by Erik Orton
The dock was wide open—plenty of room for our boat. The floodlights that had obscured our vision before now made it easy to see. They lit up the whole length of the dock. It was an easy target. But Erik saw something in the shadows.
“Does everyone see that boat?” he asked. A small boat was tucked along one end of the dock. It was a beautiful Ralph Lauren-type wooden motorboat, standing maybe four or five feet out of the water. Just low enough that it was hidden by the shadow of the floodlights. “We’ve got no room for error. We have to hit this spot on.”
Fortunately, we did. That one move should redeem us from all the missed mooring balls before. He pressed the starboard side against the pylons without ramming the glossy speedboat. Karina and I were off the boat and onto the dock in one smooth motion. We immediately lashed the boat to the pylons that stood over six feet tall. Erik came right behind us, letting the engine still run. Jane jumped off the boat and ran down the dock, barefoot, looking for any signs of life in the marina at 2:30 a.m.
Erik joined us in wrapping the lines around the pylons as many times as we could then tying them off with bowlines—one for the stern, one for the bow. The boat was secure for now. Alison was still bailing the engine compartment. Jane was out there somewhere in the darkness.
Karina, Erik, and I ran a bucket brigade to the deck, where we dumped water over the side. Then we shortened the route, dumping everything into the kitchen sink. Then Karina poured water out the side hatches of the cabins below deck—anything to speed the process and stay ahead of the water gushing in.
Karina took over in the engine compartment and Alison took a break. Her arms hung listless at her sides. The water was still rising, so I worked fast to move books and clothes out of the water, all while trying to keep pace with the inflow. But the water was continuing to rise and our pace was falling off. We were exhausted before this had started. Now all we had was adrenaline.
Erik went to the engine compartment. The water was definitely coming from the sail drive, the underside of the engine where it connects with the propeller outside the boat. Once we were in off the ocean we’d lowered the dinghy down flat onto the water and towed it behind us. The new glossy black line on the front of the dinghy disappeared somewhere under the waterline below the leaking engine compartment. The other end was lashed around the stern deck cleat. The line was tight as a wire, pinched against the hull. We didn’t know if that was related to the problem, but it was a good place to start. Erik went below and found his knife. He came above deck and cut the line. Snap!
“Whoa!” Karina yelled from inside the engine compartment.
“What?” Erik asked.
“The engine moved like two inches.”
“Okay, that’s good,” he said.
“The water seems to be coming in slower,” she said.
“Good. Keep bailing. I’m going to call for help.”
It took him ten minutes or so, but he finally reached the local Sea Tow for the Manasquan Inlet. A guy named Scott took the call.
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” he said, and he hung up.
Erik sent me to the road to meet him and guide him to our boat. I raced out of the marina to a suburban street corner. I paced barefoot. Of course I was barefoot. I’d taken off my wet socks and shoes. I looked up and down the road. I wished I were bailing. Someone else could wait. I wanted to work. I checked the phone. It had been only five minutes. Finally, Scott arrived. I ran ahead of his truck to show him exactly where Fezywig was lashed to the pylons.
Scott pulled up in his huge pickup truck, jumped out, grabbed his high-power pumps out of the bed, and ran down the dock with me carrying a giant hose right behind him. His truck stood empty, the door open and engine still running.
Jane was back. She had brought a bleary but willing sailor trailing a few feet behind her. He was probably the only person living aboard in this marina. It was that kind of a place. The poor guy was white-haired and hungover. He asked what was going on. By that time Sea Tow was on the way. Erik had thanked him and recommended he go back to bed. The old guy disappeared back into the night. Scott conferred with Erik. I rejoined the girls. We kept bailing.
Erik and Scott wired up the pumps and shoved them down into the lowest point of our engine compartment. Immediately water was pulled out faster than it was pouring in.
“Do you have any of the foam floaties kids use?” Scott asked.
