Suddenly Overboard (27 page)

Then he saw another boat speeding toward him from one side. He waved. The boat came on, and soon he saw the slash of orange that meant the Coast Guard.

The boat came in closer, and a man was shouting at him through a megaphone. “Drop your sails!” he said. “We'll come get you!”

Ethan gestured futilely.

The man ducked inside, then reemerged as the boat started working toward him slowly. Other men on deck readied ropes and hung big orange balls over the side.

As the boats touched, two men jumped over quickly. One went forward with a coil of rope, the other came back to Ethan. “I'll help you over to our vessel,” he said. “Let me get this line around you, then we'll get the sails down.”

“But—”

The man looked up. “Oh yes, they found him with the helicopter. He was cold but alive.”

Ethan started to cry.

The crew got the sails down, and they took the schooner in tow after getting Ethan across to the cutter. They took him inside where the woman on the helm was talking on the radio. She held up a finger for him to wait. Ethan couldn't make out what the radio was saying. Then she turned to him. “They just heard from the hospital. He's going to be okay.”

Ethan slumped into a seat.

Someone else came over. “The helicopter crew didn't think they'd find him,” he said. “With all the rain, and fog moving in, they couldn't see anything. Then they thought they saw a buoy or something, and they went lower and there he was, waving this bright orange cushion over his head. He's a lucky man, your grandfather. They got him up in a minute and flew straight to the hospital.”

Ethan couldn't speak. After a few minutes he was calmer and asked if he could call his grandmother.

“She already knows he's okay. She's probably on her way to the hospital right now.”

“Can we get a message to my grandfather then?” Ethan asked. He looked back out the window to where the schooner was riding proud through the waves. “Tell him his boat's okay, that I didn't sink it or anything.”

Columbia River, Washington, October 2010
. An experienced sailor reputed to be a good swimmer, age 46, was sailing in the
5-mile-wide stretch of the river east of Astoria with his two children when a strong gust heeled the boat and he toppled overboard. He was not wearing a life jacket. The children saw him in the water, but the 18-year-old who took the wheel was not able to get the boat back to him before he went under in the cold water. The kids radioed for help, but the responding Coast Guard boat and helicopter were not able to find him before having to abandon the search late that night.

Lake Erie, Ohio, July 2010
. A crew of three were sailing in Lake Erie not far from Port Clinton when they decided to use the auxiliary inboard engine to return to port because conditions had gotten rough. As the boat bounced around in the choppy water, one of the jibsheets slipped overboard and fouled the prop, stalling the engine. The owner removed his life jacket and entered the water, intending to cut the line from the prop, but the waves pulled him away from the boat and the wind blew the boat away from him faster than he could swim to it. The other two were unable to get back upwind to him in time, and he went under. Searchers were unable to recover his body.

Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, 2008
. A man and his wife were just beginning a day's sail on the bay. While motoring out to open water, the man stood to raise the mainsail, directing his wife to turn into the wind. The boat accidentally jibed, however, and the boom swung across fast and struck him in the head, knocking him overboard. She was unable to rescue him. His body was recovered 3 days later.

San Diego Bay, California, July 2012
. The owner of a 36-foot sailboat was taking two guests out for an afternoon sail on the bay. One of the jibsheets got hung up on a foredeck cleat, and the owner turned the wheel over to one of the guests and went forward to clear it. As the boat bounced on a wave he lost his balance and fell overboard, not wearing a life jacket. The two guests had no sailing experience and had no idea of how to turn the boat back to reach him, but they were able to radio for help. Later, harbor police recovered his body.

T
he stories in previous chapters have illustrated the many things that can go wrong when sailing, often with disastrous results. A key issue in those stories, as in almost all sailing and boating disasters, is that the people involved were not expecting trouble. What could possibly go wrong on a fine day like any other? But in virtually all cases, lives could have been saved if only the sailors had really thought about that question. Lots of things can go wrong, and regularly do. What happens next may depend on luck, as the rescues in some of these stories demonstrate, or on preparations made or actions taken in advance. When you do ask and honestly answer the question of what can possibly go wrong, you're much more likely to live to tell the tale. Accidents still happen, but when they do, as we see in the following four brief narratives, the sailors who prepare for them, who frequently think in “what if” terms, are sailors who live to sail again
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Blake didn't consider himself a very experienced sailor. He'd learned to sail only a year ago after moving to the Tala Point area north of Seattle. He first sailed with a man he worked with who sailed a Catalina 30 on the sound. Blake loved it immediately: the wind and water, the beauty of the islands, the sheer joy of the boat
cutting a line through waves, the music of water along the hull—the whole experience.

Unfortunately, his friend insisted on doing everything himself, so Blake didn't feel he learned much. Rather than wait to be invited out again on the boat, he signed up for sailing lessons at a nearby yacht club. They told him that at age 40 he'd be mostly in with kids and teenagers, but he didn't mind. He just wanted to sail.

The sailing class used 14-foot Hunter daysailers, two crew to a boat, with an open deck and long cockpit, but they felt like “real” sailboats with a jib, a mainsail, and sail controls, including a vang and leech tension lines. He learned how to position his weight, use the centerboard to advantage, and avoid overtrimming the sails. He learned a lot and loved it all.

