Bridges to Nowhere

Chesapeake City

Yes, it’s that time of year again. Becky and Rick are going off on another sailing trip, leading exciting lives, making everyone else feel badly that they have to stay home and work. Chumps all, soldiering on with mundane existences.

Well, let me just tell you how it REALLY is…

We had a terrific plan this year. Rick was going to leave by himself in early June, getting up to Portland by the end of the month. I was to join him up there on July first, when my orchestra’s winter season is over. Then we could spend the summer sailing north, exploring the coast of Maine – a famous sailing ground that we have been unable to enjoy together due to lack of time.

Rick had spent a good couple of weeks slaving on the boat to get ready for the sailing season - re-doing bottom paint, re-fitting the head, and other not-so-enjoyable tasks. Thinking that the boat was now ship-shape, we had our traditional shake-down cruise the last week of May. The plan was to take three days and toot around the Chesapeake, so we headed out from the Baltimore harbor toward the Key Bridge.

I don’t know what it is about that bridge, but it is clearly cursed for us. It seems like every time we try to leave Baltimore we have some horrendous problem, and we’re always right under that thing when it happens. This time it’s the engine. Having just settled onto the foredeck for the cocktail hour, we look back and there’s smoke billowing out of the cabin hatch!

Rick races back to the cockpit and cuts the engine. A fire in the cabin would obviously be disastrous, but so far the smoke seems to be confined to the engine compartment. After some tinkering around down there, Rick determines that the problem is actually with the refrigeration unit – the thing that cools the icebox – and that the actual engine appears to be fine. We end up going out for our little shake-down trip anyway, but Rick admits to me the next day that after reading the manual for the unit (never bothered to read it before!) he now knows that he should have been monitoring the fluid levels. They were down to nothing, and he’s pretty sure he has blown out the compressor. Kinda like blowing a head gasket in your car. The icebox won’t work now, and if you try to use it like a cooler by just adding your own ice, you end up with a big tub of water after just one day. It’s not that well insulated and has no drainage holes.

A working cooler/fridge is something you wouldn’t want to be without on a two or three month voyage. It takes a load of money and another two weeks to get the thing fixed, but Rick is certain that he can still get up to Portland in time to stick with our original plan. He’ll just have to do it a lot quicker and give up on the idea of a leisurely, relaxed trip.

We load him up with provisions and have a tearful goodbye. When we made our original plan, I was looking forward to having almost a month of alone time in our house. Now, that period has been reduced to two and a half weeks, but I feel quite differently about it. My father passed away mid-May, and even though it was not completely unexpected, I’m still grieving and not particularly happy about spending time alone in an empty house. Plus, I worry about Rick going up there by himself. Kind of silly really – he’s done this trip six times by himself, and even when I’m on board it’s not like I’m any big help or anything. But I’m worried anyway.

A few mornings later, I get a casual message on my voicemail. “Hi sweetie, call me when you get up.” When I do get around to calling him back, Rick tells me he’s headed back to Baltimore and is only about an hour away. “What happened?” “Well, I hit a bridge.”

Uh…..what?!!!

Railroad bridge in Mass. - (not the one Rick hit, but similar)

Well this can’t be good. Having just left Chesapeake City, Rick was about to go through the canal that connects the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays. You have to time your traverse through the canal with the tides so that you aren’t working against the current, and Rick was out there in the dark, having had very little sleep, at about 4:00am. There are many bridges that cross that canal, and one of them is a railroad bridge that lowers when a train is going through, but otherwise is raised up high. Rick has gone through there many times, and this was the first time he had ever seen it down, but he wasn’t at all worried because it still looked pretty high. Literally, just at the last minute, he realized he was going to hit and he turned the boat hard to port – not enough to save her, but enough to make it a glancing blow instead of a full on smash. The top two feet or so of the mast scraped against the bottom of the bridge, and all kinds of equipment, lines and debris came down onto the deck of the boat. The bow rail had been completely bent out of shape.

So, at least the engine still worked (and of course, the newly repaired refrigeration unit)… Rick motored back to Baltimore. I would be feeling sick about the damage, but Rick is a pretty positive guy and he says he mostly just feels embarrassed. It probably didn’t help that there was another boat waiting on the other side of that railroad bridge whose captain must have seen the whole thing. Good thing Rick doesn’t know them.

We don’t know the full extent of the damage yet, but it's doubtful that it'll be a cheap and easy fix. It’s unknown whether any of our original plan can be salvaged - we may be spending our entire summer on dry land after all (and in the Poor House). Who are the chumps now?

By the way, the bridge was undamaged by the accident.

This video pretty much sums it up:
http://www.prochan.com/embed?f=e53_1351184775