for better deta
il.

  So they were more aggravated than surprised when the keel struck mud and the boat shuddered to a stop. It was a soft grounding, and fortunately no one was thrown forward and hurt. They assumed the keel was not damaged, at least not seriously. They were in no imminent danger and had time to talk over the best plan of action.

  The main problem was that the tide was still falling and would be for an hour and a half. If they didn’t get free very soon, the boat would lie over to one side, possibly bringing water aboard, and worse, they’d be delayed by hours more.

  The skipper shifted to reverse and revved the engine. The prop spun furiously but the boat didn’t budge. They conferred briefly, then moved the boom far out to one side and put the weight of both crew on it to heel the boat and thus shorten its draft and hopefully break free. Again he gunned the engine, but they remained stuck.

  So they talked again. The 11-meter sailboat’s draft was 1.4 meters, and they figured the water now was only about 1.2 meters deep. The last option was to carry the smaller Danforth anchor back to deeper water and try to kedge off with a winch. It seemed a good plan, but it would take too much time to pump up the inflatable dinghy. So the skipper reluctantly volunteered to carry out the anchor, tied a long line around his waist, and slipped off the starboard aft quarter into the cold water. “Keep it hard in reverse,” he called back. “Maybe she’ll break free still.”

  One of the crew went to the helm and operated the throttle while the other paid out some line and readied the anchor to lower it to the skipper, who was standing chest deep in the water beside the boat.

  It happened so fast that at first they weren’t sure what was going on. One moment they were looking at the skipper in the water and the next he was gone. They tried to locate him with a flashlight but without success. Then they saw that the line he’d tied around his waist was pulled down along the hull and under the boat. “Neutral!” shouted the one at the rail. He yanked hard on the line, but it was taut as a bar down into the black water. The skipper had somehow been pulled beneath the boat.

  “Kill the engine!” he shouted. Checking that his knife was still on his belt, he climbed over the rail and jumped in the water. He seized the line and felt down along it as far as he could, then he filled his lungs and ducked under, pulling himself down into the dark.

  The water was totally black and shockingly cold. The tidal current surging past threw off his equilibrium, and it seemed to take minutes to pull himself down the line. He struggled on, and then his fingers touched the cold steel of the prop shaft and found that the line was tightly wrapped around it. But where was the skipper? Then he realized that a free loop in the line had caught on the prop, twisting in both sections of line along the shaft, and he let the current pull him farther aft along the shaft.

  The skipper was still struggling, but only weakly, when his friend’s fingers touched his sodden clothes. Frantically the friend tried to find the rope where it was tied around the skipper’s waist. Then his lungs were bursting and he had to go back up for air.

  Down again, following the line, not as disoriented this time, and he quickly reached the skipper. The skipper’s body jerked once at his friend’s touch, then stilled. Where was the damn line wrapped around him? He fought the current, feeling in the dark along the skipper’s body with one hand while holding on to the prop shaft with the other, and then had to surface again for air.

  On the third attempt he found the rope around the skipper’s waist, but it cut so deeply into the skipper’s flesh that he couldn’t get a finger between it and the skin to be able to work the knife blade in. The rope was cinched tight against his ribs. Finally he clawed a finger beneath it, but before he could reach for his knife with his other hand he ran out of air again and had to surface.

  Now he knew he had to cut the rope no matter what, even if he sliced up the skipper at the same time.

  He was exhausted, the cold water sapping his strength as he went down for the fourth time. He had no idea how much time had passed—seconds or minutes or more—but he was going to get him free now at any cost.

  This time he found the rope quickly and with brute force he shoved two fingers between it and the skin, held on, and sawed at the line as hard as he could.

  It gave. Freed, they were both caught by the current and swept back as he struggled to stand in the mud. He shouted the moment his face broke the surface, and the beam of the flashlight held by the crewman on board found them immediately some 3 meters off the stern. As he worked to pull the skipper’s motionless body above the surface and back toward the boat against the current, the crew on board threw him a line and helped pull them both back to the stern.

  They couldn’t remember later how exactly they got the skipper back on the boat; probably with a great heave and an adrenaline rush. One of them had taken a CPR course once and did his best to resuscitate the unconscious skipper.

