July 29 - 3rd Grounding - Low point in our travels

Thursday, July 29


It started out as such a lovely Thursday.  We had a nice SE wind, 10 knots, and we had the sails prepped for a nice sail across the Abermarle Sound.  This crossing is a notoriously difficult passage.  It's a 14 mile stretch of open, shallow water (12-15ft)  that is known to create rough, confused seas in even light wind.  Having a south wind meant that both the seas and the wind would be behind us, pushing us along instead of breaking over our bow.  We even had a 'buddy boat' to share the journey having finally met up with Jan and Greg aboard s/v Glenice.

We left Alligator River Marina at about 11:00 after a leisurely morning of showers, getting water onboard and other misc chores before leaving the creature comforts afforded by a marina. There was only one dicey part to the crossing -- Long Shoal Point on the Alligator River -- so named because it continued to fill a large part of the river with sand.  All the the guidebooks talked about it and gave lots of advice on how to avoid the perilous parts.

Somehow, all that good advice didn't help us as Dan navigated through the river, approaching the two buoys that marked the shoal.  While he was worried about the shallow water on the right side of the channel, we ran aground on the left side.  Damn, not again!  We tried several different attempts to get off the sandbar, but we were hard aground... and it all likelihood, everything we did probably just resulted in driving us further onto the shoal. Let me tell you, there was lots of swearing this time around .... maybe in the hope that yelling f-bombs at the top of our lungs toward the horizon would help vent some of our frustration.  When that didn't work either, we came around to the fact, that yes, once again, we had to call Boat TowUS (now beginning to worry that we may be at risk of losing our unlimited tow coverage with them).

The day just kept getting worse.  The tow boat would take 2 hours to reach us.  In the meantime, the southern swells that we looked forward to having off our beam, caused Maja to repeated rise and THUMP on the sandbar.  THUMP THUMP THUMP.  HARD THUMPS every 9 seconds that now added to the worry that this grounding may cause some real damage to Maja.  Slamming the keel on a sandbar of 2 hrs was the most unnerving experience yet ... 2nd only to the truly sick feeling you get when a forward moving boat suddenly comes to an abrupt halt.

When the tow boat arrived, the captain was full of more dire information.  He told us that if he could not get us off the sand bar in one hour, our insurance would not cover his time, at which point, he would consider this a "salvage operation", take our credit card number, and start charging us $100/hr per foot.  Meaning that if it took 2 hrs to get the boat moved, it could cost us $4000.  Holy shit. And that didn't include hazard pay if the thunderclouds gathering on the horizon dumped their rain while he was on the water.

I didn't know whether to start crying or throw up.

Instead, I stood at the helm, eyes glued to the compass, willing the dial to move as the tow boat tugged away, trying to pull the boat off the sandbar to starboard.  It took five minutes of pulling to move the boat one degree; 10 minutes to move 5 degrees.  After 20 minutes, we were clicking off degrees of movement, and we were off the sand bar in 30 minutes (all together now:  WHEW!).  There was no  damage to the rudder, prop or steering, and no rain had yet to fall, so all-in-all, we considered ourselves lucky.

Since it was now almost 4pm, we had no choice but to return to Alligator River Marina and hole up there for another night.  Which turned into 2 nights, because the weather on the Abermarle Sound on Friday was nasty, with 20 knots of wind from the North (meaning the wind and waves would be coming straight on, over our bow).  Running aground in those conditions would definitely suck.

So we spent Friday watching our first DVD on the boat, had a late breakfast of eggs, bacon and pancakes (something we never have time for when underway), enjoyed a bottle of champagne we'd been saving for celebrating when our son, James, got hired back as a teacher - YAH -  (layoff in June) ... but mostly trying to recover from this low and get our confidence back.

I seriously wanted to turn around and go back to Oriental, NC.

Encouragement for our boating friends came to the rescue in the form of their grounding stories and jokes and prodding and relentless good will, leaving no choice but to stay the course.  So, tomorrow we are leave the marina ... again....