Uncharted

by Kim Brown Seely

  Perhaps we were distracted by the concept of a more tropical place; maybe we were worn out after five hours of motoring without any real wind, or just getting overconfident. But whatever the reason, we failed to note that the Hardy Island guide also warned: “Mariners should use caution when anchoring, as there is a rocky bottom.” If there’s one lesson I’ve learned—whether in boating or in life—it’s that the minute you grow the least bit complacent, nature and circumstance conspire to correct you, reaching up to grab an ankle, shake you hard, and remind you of the natural order of things and who, in fact, is boss.

  Which is exactly what happened as we attempted to anchor in Hardy Island Marine Park in the aptly named Blind Bay.

  Well over two dozen boats had beaten us to Blind Bay and were anchored with their lines stern-tied around the few graceful red-barked madrone trees clinging to the shore’s granite cliffs. Beside the cliffs the bay dropped away precipitously; we realized we’d have to anchor deep—in sixty to seventy feet of water. On top of that, with our roundabout detour up Agamemnon Channel and lazy start to the day, we’d arrived late: there was little room to maneuver, and our mariner neighbors were eyeing us warily. Already well into evening cocktails, they were wondering who’d be the “lucky ones” to wind up with us anchored too close next door.

  Circling round we finally found enough room between boats to drop anchor, back in, and stern-tie to a cliff. I walked up to the foredeck, crouched down, lifted the lid to the chain locker, and reached in for the small handheld remote that runs Heron’s anchor windlass. When I pushed the button that should trigger the electric windlass so the heavy anchor chain begins unspooling, lowering the anchor from the bow of the boat to the water, nothing happened. The windlass’s clutch plate spun but without moving any chain. I tried again. No dice. Again. Nada. Instead of the plate’s teeth grabbing the chain and lowering Heron’s fifty-five-pound anchor, the mechanical windlass just spun and spun.

  “It’s not working!” I called, turning back to Jeff. He was at the helm, driving the boat behind the dodger and windscreen, and he couldn’t hear a word I was saying.

  “Drop the anchor!” he called up.

  “It’s not working! It’s not doing anything!”

  I tried the windlass again.

  “What are you doing? Drop the anchor!” Jeff shouted back, exasperated.

  I pointed to the useless remote, gave a shrug.

  “Just pull some chain out—drop it by hand!”

  Hmm, okay. I yanked a few feet of chain from the windlass onto the foredeck, stepped forward keeping my feet clear, and shoved the huge anchor over. But instead of dropping a few feet, the anchor began pulling chain from the windlass and, as the weight tipped the balance, picking up speed. Jeff left the helm and rushed up just as the windlass, freewheeling wildly, began spewing close to four hundred feet—six hundred pounds—of heavy three-eighths-inch-thick galvanized-steel chain straight off the bow and into Blind Bay.

  “Take the helm!” Jeff shouted, at my shoulder in a flash and ripping the remote from my hands.

  We switched places, and I hustled back to the wheel, leaving Jeff on the bow to wrestle with the windlass. “Put it in neutral!” he hollered.

  Shit. I’d driven the boat before—but only forward. I had no idea which click on the lever’s rotation was neutral. Plus, wasn’t it already in neutral?

  Before our arrival Blind Bay had been blissfully silent. Now it sounded like a symphony of jackhammers had gone off, thanks to us, the noisy chain reverberating over the water and echoing off the cliffs: Clankity, clankity, clankity, clankity-clankity, CLANKITY-CLANKITY-CLANK…The racket was accelerating, growing louder and louder as the weight of the anchor pulled what chain was left out of the boat.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it. I looked up just as Jeff sprang forward in his leather Top-Siders and jumped on the violently spewing chain. I shrieked involuntarily, knowing how dangerous this was, how any attempt to stop that avalanche of metal could mangle a foot or sever an ankle. But my husband’s first instinct was to stop the anchor and chain from flying off the boat. So he jumped—managing to halt the thing without losing his feet. Then, still standing on the hefty chain, he reached down, grabbed the steel-bit anchor lock, and shoved it through the remaining links, securing them seconds before the last hundred feet shot off the boat.