  The crew who had remained on the boat had made a Mayday call on the radio. While they were still pumping the skipper’s chest, the first lifeboat and then a helicopter reached them. In minutes the experts took over CPR and then hoisted the skipper to the helicopter, which departed immediately for a hospital.

  The two crew went aboard the lifeboat after a second rescue boat arrived, and arranged to put a towline on the stricken sailboat to tow it in when the tide rose.

  Shortly after they reached shore in the lifeboat, they learned the skipper had been pronounced dead at the hospital.

  On the Rocks

  The mouth of the Merrimack River in northeast Massachusetts is one of the most dangerous boating areas on the East Coast. With a tidal flow that extends for several miles back from the Atlantic, the Merrimack also brings water down from far up in New Hampshire, and its current is typically 3 knots or more on the flood tide and considerably faster after heavy rainfall upstream. Along the way the river picks up silt and sand and then funnels between two breakwaters extending a short distance into the ocean. Where the current slows as the river blends into the sea, sand is deposited on a bar that rises abruptly from a depth of 30 feet to only 8 to 9 feet at low tide. When the wind is east on a hard ebb tide, steep breakers form and make the river mouth impossible for small boats to navigate and dangerous for large ones.

  Fortunately, a hard east wind is rare, although the water is often choppy on the tide. Added to this, especially on summer weekends, dozens of small fishing boats hover between the jetties or just outside and larger craft throw big wakes as they zoom in and out of the river. For the uninitiated the mouth can seem a hellish maw, and the locals know when to keep away. Reportedly, on average two boaters die there every year, typically fishermen on small skiffs overturned by a wave or a wake, and sometimes crew from a larger boat that broaches in the breakers and capsizes or is bashed against the granite blocks of the breakwaters. One year a powerboat captain lost his life after hitting the jetty.

  On the flood tide the current reverses at the mouth, usually flattening the waves and easing speeding boats’ return voyages to ports upriver. Then it’s mostly a matter of paying attention to the markers, staying in the channel, and avoiding other boats. A few intrepid sailors even come in under sail, occasionally tangling with powerboaters who seem to understand neither the rules of right-of-way nor why a sailboat must sometimes tack diagonally across the channel. On busy weekends only the bravest sailors thread this gauntlet under sail.

  Once between the jetties, headed in, the channel bears hard to starboard around a sandbar extending from Plum Island, on the port side, more than two-thirds of the way across the water. It’s clearly marked on the chart—the big green buoy with a flasher is obvious—and few boats risk cutting the corner below half tide. Yet fishermen and beachgoers wading out on this sandbar sometimes get in trouble when the water rises fast behind them, and recently a young woman was washed off by the current and drowned.

  Chart section showing the track of the sailboat into the rocks.

  This Saturday afternoon was a typical summer we
ekend—sunny, a light southwest breeze, the river full of boats. Joanna and Seth were happy to have their three children with them for the day’s sail. One had driven up from Boston, and the other two were home for the summer from college. The family of five filled the cockpit of the 28-foot sloop to capacity, but they were a close family and having a great time. Joanna especially was pleased by how well the kids still got along, and for his part Seth was thrilled they still wanted to go sailing. So many friends complained that their children had lost interest.

  Not only that, but they helped with the sailing, too. The oldest boy had taken the helm while Seth and the younger boy dropped and furled the main in preparation for motoring in.

  The boys then decided to drop a fishing lure in the water and troll during the ride up the river. With so many fishing boats around they figured the stripers must be running. Seth took the helm and steered to skirt the shore to starboard and keep away from most of the fishing boats.

  The flood tide was running hard, and though the knotmeter showed only 5 knots under diesel power, Seth knew they were probably doing at least 8 over the bottom. But to the powerboats zipping by to port, they must have looked like they were standing still.

  Past the flasher at the inner end of the breakwater, he eased still more to starboard, watching sunbathers on the beach and listening to the chatter of the boys leaning over the stern rail with the fishing pole. There were no markers here, and deep water held almost up to the beach. A couple hundred yards along you had to turn almost 90 degrees to port, across the river, to leave the red flasher to starboard.