And now he had his own sailboat, a chubby 15-footer with a tiny cuddy cabin, beamier and heavier and slower than the club boats, a little old and a little beat up—and it was great. He had bought it in the fall and found it hard to wait for spring. Through the winter he read sailing books and magazines and made frequent visits to his local chandlery, marveling at all the boat gear. Marveling too at what it cost to own a boat! But he was determined to do it right, and he chose his gear after researching options online. He hadn't much liked the life jackets at the sailing school, so he bought an inflatable PFD that felt good and had a built-in harness. He bought new docklines because the old ones were frayed. He inspected the rigging closely for any weak points. He discovered the flares on the boat had expired and bought new ones. All the while he was imagining himself out in the sound, sailing his own boat among the San Juan Islands, camping aboard, exploring hidden coves. He was reading classic sailing narratives too, which taught him about things that sometimes happened out there. He bought a tether for his harness. He bought a submersible handheld VHF.

Friends visiting his small apartment surveyed the heap of gear and joked he was getting obsessed.

Then, finally, spring arrived, and with it, sailing! It was all as good as he'd imagined it.

On his fourth weekend he made a small mistake while out sailing alone, turning without first releasing the mainsheet from the jam cleat, and a gust knocked over the boat. The rail went under, the cockpit filled, the mast went down, and the boat kept rolling.

Blake jumped and was clear when the boat turned turtle, his PFD inflating with a bang and its bladder filling around his neck as it ripped open the Velcro cover. He floated easily, staring at his upside-down boat, imagining his precious gear tumbling out to the bottom below.

There was nothing he could hold on to except the rudder, and he saw immediately that the heavy centerboard had fallen back into its trunk. He pulled himself as high on the hull as he could, but no part of the board emerged from the hull, and he assumed there was no way he could get the board extended again to try to right the boat, as he'd learned in the smaller sailboats at the club. He was screwed. And the water was cold.

He pulled himself up again and looked all around, but there were no boats close enough to see him. So he held on to the rudder with one hand while with the other he reached down and unclipped the VHF radio from his belt. Thank god he'd bought one that was submersible.

He switched it on, was thrilled to see the screen light up, and called the Coast Guard on channel 16. They answered immediately. He felt sheepish as he explained what had happened, but they took his information and said help would be on the way and to keep the radio on.

He was surprised by how quickly the helicopter arrived. It hovered overhead, and the crew called him on the radio to see how he was doing. He said he was cold but okay and was not having any problem holding on to the boat.

The helicopter remained nearby until a Coast Guard cutter appeared not long after. They had him on board in a minute, and then one of their crew in a wet suit went into the water with a line and attached it to the sailboat so that they could pull the boat over and back upright.

While they worked with his boat, Blake kept apologizing for causing all this trouble, but the crew assured him that's what they were there for. They asked if he wanted them to tow the boat back, but everything looked fine when they'd pumped it out and checked the rigging.

“Can I sail it back?” he asked.

“Sure,” a guardsman said. “That's what you came out for, right, the sailing?”

He had removed the uncomfortably inflated PFD and switched to his spare life jacket, and now made a final check of his gear and the sails.

“Just keep that life jacket on, right?” called one of the crew. Too often they'd had to do recoveries when boaters didn't.

When Jackson planned his move to Michigan from North Carolina, he looked for an affordable place to live as close as possible to Lake Huron. Over the last couple of summers he'd sailed his Hobie catamaran as often as he could, and he planned to keep on sailing on the Great Lakes. He and his wife towed the boat all the way behind his pickup.

Both the air and water were cooler on Lake Huron than Pamlico Sound, but otherwise it felt just as good to be out on the water, flying hull when the wind was good. Soon he had his new Michigan friends joining him on the weekends when the weather was good. His wife enjoyed other pursuits but seldom complained about how he spent his Saturdays.

On this Saturday afternoon, two of his friends had come along and they'd had a blast. The wind was good and his crew, who had sailed with him before, knew what to do. Even better, it was a warm day for early October with good wind. His only regret was that the others had to leave by four o'clock, so he sailed them both back to the beach. The day was so perfect for sailing, though, that he couldn't just stop so early. So he let them off and headed back
out into the lake for another hour or two of sailing, as if he could bank the experience for the coming winter.

He shot off straight out into the lake to where the wind was stronger and steadier. A couple of miles out, the wind was perfect and he turned slightly, onto a beam reach. The windward hull rose high from the water, and he felt the thrill of riding the fine line of control, hiked out on the high hull, the boat like a nimble extension of his own body.

Until he relaxed just a little too much and responded too slowly to a gust and the cat went over.

The cold water was shocking—this was the first time he'd flipped since North Carolina—but he floated well in his life jacket and wasn't worried. He'd righted the cat several times back in North Carolina, and the waves weren't high enough to be troublesome, so he wasn't worried.

Then he realized the mast had gone much deeper in the water and the position of the hulls was different than in the past. He stared at the boat, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. The angle of the hulls suggested the mast was some 45 degrees into the water. That made no sense. He'd made his own masthead float, and it had always had enough buoyancy to keep the masthead at or near the surface. At that angle it was easy to stand on the lower hull, grab the line tied to the other hull, and lean back to pull the boat back upright. But now with the mast far underwater, the hulls were positioned differently. He climbed up on the bottom hull and reached forward to the upper hull, but it was too far over and the lifting line was too short to let him pull back with enough force to pivot the boat back up.

He tried over and over, but he simply had no leverage. What had happened?

Then he remembered something from his college physics class: salt water is denser than fresh water and provides more buoyancy. The masthead float that had worked in North Carolina didn't work as well here; it was just too small for the lesser buoyancy of fresh water.

He looked around but saw no boats nearby. It was after five o'clock now, and the few distant boats were headed back toward marinas. Dark came early in October. Already the air was cooling, and he shivered in his wet T-shirt and shorts.

Surely, he thought, someone will see me standing on the capsized hull. But as the sun sank, no boat had come close enough.

There was nothing to do but wait. He hoped his wife remembered that he'd said he would be home by six, and would call someone for help.