  Unfortunately, this heroic effort was too late—we’d already sent nearly three hundred feet and nearly five hundred pounds of chain freewheeling over the bow. And so, thanks to this colossal screwup, most of our anchor chain lay on the bottom of Blind Bay, useless as piles of spaghetti.

  Once the heavy-metal explosion ceased, the cove was dead silent.

  I could hear someone clear his throat on the boat where he was standing, watching, thirty yards away. I was mortified. I felt like I was going to pass out. I stood at the helm, wanting to disappear, every ounce of me aching to melt into the deck—but I knew I had no choice but to stay there and ride the thing out.

  “Christ, you could have lost both feet!” I hissed to Jeff, who’d just walked back to me at the helm. “What was that?”

  “A shit storm, that’s what,” he said, nodding toward the bow. “Don’t worry. I analyzed it and figured if I jumped hard enough, it wouldn’t break my legs.”

  “Great. What a nightmare,” I muttered under my breath.

  “We’ve got to get that chain back on board.”

  “I know, but how?”

  While we were trying to figure out what to do, a dinghy motored across Blind Bay in our direction and idled up to the side of the boat.

  “Um, hoop you won’t mind my asking, having a little trouble with your windlass?” our neighbor, a concerned Canadian, maybe midforties, said, his raised o’s and laid-back delivery the epitome of understatement.

  We admitted that yes, we were, as a matter of fact, having “a little trouble” with our windlass.

  “Hoommm. Did yeh check yeh clutch plate?” our new friend wanted to know.

  Jeff and I looked at each other. Had we what?

  “Yeh, clutch plate…on the windlass. They loooosen up sometimes, eh?”

  Jeff and I raised our eyebrows, traded a you-learn-something-new-every-day-out-here glance.

  “Hmmm,” Jeff said, “maybe it loosened when we were crossing the strait?”

  “Yup,” he concurred, bobbing alongside us. “It happens.”

  While the kind Canadian hung to Heron’s side rail, we dragged out a tool kit.

  “That oughta do it,” Jeff said, tapping down the tightened windlass with a winch handle. “It was great of you to come over, thanks. Can we offer you a beer at least?”

  “Guess it’s about that time of day, isn’t it?” Our new friend grinned as we handed a beer over the side of the hull to him. “So what’ll yeh do now?”

  Jeff and I looked at each other, assured him we’d be fine, and he paddled off. But damn, the windlass wasn’t the half of it: now we had a ton of chain to crank back onto the boat.

  * * *

  I thought my nightmare was almost over, but no. Ten minutes later it had morphed into a full-blown fiasco. I was back at the helm; Jeff was back on the bow. But this time Captain Jeff was leaning over the rail, staring into the murky depths and trying to follow the chain’s trail to where, apparently, it was snagged on Blind Bay’s rocky bottom.

  “Reverse! Reverse!” he was shouting. Shit. I put the boat in reverse, I hoped, and was indeed backing Heron, closer and closer, dangerously close to the cliff we’d originally planned to stern-tie to. I’d never even backed Heron until leaving the dock in Seattle four days before. I focused on trying to keep the stern straight in these close quarters.

  “Now forward. Forward!” Jeff hollered.

  I pushed the throttle forward again while my husband simultaneously tried to troubleshoot the chain and keep us floating in the desired spot.

  “Is it in gear? Forward!” he shouted back.

  Get me out of here! I thought. I trie
d to adopt a cool-as-a-cucumber-I-drive-this-boat-all-the-time stance, but I couldn’t help sneaking a glance at the boats around us. God, people had come up and were actually standing on their sterns like prairie dogs, all heads turned our way, enjoying the drama. Each of them had probably been here before, I told myself, but tonight was our special night. A few hours earlier we’d been floating along on top of the world. Then suddenly we were completely screwed. Why did I sign up for this? I wondered.

  Jeff and I moved forward and back, forward and back, hovering over the chain pile, slowly pulling steel up with our now-working windlass, until the chain remaining over the bow suddenly stretched tight as piano wire.

  Oh no. What was this?!

