Well, this was a tough post to write. And not just physically, since a significant percentage of my typing fingers were affected. Don't panic, nothing I won't recover from, other than maybe a souvenir or conversation piece, and a deeply bruised pride.
When something bad happens it very rarely is completely an accident, and if so, rarely the result of a single bad decision. I've thought about this kind of thing a lot, sometimes even when I didn't really want to, and from a very young age. It made me, let's say for the purpose of discussion, an unusual child. Adolescence didn't make it better, but it became occasionally useful in my career. It's clear now there were a number of these on this fine day, ranging from in scores from "not good" to "really?".
Let's start back at Hope Town, on what began looking like a beautiful day. The first inkling of trouble was in the morning when no one came by to collect the mooring fee. We had a $20 bill on the nav desk ready to go, but by 11a we were anxious to get moving. We decided we had to move and that twenty stayed on the nav. I place this under the category of bad karma. Moving on.
We had just decided Hope Town was as far as we were going to make it this season, and all of our movements now were to be at least leaning in the direction of making our way back to the states. I think this gave me at least a slightly inflated confidence, since we were largely just retracing our steps. Nothing we hadn't done before.
But on the topic of returning there were a number of pressures. First was hurricane season, which looked like it was already ramping up with the number and intensity of storms we had been experiencing. We wanted to be stateside and north before the show really got rolling. Our insurance company felt the same way, requiring us to be north of Cape Hatteras by June 1, the official start of hurricane season. Finally, Heather had a family reunion in Vegas over the 4th of July, so we needed to park the boat somewhere secure and hit the road by late June. Since we had already blown through the first week of May, we really were already late.
As for the topic of weather, I recall us briefly discussing (well, me saying) that morning that the weather was going to be worse than the day before, with a 90% chance of rain, and perhaps even more important, significant rainfall. Like more than 10% of what we get in a year in Arizona. I was pretty sure we were going to get wet, which was okay, and the wind was supposed to be coming from SSW. Not enough weather to be unsafe directly, but enough to perhaps pressure our decision making, and degrade our communication, especially with Heather at the wheel and me 40 feet forward at the bow. Again, nothing we hadn't seen before, and with no reaction from Heather, I accepted it and let it go.
While we had pressures to get moving on our return, we also had something that was still on our list. Heather loves the water, and she had yet to do more than wade in from the beach to feed the turtles. We had literally dozens and dozens of pieces of snorkeling gear of varying ages and conditions that we wanted to try out, pick the best for us (with some spares), along with a couple more sets of everything for guests, and get rid of the rest. We had been hauling some of this stuff for two years, since we got the boat, with the last shipment from moving out of the house and into the storage unit. It took up a significant portion of the aft cabin, plus a huge dive bag with even more stuffed in a lazerette. I really wanted most of it gone.
Next topic - anchoring. Staying at a dock costs money. Now that we have simplified our budget, most months slip fees are our second largest expense. Anchoring is free. Although we have gotten better at anchoring, and Heather is now comfortable with setting the anchor well with the engine revved up in reverse, we're still not completely comfortable with it, and I never sleep well the first night or three. We've never left the boat while anchored.
Since we're still pretty new at this, our compromise has frequently been moorings, permanent anchors usually drilled into the seafloor, with lines brought to the surface by a float. They're usually pretty cheap, but why we still routinely trust these anonymous anchors in unknown condition more than our our own anchoring rig and skills is certainly a topic for discussion. Well, anyway, we run lines through loops in the end of the mooring lines, tying them off on our bow cleats. Heather has gotten good at getting me within boat hook distance so I can scoop up the mooring lines from the float, and I've gotten good at scooping up and tying off the lines quickly. The important addendum that we were not thinking of was "for the conditions we had experienced".
We had paid good money for a number of guide books for the Bahamas. Some of them seem expensive at first, but when you think of the number of people and the years they spent acquiring the information and wisdom they have attempted to summarize it looks cheap. Well, we were headed back to Fishers Bay at Great Guana Cay, not so much to revisit Nippers, but to pick up a mooring surrounded by clear water so Heather could snorkel off the back of the boat, trying out gear. In one of the most respected guides there was an unusual notation for Fishers Bay, which is open to the west. Do not attempt to pick up a mooring in a west wind. But with an exclamation point. In all caps. And to finish it off, entirely in bold. Almost like they were trying to make a point.
Heather and I discussed this as well as we could in the wind and the rain. Specifically, that I could not recall any other point in the entire guide receiving this treatment. We talked about anchoring instead, but we both still had a strong preference for a mooring. When we arrived several boats were still happily moored there and I had not yet made the guide's distinction between the act of picking up a mooring, and remaining on a mooring. The wind was mostly from the south, with only a little west, and once on that mooring we would be protected from that west wind by the curve of the island. True, but in retrospect, not the point the guide was trying to make.
What should have been more important was what our own eyes were telling us. The storm had made the open anchorage very bouncy, with a decent swell. We had been in much worse, but not while trying to pick up a mooring line. So this gets to one of the most important errors. People know things to be true. At some point they try to attribute to these truths some sort of causation. Sometimes these proposed causes turn out to not be completely true, such as evil spirits or imbalanced humors as causes for disease. But an error in causation doesn't change the fact that the disease can still kill you. I saw this error a lot at work (myself included), that disproving a proposed cause somehow defanged a clearly established effect. Because the the guide was cautioning against a west wind, and we barely had any, I jumped to - well, it must be okay.
So that's how two otherwise intelligent people ended up trying to pick up a mooring line in an open bay during a storm. The first pass I couldn't even pick the line up out of the water. Some waves raised or lowered me several feet at the bow. Around we went for another pass, acquiring up an audience from neighboring boats already moored.
On the second pass I snagged the line in the water with the hook and brought it up the the deck. I had the line in my right hand, between my thumb and index finger so you can release the line quickly if you have to (as we were trained). I was trying to secure the now unneeded boat hook with my left hand, and glanced back to make sure. The mooring line was completely taut; I could feel the line pulling me. I was losing it, but for some reason didn't let it go.
Before my head came back completely facing forward another steep wave came by and popped the bow of the boat up at least a couple feet, but didn't make the mooring line in my hand any longer. I heard a loud snap, like breaking a green 1/2 inch thick branch. If it hadn't been for the noise I'm not sure I would know precisely when it happened, which helped me figure out how. I didn't actually see it because it happened so fast, and my head wasn't quite pointed in the right direction. Now I looked down at my hand but couldn't really process what I saw because I hadn't seen something like this before, and because it didn't hurt - yet. The wave had yanked my hand into the stainless steel bow rail, at which point I did finally released the mooring line. I looked again then just sat down, yelling at Heather that we were now going back to Marsh Harbor.
She did this without question. If you know Heather this was, shall we say, uncharacteristic. She knew something bad had happened, just not what. I didn't either, really. She had seen my double take at the bow, quickly followed by me plopping down roughly on the deck on my ass. I slid on my ass back to the cockpit, then went down below to take a couple of ibuprofen before the pain really hit me. Heather immediately had me take a couple more - good call. While below I did what the kids do; I took a picture with my phone. What's wrong with this picture? And this is minutes later, before the swelling kicked in.
sv-hiatus.blogspot.com