I pulled out four or five from the cockpit bench seat. With their knives, Erik and Scott sliced them into thin, short strips and shoved them under the engine around the edges of the leak. Once the water level started dropping, Scott got on the phone.
“Hey, Dean, we’ve got a catamaran here that’s taking on water and needs a haul out. It’s tied up to the Brielle fuel dock. The beam is twenty-one feet. Can your lift handle that?” He listened.
“Excellent,” he continued. “How soon can your guys get here?” It was 4:00 a.m. The marina he was calling was next door to the dock where we were lashed off. The crew came en masse and got everything moving. To make room for Fezywig, they had to get a boat out of the lift that was currently hanging in the slings, put it on blocks, and reposition the lift for us. Then came instructions for me from the crew chief.
“You have to sail your boat around to that alley,” the chief said, pointing a hundred yards away, “and come straight in. Then stop before you hit the concrete wall, but don’t come in too fast.” Just stop our twenty-ton boat on a dime. Erik could do it. The more difficult or urgent a situation, the more focused, calm, and decisive Erik was. This kind of pressure brought out his best.
The sky started to lighten. The tide was slack, but picking up. The wind was blowing out of the east, pinning the port side of Fezywig against the dock. We had one engine: starboard. Running that engine would spin the boat counterclockwise, the exact wrong direction we needed to go, but it was the only way. Erik started our one good engine.
He tried every trick and angle to get the boat off the dock. Scott, Karina, and I grabbed fenders and moved them between the boat and all the hard objects we were about to hit. Erik couldn’t get enough momentum to have control of the boat’s direction. Finally, he went backward. He’s a genius. One day a stroke of brilliance will kill him, but not that day. It was Fajardo all over again. He put the starboard throttle in reverse.
As the boat moved down past the end of the dock, the bow began to swing around counterclockwise. The only problem was we were surrounded by beautiful, expensive fishing trawlers with long bow sprits jutting out five or six feet off the front of each boat. As our boat pivoted, we moved fast to make sure no additional damage was inflicted. Free of the dock, we picked up speed in reverse and moved toward the lift alley.
Imagine a movie car chase. The car is speeding along in reverse, hits the brakes, swings around 180 degrees, and then peels off in the original direction, but now facing forward. That’s what we did, but at four miles per hour. Not nearly as impressive to watch, but nerve-racking to pull off.
Erik turned the corner into the lift alley. We had good momentum now and the boat was moving straight. The tricky part was still stopping Fezywig before she ran into the concrete wall dead ahead.
The guys on land were radioing instructions to Scott on the boat, who was standing next to Erik. He needed both hands to drive. He edged this way and that way. Fezywig was twenty-one feet wide. The lift pit was twenty-three feet wide.
“It’s a good thing we’ve done all those narrow bridge openings with one engine in Saint Martin,” he said. Every part of this journey had prepared us for what would come next. I was preparing for what would come next, too. Once Fezywig was in the slings, we’d have to get off, and we couldn’t get back on until she was on blocks. I brought Eli and Lily on deck. I told the older girls to pack their go-bags with PJs, toiletries, a regular outfit, and Sunday clothes for church the next day. I packed for myself, Erik, Eli, an
d Lily. We broke our record set during the surprise trip to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. We were focused.
Erik hit the centerline right on. That’s when the guys started shouting, “Slow down! Slow down!” This was the “stop on a dime” part.
Erik throttled the boat in reverse, trying not to pivot the boat off its line. The slings slipped under the hull and snugged safely between the rudder and keel fin on both sides.
“Okay, you can kill the engine now,” Scott said.
Erik exhaled.
Ten minutes later the boat was out of the water, the cut dinghy line dangling off the port propeller. The tear in the sail drive was now easy to see. That was the breach. So simple. So small. But so important.
It was about 6:30 a.m. The sun was rising over the Atlantic Ocean.
Scott packed up all his gear and found us by the bench with the kids, our go-bags piled in the gravel at our feet.