  Try as we might, moving backward and forward, we couldn’t loosen it. With all our gyrations, we’d managed to wrap ourselves around one of Blind Bay’s notorious bottom rocks. Arrgghhhhh! I rubbed my head with both hands, feeling a killer migraine coming on.

  Jeff set down the remote, strolled back to me at the helm again.

  “Now what?” I asked, massaging my temples.

  We looked at each other. We were in this together.

  “Well, we’re not going anywhere,” Jeff said, sitting down and gazing gloomily toward the bow. “You don’t even need a stern tie. You’ve got a hundred or so feet of chain and a fifty-five-ton anchor down there now—it’s called a rock.”

  * * *

  We switched off the engine, lowered ourselves into the cabin, and shut the hatch—disappearing like Butch and Sundance after a hairy shoot-out into the safety of our secret lair. It was an indescribable relief to be alone together. Jeff hurled himself onto the settee. I sank to the small green leather couch on the opposite side of the cabin, shaken and embarrassed, insanely glad to be off that helm and out of sight.

  Then we both looked at each other…and burst out laughing.

  “Oh my god! Oh my god!” I kept saying. “What a fiasco! A total fiasco! That was the worst!”

  “Worst ever,” Jeff concurred. “What a shit show. I had no idea the clutch plate could come loose.”

  “Well, now we know. Seriously, I’m just so relieved you didn’t lose any toes out there!”

  “Or feet,” Jeff said.

  “Or your legs, you big fat idiot.”

  “At least I’m not so bad looking, for such a big fat idiot,” my husband tossed back with his most winsome grin. “Let’s have a beer and regroup, figure this thing out.”

  “That is a brilliant idea,” I said, brightening.

  So we stole two of the boys’ cans of Kokanee beer from the fridge and popped the tops, out of commission but at least safe for the moment. It was a new kind of moment, but it was a tense moment: darkness was coming and we had to figure this thing out together fast. We were becoming a culture of two. When was the last time we’d faced a challenge like this together? It felt like us against the world, or the rock, as it were.

  * * *

  There was a groaning. We listened. Every few seconds, a horrible, tortured, plate-tectonics-shifting kind of groaning noise would reverberate through Heron’s floorboards. We could literally feel the sound. It came up through the bilges and floor and fed straight through our feet.

  I looked at Jeff.

  He looked at me.

  “We’re out of here,” he said.

  The noise was just the sound of chain dragging across rock, but we had no idea what had really happened down below, how much chain was wrapped around how much rock in which direction, or how solid our hold was. Our chart plotter, a screen display that integrates GPS data with an electronic navigational chart, showed a web of chain circling round and round in tighter loops, then backward and forward—our entire anchoring debacle mapped out like the trail of an insane sea snail.

  “That’s hilarious!” Jeff said, peering over the nav table at the image. “In fact, I think someone needs to take a picture of this right now.” He whipped out his iPhone and pointed it at the screen.

  We both stared at the absurd trail we’d unwittingly Etch-A-Sketched in Blind Bay. We knew we’d never sleep—we’d be up all night worrying about the boat, that it might work itself loose and drift too close to the rocks or one of our neighbors. Retreat, as late in the day as it was, started to seem like our best option. Within ten minutes we’d calculated how long it would take to return to Pender Harbour (where we’d started the day twelve hours earlier), tied a buoy to the chain, and tossed the whole thing—all the remaining chain and anchor—overboard. We figured we could mark the spot on our GPS and come back the next day to salvage the pieces.

  “You’re not leaving, are you?” a young husband and wife anchored on a pretty little ketch called out as we motored past, tails between our legs.

  “Yep, can you believe it? After all that!” I said. We waved back jauntily, trying to look casual.

  HERE’S TO FINGERS AND TOES

  We left Blind Bay and turned south, heading into Malaspina Strait, the wide body of water that would have been the more direct route that morning. I took the helm from Jeff and checked my watch while he went below to plot our course. It was already seven o’clock at night, and it would take us about two hours to reach Pender at our cruising speed.

  Jeff brought up the portable speakers and plugged in the iPod.

