This concerns observed events in E FL today I am writing just before midnight on Thursday, May 5th to share our experience today.
We sadly observed both Embarrassment & Tragedy on the water today. We were only observers and not direct victims in either of the two instances today. THE EMBARRASSING GROUNDING We were near the Matanzas Inlet, in Eastern Florida just South of St Augustine. I had just called TowboatUS in St Augustine to get information after reading a post by Claighborn Young about St Augustine's sad inlet to find out if there was any fresher information about it. Upon going into the Matanzas pass we saw what looked like a 42 foot fast sailboat named OCEAN TRAVELER that had zoomed past our Catamaran two hours earlier as we headed north up the ICW. Near the former Marineland near Fort Matanzas (where the Spanish long ago massacred the last of the French Hugonaut Christian settlers), almost abeam of the Matanzas Inlet on the ICW, we saw a beautiful Sailboat sailed by a French Canadian and his wife listing badly fer to the east of the channel that runs aronf the west circumferance of the curving ICW there. He had followed his chartplotter's map and was in it's satellite GPS-defined channel instead of getting his eyes out of the cockpit and following the markers around the outside of the bend as he should have done. I felt bad for him. He was halfway into a falling tide and hard aground with a sail hopelessly up, and the water was going to go down 2+ feet more for another three hours before low tide at five pm. It would go up four feet by high tide by 11 pm... I snapped some pictures for future lectures as We went around. Sometime after I snapped a picture of him, the boat, OCEAN TRAVELER" attempted to call us on Angel Louise as we rounded the outside of the ICW pass and floating temporary buoys warning of shoaling there -- but the noise of the wind in his microphone made him unintelligible. I tried calling him with no answer either on 16 or on 9 of the VHF radio and advised without response there was too much wind noise. A few minutes later his French accented voice called clearly on 16 and asked if we could give him a tow. I told him no and also advised the extent of his falling tide and answered his question of when the next high tide was. I had had the tide graph for the location displayed on my inside helm station computer as I was curious befiore his call. At the same time USCG came on channel and advised 16 was only for hailing or distress calls and to move our idle conversation to another channel. We went to channel 17 and I gave him the TowboatUS number as he wanted to call them. (I imagine he will have gotten a shock if a tow captain responds promptly -- his situation on a falling tide will likely be classified as salvage when it takes much more than fifteen minutes to dislodge a vessel. His best bet will have been to wade out with anchor and chain and carry it to the channel to be ready at high tide if it is safe in his boat to wait that long. NB: some boats will ship water on the! ir sides if they go over too far.) THE TRAGEDY We had debated on going outside in the ocean at St Augustine through their inlet and sail all night to Brunswick. Wind was forecast to switch from gusty north winds that would have been horrible for us, to winds out of the east by the time we got to St Augustine. Seas were running 4 to 6 feet. We had read underway on our iPad the help that Claiborne has on his website. (I have even created an internet shortcut direct to his great site: http://tinyurl.com/icwfuel St Augustine has a bad reputation for its inlet. A huge underwater sand bar has grown like a drift of snow underwater from the South and now goes clear into the previously USCG-marked channel, taking up most of it's depth in several spots, and forcing boats to go hard-up against the North side of the East and West Inlet, hugging the red and going direct RED to RED. This afternoon we got there a few minutes before low tide, just minutes after going thru St Augustine's Bridge of Lions at Four O'clock. We had donned our life jackets, prepared Angel Louise to go to sea as we knew it would be nasty out there, and headed from the bridge in a NE diection for the inlet. But as I turned more NE on my way out toward the entry edge of the inlet (where the ICW also runs) I realized wind was really honking, showing just under 20 knots and on the nose with our NE heading (45 degrees). You could see the waves and surf breaking at the inlet ahead. We had everything battened down but as we got nearer the leading red buoys that would take us out into the breaking waves and salt water bath that would result, I decided the punishment and risk was too great and the inlet was just too risky at the time... So at the last moment before continuing down the inlet, I turned 270 degrees left, to turn and follow the ICW route from the inner inlet buoy going out! , back to the ICW going North toward Jacksonville. But another boat tried the inlet just after us and now is sunk in the inlet. The Tragedy sadly happened to some poor guy who was aboard what sounded like a very seaworthy vessel. His boat was a 48 foot vessel that tried to go thru the same channel only minutes behind the time we turned away. Channel 16 on our VHF clearly said "Mayday Mayday". A mans voice calmly came on and answered the USCG Jacksonville radio person's interminable questions - the USCG operator sounded like a very professional & efficient woman - to describe what the nature of the emergency was. He said he had been traveling the inlet in his 48 foot vessel, The Edge, with three aboard and had hit and gone aground on the south side. Wind whipped waves would have been blowing him further southward and further aground after his motion stopped at the time. He advised there were no children aboard. They were on sand and had not been holed. They were not taking on water. The USCG offered to call a towing service after he disclosed he had a policy with TowboatUS and its local St Augustine boat radioed they were responding. Aboard our boat Captain Sue looked at me and said, "A grounding probably shouldn't be a Mayday call should it?" ... Sue and I were later anchoring Angel Loise at the SPOT location shown on our SPOT satellite locator beacon ( http://tinyurl.com/edandsue ) so we did not pay a lot of further attention. Then minutes later when we were setting our anchor we heard the skipper of THE EDGE calmly ask the TowboatUS vessel what "the plan" was. The Towboat operator said he probably had enough line -250 feet- to reach the stricken boat, but confessed that if he tried to pull the boat off the sand that The Edge was driven upon, the Towboat would be turned 'beam-to' the waves breaking in the inlet and it would flip his boat. At that time the Captain of the 48 footer said he was starting to take some water in the cockpit of his vessel. But he said he was equipped with three bilge pumps that were running and his high water alarms were not going off. Shortly he did ask for aid in removing one of his two passengers, and was advised either Police or Fire Rescue was on its way. In response you could he! ar tension in the skipper's voice you could hear beeping of alarms in the background, and he advised high water alarms were now going off. Shortly all had to abandon the vessel. USCG Jacksonville anounced by radio a short time later that a partially submerged 48 foot vessel on its side in the inlet was "a hazard to navigation". Ed Kelly from USSV ANGEL LOUISE web postings at http://twitter.com/CaptEdKelly (posted from iPad - along with 1 finger typos) USSV Angel Louise, Catalac 41 Catamaran, USCG Hailing Port Cruz Bay - currently bound for Brunswick, GA prior to a Trans-Atlantic Crossing via Bermuda-Azores-London Ed Kelly from USSV ANGEL LOUISE web postings at http://twitter.com/CaptEdKelly (posted from iPad - along with 1 finger typos) _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://liveaboardonline.com/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardonline.com/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
