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Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Mystery of the missing skiff

Part one: Disappearance of the Crustliner

“Harry! Get up right now, we have to save the skiff.”

               A skiff is a small boat usually kept aboard a larger boat. The purpose of our skiff is mainly pleasure and we use it to get to land for some beachcombing or berry picking. We call our skiff the Crustliner. The actual brand name of our skiff is ‘Crestliner’ but the thing is so beaten and dilapidated that it is constantly trying to sink itself in a variety of manners and often required a bit of bailing.
I didn’t know what time it was but had the sneaking suspicion it was earlier than I would’ve liked. I jumped up, just in some shorts, and pulled my boots on over my bare feet. I grabbed my red hoodie as I exited my bunk and went up to the wheelhouse to see what the problem was. I expected an ‘oh the skiff is sinking again, great’, but I got up to the wheelhouse and the skiff wasn’t where it’d been tied up the night before. The skiff was actually gone…
               Amber had the binoculars out and was looking in the direction the wind was blowing. I stepped outside, into the rain, to get a better look around the wheelhouse and sure enough there it was. I wouldn’t say it was dark outside, but it certainly wasn’t light yet and it was definitely raining. The clouds were low and dark. The sea was darker still. And somewhere between the two, a good distance away, was the Crustliner bobbing on the swell with a 20 knot wind pushing her towards shore.
               I heard Amber firing up the mains (the main engines) which was my cue to haul the anchor. I ran up to the bow, still in shorts, and started pulling her. Normally I try to make the cable wrap as nicely as I can but in this situation we just needed the anchor up. Amber got on the hailer and I could hear her through the deck speakers.

“I don’t know if I can get close enough for us to grab it, it gets too shallow. But get the pike pole and the grappling hook ready.”

               By the time the anchor got all the way up I was already a little bit wet and cold. Parker had the grappling hook and pike pole ready while Amber was driving us closer to the skiff. I headed towards my bunk to get more prepared for whatever was about to happen. I put on socks and pants. Just that small change made me feel less miserable about the elements.

Amber called down from the wheelhouse “I won’t be able to get that close to it. It gets too shallow too fast…”

I could see the skiff still in the distance. It wasn’t close. I ran through what we could do in my head real quick. In any other circumstance where something went overboard we would use the skiff to go get it, but I’d never thought about what would happen if we lost the skiff itself. The grappling hook and pike pole were good for like 10 meters but that was going to be useless. I mean the skiff still looked to be at least a quarter of a mile from the boat and the wind was slowly pushing it farther from us and closer to the beach. It was still early and I wasn’t thinking the clearest but,

“Ummm…. Should I get in a survival suit?” I asked. “I guess I can swim to it….”
“I don’t know how else we could get it, but that is a long way…”

I was down in the galley pulling out one of the suits already. The survival suits are what we put on if the ship is sinking. That’s what they’re designed for. Mostly just to keep you alive. They’re big, heavy duty, and awkward as hell. I slipped it on over my clothes and then got back up in the wheelhouse.

“Will you zip my hair in Amber?”
“Are you sure you want to do this? It’s a long way and once you’re in we have no way of getting you back.”
“Yeah I guess. There’s no other way right? Either I can swim to it or I’ll get washed back out to sea where y’all can hopefully find me.”

               Then and there, that was all we discussed about the matter. Thinking back there are a ton of questions I would’ve raised before going. Like ‘What if I can’t get the skiff started and I’m stuck out there?’ or ‘should we agree upon some form of signaling each other?’ and about million other what if questions but, like I said, it was early and time was not a commodity.  

