SMALL Stuff
In the last issue of Seaworthy, there
was an account of a sailboat that was
abandoned on the way to Bermuda (“Lost
at Sea, The Perils of Abandoning Ship”).
The following account (Claim #0913926)
involves a highly experienced 78-year-old
skipper who abandoned his 49-foot trawler last fall in the Gulf of Mexico during a
trip from Texas to Florida. And while the
story about the Bermuda-bound sailboat
centered on the difficulties of getting from
a small sailboat onto a giant ship in raging
seas, in the following account, it’s the
reason the trawler had to be abandoned
that makes the story interesting.
On Tuesday, October 27, the skipper was
finishing last-minute preparations for his
solo trip from Texas to Tampa, Florida,
where he was planning to meet his wife
for a leisurely, three-month cruise. He
hoped to take the Inland Waterway but at
the last minute, he had learned that a lock
in New Orleans was going to be closed for
45 days for repairs. After topping off his
trawler’s tanks at a marina in Clear Lake,
the skipper made the decision to take
the “shortcut” directly across the Gulf of
Mexico. He’d made the trip offshore six
times before, always in a sailboat. With
his trawler, he estimated the 825-mile
voyage would take five or six days.
Technically, it was still hurricane season
but 2009 had been unusually quiet—no
hurricanes—and when he set out on
October 31, a Saturday, calm winds and
seas were forecast for the upcoming
week.
As predicted, seas were calm for the first
two days and the trawler made good time.
Since he was by himself with no place to
put in for the night, the skipper developed
a technique of looking six miles ahead on
the radar screen, selecting a course that
was clear, and then dozing for 20 minutes.
An alarm would wake him up and he’d
repeat the process.
Wednesday, as he was approaching the
Florida coast, was when the trouble
started. Seas built to four feet; not
dangerous, certainly, but large enough
to occasionally roll the trawler gunwale
to gunwale. Sometime in the early
afternoon, the starboard engine quit.
Seconds later, the port engine quit. The
skipper went down into the engine room
14 Seaworthy July 2010
and found water in the filter. He drained
the water and then started the engines. A
while later, the port engine stopped again.
He discovered more water in the filter. The
frustrated skipper then switched tanks,
but the problem immediately got worse.
In desperation, he checked the depth
gauge and found the boat was in only 200
feet of water. He dropped the anchor and
350 feet of line. Despite the lack of scope,
the anchor held.
At almost the same instant the skipper
was anchoring his trawler, a late-season
storm, Hurricane Ida, was brewing in
the Western Caribbean off the coast of
Honduras. Initially Ida was only a tropical
depression with 35-mph winds, but four
days later, on November 8, it would enter
the Gulf as a Category 2 hurricane.
The skipper, unaware of the new forecast,
was, “racking my brain, trying to figure
out a way to get clean fuel to the injector
pump.” The fuel pump on the starboard
engine was working. He released the plug
on the injector pump and was getting
clean diesel and no bubble. He tried
pushing the stop button and the start
button at the same to time to clear the
cylinder. No go. He disconnected the line
from the fuel pump to the two filters on
the engine; he worked the lever on the
fuel pump; and he continued cleaning
fuel with the boat’s fuel polishing system.
Nothing worked. As he kept trying to coax
the two engines back to life, his anger at
the marina in Texas that had sold him the
water-soaked fuel started growing.
The waves continued to build, making
the engine room an increasingly more
dangerous place to work. While he was
cleaning one of the filters, the boat lurched
suddenly, catapulting him into the battery
box and giving him a nasty gash and a
black eye. Later, the skipper was thrown
again, this time cracking a rib, twisting
a knee, and getting another cut on his
head. The 78-year-old continued working,
draining the muffler to keep water from
backing up to the exhaust manifold. Later,
up in the galley, he was thrown against the
pantry and got a third gash on his head.
He decided that the time had come to let
someone know his predicament. He tried
raising a ship on the VHF. Silence. He shot
off flares. Nothing. Finally, he raised a
Japanese freighter that was late picking
up a pilot and didn’t seem interested in
helping him. Sometime later, he reached
a tug that contacted the Coast Guard;
help, he was told, would be sent out the
following day.
By the time the Coast Guard arrived the
next morning, Ida was well into the Gulf
and seas were 14 to 16 feet and rising.
According to the claim file, the skipper
was reluctant to leave his boat until the
Coast Guard told him Ida was quickly
approaching and his chances of surviving
were “nil.” The skipper said he thought
about his wife and also how he was going
to get back at the marina that sold him
the “dang fuel” and decided to board
the cutter. Revenge is a powerful motive.
Before leaving, he set a second anchor, a
45-pound CQR, with 350 feet of line.
As soon as the storm had passed, BoatU.S.
hired a plane and the skipper was flown
to the site where his boat had been
anchored. All they found was a small fuel
slick. That’s when he finally realized his
mistake with the fuel: “With nothing to
do but think, I tried to visualize how the
fuel could get out of the tank in small
amounts. Finally, it came to me—the
fuel vent! If fuel could go out, then water
could come in. The fuel had been fine for
hundreds of miles — until the boat started
rolling. When [the boat] rolled 45 degrees,
water came over the rail. The vents are
two feet below the rail. Probably three or
four ounces of seawater would come into
the tank. A lot of rolls, a lot of ounces. If I
would have thought of that earlier, I could
have cut the hose and let the water go
into the bilge to be pumped out.
“If only I’d thought of it earlier.”
This seems like a good place to
mention a topic that has been on a lot of
people’s minds: the Gulf oil spill. As
Seaworthy was going to press, there were
still hundreds of square miles of crude oil
drifting in the Gulf with no end in sight.
Using first-person reports from BoatU.S.
members, TowBoatU.S. towers and Co-op
Marina managers, BoatU.S.’s new online
page www.BoatUS.com/oilspill provides
fishing and boating conditions at various
ports, NOAA maps, updates, and photos.
There is also information on protecting
