The delivery
2002-05-29

I'm back, did you miss me? Yeah right... I had a good week and it seems weird to be back at work. The trip was pretty eventful. The readers digest version, we hit a rock, the engine didn't want to start the day of the race and we sailed home in the fog.

The extended version, well, that will take a little time to tell. We went to Johhny the chins party on Wednesday night had a nice dinner out and then crashed on the boat. 5:30 came way to early. We left the dock right on time and tried to catch the boat that left at 5:30. We eventually did. The wind was light and we motored out past Newport and into the open ocean. The visability was pretty good, but it was cold. People slept, listened to music and took turns driving the boat or plotting our course. Everything was fine until we hit Woods Hole passage. Woods Hole is a nasty place that connects Buzzards Bay to Martha's Vinyard Sound. It is narrow, full of rocks and poorly marked. The currents there are the worst on the East Coast. Not a good place.... We had our chart out and were carefully following the channel markers. All of a sudden, we are surrounded by rocks with no way out. I cut the throttle just in time to hear BLAM! We stopped, I hit reverse and we slip back out into deeper water. What the hell??? So we turned back and checked for damage. We arent sinking, a good thing. In fact no water was leaking in at all. The steering was fine too, OK, no immediate danger. We sat back and regrouped. Then another boat came through and we followed them through the hole. At thet point we realized how we screwed up. There were two intersecting channels and one of the bouys for our channel looked like it belonged to the other channel. We should have taken a hard left. We didn't, Oh well.

Everybody was pretty shaken up, especially Bob who was doing the navigation. I didn't blame him, hell I was driving. We should have had somebody on the GPS. We went back and looked at the track and sure enough, it showed us plow right into the damn ledge. Oh well...

M.E. got on the radio to talk to the boat in front of us. They hit the same rock last year and their owner had the name of the diver who checked them for damage last year. We called him on one of the cells and he was waiting for us in Hyannis.

The rest of the delivery was mostly uneventful, well until it was time to dock. I call the dockmaster for instructions and she tells us to pull into the end of A Dock. I tell her that there is only 20 feet of dock left on A and we are 40 feet long. She says not to worry, that they will move the other boat up and that there is plenty of room. There isn't. The dock hands are green as grass, and don't have a clue. We pull up and they sort of grab the lines and it is apparent that we don't fit. In the mean time the boat is now starting to wrap around one of the pilings, while the kid in charge spaces out, sooo.... I start to bark orders. You pull in that line and cleat it off, you three, pull that damn boat up the dock, now. Eventually we got it all straightened out, and we only stuck 5 feet off the end of the pier. I appologized to the kid I yelled at, but he seemed happy that somebody knew what was going on. The diver came and we came out of our crash with out damage (but $175 lighter in the wallet). The crew tried to pay but I wouldn't let them.

When I went to check in the dockmaster appologized for the confusion and said she had another dock for tomorrow. After all the work we did getting tied up to this space I was in no mood to leave. She said we had to because she needed ths space for deeper boats. They were all messed up. We'll see I thought as I went back to the boat for a needed glass of grapes. To be continued.....

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