  I didn’t mind driving, I was so tremendously relieved just to be out of there.

  I looked out and surveyed the still, windless sea, chagrined.

  Then, realizing we’d never been underway together this late in the day, I looked up at the sky. It shone silver and pink, like the inside of a mussel shell. Everything was illuminated by the setting sun. And although there was nothing but the smell of ozone and salt and we were in the middle of the darkening sea after acting like the Northwest’s two biggest oafs afloat, there was also so much: purple sea beneath us, mountains in all directions, the vast sky shining and then fading to black as the stars emerged overhead.

  We were so tired. Bone tired. My stomach growled…

  But at the same time it struck me we weren’t home just standing in the kitchen and cooking the same thing for dinner again, or driving the boys around in the same old suburban circles, or sitting in our office cubicles staring at screens. We were outside on what felt like the edge of the earth, seeing it again for what seemed like the first time in a long time. I blinked. I felt so small suspended over the surface of the sea beneath that sky. But as Heron slid on through the twilight, and the sky began to deepen, a new moon, thin as a sliver of ice, rose.

  Gazing up, my hands on the wheel, I felt powerful. As I looked out at the limitless seas of the stars, really looked at them, a feeling of calm came over me. I had a conscious realization of what it feels like to be intensely alive. And I felt gratitude not only for being alive but also for being part of something larger and so much more mysterious. Suddenly, the distance between Heron and the stars seemed to disappear. I was out in the middle of the sea, on the edge of a darkening night, but felt expansive, entirely safe.

  “I love you, Chet,” I said.

  He looked at me like I was crazy. Even though the past few hours had been ridiculously traumatizing, the worst imaginable, we’d somehow come through them—and come through them together.

  “You’re okay, Bug,” Jeff said as I drove on into the dark. He wrapped his arm around me. In the damp cold I was intensely aware of the warmth of his body against mine. “You’re turning out to be one heck of a chief mate, you know. Tough as hell. Who’d have figured?”

  I laughed, shivering with pleasure. “That’s nice of you to say.”

  It was one heck of a compliment coming from my husband.

  And as I squinted deeper into the night, it occurred to me that maybe it might even be true.

  * * *

  Two hours later, in total darkness, which heightened the spicy smell of the surrounding forest and sun-warmed odor of rock wafting off land, we floated up to the same dock we’d left eight hours earlier. Unbelievably, there was fifty-fo
ur feet left.

  “Just like the Flying Dutchman!” a fellow boater called out as we limped in for a port-side tie, utterly spent.

  I was ready to scarf down some Cheerios and call it a night, but my husband declared he was going to cook us dinner, and he did. It was nearly ten o’clock at night when we sat down to grilled prawns, fresh that morning, piled atop linguine, and a bottle of Galardi Terra di Lavoro 2004, pulled from the stash beneath the floorboards.

  “Here’s to fiascos!” Chet said, raising his glass.

  “Here’s to fingers and toes,” I added.

  * * *

  The next morning, our sixth day afloat, we awoke in the exact same place we’d started the day before. Except that carefree, easy feeling, the giddy freedom we’d spent nearly a week to gain, was gone. We would meet the boys in less than two days! And not only were we groggy from drinking too much red wine the night before, we no longer had an anchor or chain. And without an anchor or chain, we’d be unable to anchor in all the remote coves and bays we’d planned to explore with the boys. How had we gone from being capable adults to such complete idiots in less than a week?

  We sat in the cabin with a stack of cruising guides and a pot of strong coffee between us, assessing our situation. We located three local divers and dialed them all: Bruno, Andy, and Fig. I was eager to meet a guy named Fig, but only Andy picked up when we called. It turned out Andy also ran the local water taxi, so he could meet us in Blind Bay.

  By nine o’clock in the morning, we’d hired him and were headed all the way back north. After nearly two hours motoring along the exact same coast we’d just traversed the night before, nothing looked beautiful. The sea was choppy and grim. The damp sky sagged. When we finally pulled into Blind Bay, it was deserted. All the boats from the day before had pulled up anchor by then and left.

  In the middle of the bay, a pathetic little buoy bobbed…