Running Amuck

Sailing out into the open ocean can be a scary proposition. Out of sight of land, and out of cellphone and internet range, the off-shore sailor can find him- or herself in an unexpected storm with nowhere to hide. Equipment failures, health crises, falling overboard - all nightmare scenarios for a blue water boater. But the one disaster you will thankfully almost never encounter while out in the deep blue sea is running aground.

Georgia ICW

The ICW is a set of protected waterways that are just inland of the Atlantic, made up of rivers, canals and inlets that provide a pathway north and south for traveling boaters. Many areas of this meandering snake are very shallow, particularly at low tide, and are maintained by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), who are mandated by law to cut through the low spots regularly to ensure a mean low depth of at least twelve feet. Because they don’t dredge the entire waterway, but only a very narrow channel, this results in a deceptively wide body of shallow water with only a thin cutout for boats to pass through, not unlike a very narrow two-lane country road. It’s not for nothing that the ICW is nicknamed “The Ditch” by boaters. The USACE is also in charge of checking the channel markers periodically and, if necessary, move them to reflect the latest shoaling of a constantly changing bottom. Unfortunately though, they don’t catch everything, and due to chronically low government funds for dredging, the depths are inconsistent. Things can change so rapidly that sometimes even updated charts are just woefully wrong.

A couple of weeks ago, we crossed over from the Bahamas to Florida, joining the ICW at Fort Pierce. Since then, we have been working our way north, looking forward to revisiting some of our favorite stops from our trip south, and hopefully discovering some new places as well. We spent a lovely Easter holiday in Vero Beach  - “Velcro Beach” to the locals, due to the hoards of boaters who travel down there and end up staying indefinitely. Leaving Vero behind, and looking to anchor in a little cove just south of New Smyrna, we suddenly found ourselves hard aground. True, we were off the beaten track, well off the “magenta line” that indicates the ICW route, but our chart plotter still showed that we had plenty of water under our keel. Clearly this wasn’t true.

Barely aground, still upright but stuck in the mud

No real reason to panic though; I have learned this by now. Just wait for the tide to come in and then you’ll float off. And we were intending to anchor here anyway, so not being able to go anywhere for a few hours was really not a big deal. Rick used the extra anchor, which has rope rode instead of chain, and ran it out in the dinghy to set it. He cleated it off at the stern so that he could later use the winch to help get us off the shoal. Then we had our usual evening routine of cocktails, dinner, and bed.

Around midnight or so, we were awoken by a reassuring rocking of the boat - we were floating free! But we were also completely turned around. Once the boat was released from the bottom, the current had swung it completely around, and since we were anchored from our stern, the anchor rode got all tangled up with our rudder. Oops. We started up the engine to turn us back around, but the rudder was so tightly wound with the anchor rode, we couldn’t go anywhere. We were going to have to untangle things by hand.

Rick always seems so cool in these circumstances, it’s easy to think that everything is effortlessly under control, no big deal. But this time, my mighty hero came a bit unraveled. It was the middle of the night, after a very long day of motoring, and he was exhausted. The lines he was trying to run weren’t cooperating. I was trying to help, but I just couldn’t understand his instructions, and of course that resulted in a predictable string of bickering between us. And then the damned dinghy motor stalled on him.

That’s when Rick just started maniacally laughing.

We had to do some fancy finagling to get it all unwrapped and re-secured from the bow, but it did work out in the end. Friggin’ charts.

After a wonderful second-time-around visit to St. Augustine, we again headed north, knocking out thirty-five miles each day, averaging six to seven hours of steaming. The stretch from Florida’s northern border up through Georgia is particularly squirrelly, winding back and forth like a string of small intestines (try not to think too hard about that metaphor). This type of terrain, criss-crossed by strong tidal currents, makes a great recipe for shoaling, and sure enough, we noticed a number of abandoned boats on the way that had either run aground or succumbed to some other calamity. Rick has developed a morbid fascination with these wrecks, taking pictures of as many as he can so he can add them to his “collection”. He tells me that he sees each of them as an image of the human condition. I think it's just an intellectualized version of rubbernecking after a car accident. But what do I know?