“Can I drop you guys at a breakfast diner or something?” he asked. “Rental car offices will be open in a couple of hours, but in the meantime I’m sure you guys would like to eat.”
Ten minutes later the boat was out of the water . . .
. . . the cut dinghy line dangling off the port propeller.
We hadn’t thought about it, but he was right. My mind was still spinning. We were supposed to be pulling up to our dock at home in a few hours. Now we were standing in a gravel parking lot somewhere in New Jersey—I didn’t even know the name of the town—and Fezywig was on blocks. This was a different world. Erik accepted Scott’s kind offer.
He ferried us over to the diner and then disappeared. I’m sure he wanted to get some sleep. We were grateful for him that morning.
It’s not overly dramatic to say some of us staggered into the diner, overdressed for the weather on land and a bit blank in the eyes. Erik asked for a couple of booths. They gave us two tucked-away booths facing each other. We all fell into the bench seats.
“Order whatever you want,” Erik told the kids. He never said that at restaurants. They started scanning the menus. “I’m sorry if we’re a little distracted,” he told the waitress. “We were just in a boating accident.” She assured us not to worry and went off to place our order with the kitchen. She brought out a round of hot chocolate for everyone. The kids promptly began to fall asleep. Jane crawled under the table and spread out on the floor. Eli and Alison rested their heads on the table. Karina leaned into the corner of the booth and closed her eyes. Lily lay down on the bench. The waitresses didn’t bat an eye at the sleeping kids when they carried in trays piled with scrambled eggs, pancakes, waffles, whipped cream, hash browns, and pounds of breakfast sausage. The kids woke up, took a few bites, and fell asleep again.
It was still early, but the diner was starting to fill up. I went to the restroom and found our waitress on the way back.
“I’m sorry our kids are so sleepy. We’ve been up all night,” I told her. “Our boat started sinking around 2:00 a.m. and we just got her out of the water.” She came to check on us a few minutes later.
“You all doing okay?” she asked.
“We’re waiting for the car rental shops to open up. We don’t have a way to get home. Can we sit here for a while?” Erik asked. She seemed reluctant but went to check. This was a busy Saturday morning at a breakfast diner.
She came back a moment later and said, “We’ll let you know if there’s a line.” We waited. The kids took turns waking up and falling asleep. Erik and I made calls. No one had a car big enough for our family. He made more calls. The kids slept.
Another waitress came. “You all stay put as long as you need. We’ll let you know if there’s a line,” she reassured us.
Finally, we found a car. It was expensive, but it was big. A large, black, Ford Escapade. They said they’d be by to pick us up. We thanked the wait staff and went outside to wait in the park.
“Look,” I said to Erik. There was a line of customers around the side of the building waiting for a table.
Chapter 21
Quiet Victory
Garden State Parkway, New Jersey
4 Hours off Fezywig
ERIK
I was jolted from my daze by a tollbooth up ahead. We didn’t have an E-Z Pass, and there were no attendants. This was one of those antiquated tollbooths where you throw in a couple of coins and drive on. We immediately started hunting for change. No one had any. All we had were bills. Then Emily remembered her purse was in the trunk. I didn’t want to get a ticket for jilting the New Jersey state government.
I pulled over and she got out and brought up her purse. She tried to open it, but the zipper was stuck. Sea salt had sealed it shut.
“Do you have your buck knife?” she asked. I pulled it out and slit open her wallet. She fished around inside and pulled out coins. They were all coins from other countries. This was getting stupid. I put the car in gear and drove past the tollbooth. They could send me the ticket in the mail.
We drove up I-95 and across the George Washington Bridge, turned onto Broadway, and pulled into a parking space across the street from our apartment building. For the moment, we sat in the car in silence. Karina offered a prayer for all of us. Then she cried. Emily cried, silent tears running down her face. The rest of us sat silently as rain drizzled down.
Our neighbor waved to us from her fifth-story window. We’d told her we were coming and would need our apartment key. Karina went up ahead to get it.