Part two: Into the Ocean

               I ran and jumped into the ocean. I guess it seemed like a good way to start things, a running start. Things had been happening too quickly before the jump for me to assess how nervous I was. All I was thinking about before jumping in was this movie we’d watched recently. It’s a fighting movie called Warrior. The protagonist is fighting to win some money and save his home from foreclosure. In one of the final fights, where it looks like the protagonist has no chance of winning, his coach sits him down in the corner for one of those classic motivational pep talks and says “If you don’t knock him out in this round you don’t have a chance. If you don’t knock him out, you don’t come home.” That’s what I was thinking when I was running across the deck, as I went through the air, as soon as my head dipped under and I tasted salt. If I don’t get this skiff I don’t come home.
Not that it was really that intense, but if I didn’t get to the skiff I didn’t have a way to get back to the boat. If the skiff wouldn’t start I wouldn’t have a way to get back to the boat. If the skiff beached itself before I could get to it I wouldn’t have a way to get back to the boat. If I got halfway and for some reason couldn’t go on I wouldn’t be able to swim against the wind and the swell in open water to get back to the boat. There was almost half a mile between the boat and the shore where the skiff was heading and if anything went wrong all I could do is hope that the ocean would be kind and choose to take me back towards the boat.
There was one other problem I hadn’t considered. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to find something in a swell, but it’s hard. Anything lost in the ocean can easily be hidden from sight when it goes into the trough and behind a wave. It had been difficult to see the skiff from the boat, which is significantly higher than being in the ocean, and once I was wet it was impossible to see the skiff. From the moment I was in the water I’d lost track of where the skiff was relative to me my position. I was already committed and I quickly came up with a new plan instead of trying to make it to the skiff. I decided to just swim to shore and walk along to wherever the skiff washed up instead of trying to swim to the skiff.
The easiest way to swim in the ridiculous lobster suit was on my back. The suit kept me awkwardly buoyant so there was no way to do any proper swim strokes. It was more like laying on a pool float and using my hands and arms to paddle backwards. Kicking didn’t seem to help at all either. It wasn’t fast and it wasn’t easy. I wasn’t very far before I was already breathing hard and I doubted my decision, just a little. When I got tired of being on my back I would turn over in my stomach and try to swim that way. The thing was the only place water could possibly get in the suit was where the zipper came to a stop below my nose. I could already feel the cold water seeping down my shirt from when I’d jumped in and gone under for a fraction of a second. Every time I tried to swim on my stomach a little bit more would splash in. When I tired of that I would turn onto my back again and try to make way in that position.
I was concerned at first. I wasn’t making much headway and with almost nothing to measure my progress against I thought I was actually going nowhere for a while. It didn’t seem like the shore was getting any closer or like I was moving forward no matter how vigorously I paddled, but every time I looked back at the boat it was smaller and smaller. I just kept swimming. I had a brief moment of fearfulness. It was completely irrational but the water was so large, so dark, and I was so lost in it. I thought about a storm I’d seen in Iceland once and how violent the ocean can be. I couldn’t help but imagine the space in between me and the ocean floor. I didn’t know how much depth was below me or what was in the water with me and that weird part of the mind that is scared of the dark, even though it knows there is nothing in it, was suddenly alert to the idea that there could be anything below the surface. I had a picture of huge killer whale silently gliding under me. The ocean is a deep and mysterious place though and, vaguely, that has always worried me.
I continued swimming, flipping from back to stomach every minute or so. I tried to rest some when I got tired, but every time I tried to just float it felt like the ocean was taking me farther away from shore and I was losing hard won progress.  I got to a spot where the swell was getting bigger as the water got shallower. With every wave that came through it pulled me back a little, away from shore, then as it passed it would push me forward a little, back towards shore. It was like I was stuck there with the waves pulling and pushing me so that, essentially, I wasn’t moving forwards or backwards. When I would flip on my back to try and paddle out of the stasis the swell would hit me in the face and I’d get a beard and nose full of salt water. After two facefulls I was over it and flipped back onto my stomach. I was very tired but couldn’t very well stay stuck right outside of the breakers like that. I summoned a little bit of extra strength every time a big swell came through and tried to paddle with it like trying to body surf. I wasn’t able to get much momentum while in the suit and I could only inch forward for a while until I finally, finally, caught a breaker.
It pushed me forward just enough for me to feel like I was making some progress. And then I caught one more and there was the rocky earth under my feet. I stood up and waded the last 50 meters into shore.

Part three: The World’s Dumbest Horse

Despite not being able to see the skiff for the entirety of my swim I washed up not far from the skiff. The wind was already trying to beach it. I unzipped the suit down to my chest, took my hood off, and took my arms out so I could have some dexterity again. I hurried over to the skiff to make sure it hadn’t already put itself on the beach.
               It was shallow and sandy where the skiff had landed. Behind it, between the boat and us was a small outcrop of rocks I couldn’t very well skiff over. I needed to get around the rocks, but on either side of the outcrop were sandbars creating breakers. I just had to go through the breakers. I pushed the skiff out a little and pushed off as I jumped in. It stopped immediately as my weight combined with weight of the water already in the skiff bottomed us out. I put my suit back on all the way and jumped out again to push the skiff to deeper water.
               Once, before this, Luc and I had been doing something with the skiff and he’d told me sometimes he felt like he was leading the world’s dumbest horse. That was how I felt as I pushed the skiff out. The wind was blowing hard and the surf was against us. I was already exhausted. I was feeling nauseous from the exertion and all the salt water that’d gone up my nose. I turned the skiff against the wind and surf to get the bow pointed out. It was a struggle. I pushed it until the water was waste deep and then jumped in again. It was a struggle to get the outboard down and started with that dumb suit on and I wasn’t even sure I could get it started. While I was messing with the outboard the wind turned the skiff sideways and a small wave came in, putting more water and weight in the skiff. I got it started cranked the throttle turning into the breakers when I hit the sand bar.
               I’d been hoping it would be deep enough for me and the skiff to make it over the sandbar. I was so tired already and it would take a lot to keep pushing the skiff out. Worse still I was right where all the waves were breaking. I quickly raised the outboard to and jumped out to push against the wind and the surf again. I was taking extra care to keep the bow pointed into the surf to avoid sinking the skiff beyond my ability to save.
Again, once I was knee deep again, just past what I prayed would be the last obstacle, I jumped in the skiff as fast as I could and fumbled to yank the pull cord on the outboard before the surf and wind could turn us again. I got it on the second try and immediately let loose on the throttle. With me and the large amount of water that’d come in all the weight was in the stern of the skiff. The prop went into the sand but I didn’t let the throttle go. I gave it more gas as I leaned forward to try and get some of the weight off the stern. The skiff started moving forward just a little. It hit a wave and the bow raised a ridiculous amount and, for a moment, I was afraid the swell would flip us. When the bow came down it raised the prop enough to get it out of most of the sand and I started moving forward for real, at last.
I got over the last few breakers with the bow continuing to raise to crazy heights. I got over them and into the swell before turning towards the boat. The little light on my suit was blinking and I hoped they could see me to know I’d managed it. And I had managed it. I had the dumb horse, and I was going home.