Just south of Savannah, we saw a stellar example of the run-aground sailboat, high and dry on a sand bar, and Rick grabbed his camera to document it, handing me the wheel. The boat looked abandoned to me, but Rick was pretty sure the owners were still aboard. “Wow, how could they have misread their chart plotter so spectacularly?!!” we said to one another. I don’t know about Rick, but I was smiling to myself in that self-satisfied way, thinking how we would never have been that stupid. Oh Karma, why did you have to be paying attention? I was watching the chart carefully, sticking to that magenta line like glue, but somehow… something was off. The sand bar that held that forlorn vessel was directly in front of us. Rick came back to the cockpit and questioned my course, but I was adamant that I was doing just what the chart indicated. I was like the lady on the phone who insists that you don’t exist because, “that’s what it says in the computer.”

So, I bet you can guess what happened. Yup. We ran aground, only a couple hundred yards from the boat whose beaching we had been admiring. With the keel on Valkyrie, we draw five feet below the waterline, which means we need at least that much depth to stay afloat. Our chart plotter said we should be in twelve feet of water even at low tide. Our depth sounder read “3.4 Ft.” You do the math.

Why do you need a keel for sailing? Well, when the wind fills up the sail that’s attached to your mast, that same force from the wind will tip your boat completely over if you don’t have something to counter balance it. Hence the keel. Generally, the bigger the boat, the deeper and weightier the keel. Other designs work off of the same principle, just using a different method. The traditional Hawaiian outriggers, for instance, or the modern catamaran. No keel down below, but pontoons to keep the boat from tipping over by buoying up the leeward side (away from the direction of the wind).

Hawaiian Outrigger Sailing Canoe

If we owned a catamaran, we would obviously be much less likely to run aground, particularly in the ICW. There are some other advantages as well, like more internal living space, and a less tippy ride, which appeals to the sea-sickness prone (me). But owners of these crafts tell us that the ride, while indeed less tippy, can be rather jolting and uncomfortable. We’ve also been told that the noise of the rigging while underway can be quite loud and grating. Not exactly the peaceful sailing experience we enjoy on Valkyrie. Plus from an aesthetic standpoint, at least in our opinion, monohulls have it all over cats. No, we’ll stick with what we have and risk the occasional grounding, thank you very much.

Wait - that's not a boat!!

When we ran aground this time, we were about an hour short of low tide. Mistral, the sailboat totally above the water ahead of us, had run up just south of high tide, a much more serious problem. After Rick set our extra anchor, a now familiar task in the ICW, he took off in the dinghy to visit our neighbors-in-distress, offering help if needed. 

David and Barbara were not happy campers, telling Rick about their episode with TowBoatUS earlier in the day. Apparently, the towboat had made the elementary error of attaching its towline to Mistral’s stern, and then trying to haul it off the sandbar sideways. The sailboat’s rudder was just as mired in the sand as her keel, and the predictable result was not only that they failed to free the boat from the shoal, but they also broke the rudder. Now, Dave and Barb are waiting for another towboat to come fetch them once the tide returns. They’ll need to be towed all the way to Savannah, where they will face costly repairs that may take weeks. Our predicament is certainly minor by comparison.

Valkyrie did rise above the water a bit at low tide, and we heeled over some, but it only took a few hours more to bring back the water, and off we floated. All we had to do then was to pull in on the anchor Rick had set hours earlier, and we were well clear of trouble. Unfortunately for Mistral however, their second towboat had not arrived, and the rising water and changing current threatened to strand them even higher up on the shoal. Once the water came back in force, they would have no steering without a rudder, and would be at the mercy of the currents. Rick helped David set his anchor so that at least they would be spared that disaster while they waited for the latest tow.

We finally headed out, hoping to use the last few hours of daylight to get a bit farther north before anchoring for the night. As we pulled past Mistral, David gave us a giant wave from his boat.

There but for the grace …