We walked into our building, a backpack over each of our shoulders. We crammed into the elevator and rode up to the fourth floor. No one said anything.
Karina unlocked the door. It was covered with paper hearts and messages from our friends near and far. Our far-away friends had called our nearby friends and passed on the messages they’d wanted taped to the door.
We opened the apartment door and passed through. We were home, but not really. We opened the fridge. It was filled with food. We didn’t know who had put it there. The kids and I fell asleep. Emily didn’t sleep.
Our door was covered with paper hearts and messages from our friends near and far.
I woke up twelve hours later. It was 4:00 a.m. Again.
Emily was sitting in the living room. She hadn’t slept. She did laundry. “I think we’re in shock,” she said. I think she was right.
We ate a little pasta—very little. I realized our dishes were gargantuan compared to the boat dishes.
Emily and I talked for a couple of hours. We stretched. Our bodies were sore. We remembered bailing a lot of water. We fell asleep as the sun was rising.
That afternoon my parents pulled up with our minivan. My dad had driven it while my mom drove their car. They hugged and kissed us, said they loved us, and—just like in Charleston—turned around and drove back to Virginia.
By evening all the kids were awake. They remembered the marina, the diner, and the car. They were trying to piece it all together in their minds. We were too. We gathered around the table, ate dinner from the food in our fridge, and cried.
Fezywig was steadied on wooden blocks in a gravel parking lot. We pulled ourselves up the swim ladder and went inside. It still had everything in the same places, but instead of being surrounded by water, it was surrounded by parked cars, a chain-link fence, and houses. I felt disoriented.
We took the groceries out of storage and moved them to the trunk of the minivan. We gathered the schoolbooks and packed them, too. We collected the clothes and stuffed animals that had been left behind. We’d run an extension cord to the boat, so it still had power. We opened up the fridge and found some leftovers and sausage. Emily turned on the stovetop and cooked us all some lunch. We washed and dried the dishes and put them away. Then we climbed down the stern, down the swim ladder, walked across the crunchy gravel, got in our minivan, and drove home.
The first time we went with everyone. Emily and I needed th
e help, but more importantly, we needed to see Fezywig again. We needed to see she was okay. We needed to remind each other we were okay. We patted her hull and took a few pictures. Good boat. We walked to the dock with all the kids and noticed the sunset. We hadn’t realized how pretty this place was when we were here last.
After that it was usually Emily and I driving out to collect and clean the boat, like scuba divers gradually stripping an old wreck. We took down pictures, quotes, and drawings taped up in the cabins and main salon. I tidied the nav desk. Emily swept the floors. We sat down and took a break.
“So do we hand the boat off here, or sail it back to the city?” I asked Emily.
“There’s no practical reason to sail it back to Manhattan,” she said. We both knew our friends could just as easily come and pick Fezywig up in New Jersey.
“But I kind of want to sail it all the way home,” I said.
“Me too. We are getting a fair bit of work done. Maybe another shakedown cruise makes sense?”
“Yeah. I’d hate to turn it over and then discover any issues.”
“The kids would be up for it. It’d be a day sail.”
Emily and I smiled at each other. We were talking ourselves into it.
After two and a half weeks on blocks, Fezywig was back in the slings, ready to launch. We packed the kids in the car and drove to New Jersey. We got there a little later than planned, but as usual with boats, there was a delay. The starter motor needed to be replaced. It had finally rusted out as a result of the flooding. The part would be delivered in a few hours. We could wait. We cleaned the boat.
There’s a certain catharsis in cleaning something. Emily scrubbed the deck with Soft Scrub and was thrilled to see it revert to its brilliant white color. It was probably good we had a few hours to mentally acclimate. It’d been two and a half weeks on land. The starter motor arrived a few hours later, the mechanic quickly installed it, and the engine started strong. Even though I could now install a starter motor in under ten minutes flat, it was nice to have someone else do the job. I had nothing to prove.