10:07 am Daily Log
Well, I got the shifter cable re-installed and put the throttle assembly back together with all of the screws but one…I dropped one screw in the yard or in the boat and decided it wasn’t a ‘critical’ piece, one of three screws used to hold a plastic cap in place with very little, if any, force ever put on the screws. Everything works so the boat is ready to go. The tide, however, was late in the day, around 4 o’clock, and I had another appointment in the afternoon, so I didn’t put the boat in the water. I will be working again on Friday afternoon, but I won’t be going anywhere ‘risky’ because the tide will be dropping with the sun and I don’t want to get ebbed out after dark. Getting ‘ebbed out’ is a common occurrence; it happens when you arrive on a bank at a higher tide to start working and, as the tide ‘ebbs’, your boat ends up sitting on dry land. Needless to say, you have to keep working, or just sit around and wait, until the tide comes back in and floats your boat.
There are a few tricks you can do to speed up the process. First of all, if you want to get your boat floating as soon as possible then don’t load your clams or oysters in it while it’s ebbed out, just set them in their bags or baskets next to the boat; the weight of a couple bags of clams or bushels of oysters can add an hour or more to your wait. Also, if you have a flat bottom boat, you can spin your boat around so the bow is facing the incoming tide and as the tide fills in underneath your bow, you can load a few bushels as far forward as possible; this can help to lift the stern of the boat where most of the weight is due to the engine, fuel, and battery. If you have a couple other people with you then you can also push the boat through the mud and into the water, but this is often not possible…so don’t count on this approach. I’ve spent the better part of a night being ebbed out and it’s no fun. It can get cold with a dew or fog and a cool breeze and you’re almost always wet to begin with if you’re trying to get your boat floating again.
One afternoon my brother-in-law and I went exploring in a new creek when the tide was falling with the sun. We went way up in to this new creek and started to find good clams. We loaded the boat and started out of the creek about an hour before sunset. What we didn’t realize is that on the way in to the creek, we crossed over several sandbars that were not visible on the higher tide. When we started out of the creek we realized that these sandbars were now exposed and we were like fish trapped in a pond. We couldn’t get the boat across these dry sandbars and the tide was still falling.
About an hour or so after dark, we had enough water to push the boat over the first sandbar, so we unloaded all of the clams and got in the water and pushed. We were in waist deep water pushing and pulling the boat on both sides of the sandbar. When we crossed the first bar we re-loaded all of the clams and started motoring out of the creek; we were soaking wet, but we were so happy to heading home that we both opened a beer to celebrate the near disaster. We noticed the fog was setting in, but it didn’t matter because we were on the way back to the dock and back to the house where a hot shower and a hot meal was waiting for us. Then all of a sudden the boat came to a grinding halt. We had hit another sandbar. It was about six inches under water but it was also about twenty feet long which gave us little hope of pushing the boat across until more water filled in. So we unloaded the clams again, got wet again, and pushed and pulled and waited for the tide. Needless to say, with our luck this night, we encountered another sandbar further down the creek, but that was OK because we had the process down and we set to the task again of getting the boat across. Once we crossed the third and last sandbar we thought we were home free so we loaded the clams back into the boat, pushed off from the sandbar and tried to crank the motor. It didn’t crank. Our battery gave out on us either due to the fog or the water that was splashed over it during the process of getting the boat across the last three sandbars or just plain bad luck.
It’s now about ten o’clock at night in February, we had a cool breeze mixed with fog or dew. So, we rigged a sail with a paddle as the mast and a tarp as the sail. We used the foot of the motor as our rudder. Using this jury rig got us all the way out of the creek and onto the Intra-Coastal Waterway, but once we got there, the wind was no longer helpful and we had to drop the sail. We got the boat to the bank where we could get out and push it down the waterway in about thigh deep water. However, we could only push it so far before we came to another creek mouth that was too deep to walk across. We were too cold to swim it across and the wind wouldn’t allow us to drift across so we beached the boat on the West side of the waterway. We had no other option but to hunker down and wait for help.
We were wet and cold and the fog was relentless. It was after midnight at this point and we could see the lights coming from the warm houses on the Northern end of Isle of Palms; it was a miserable feeling. We didn’t have mobile phones back then and the handheld radio had a limited range, not to mention that it was such a nasty night that nobody in their right mind would be out on the water in a boat nearby. We draped the tarp across the bow and crawled up under it to keep the fog off of our already wet and cold bodies; we hadn’t started to warm each other up by hugging or bundling together, but we were very conscious of the fact that at some point we might have to. We laid there on our backs looking up at the blue tarp that was inches from our faces; we focused on how much the tarp was helping us to not get any wetter, but that was about as positive as we could get.
After about an eternity we heard our names being called out of the darkness; or we thought we heard our names then thought we were just going a little crazy. Then it happened again and again. It was a miracle. Three of our friends had put their boat in the water at midnight to come searching for us; my wife was the catalyst for this rescue mission. They found us some time after midnight and towed us back to the marina. Needless to say, I will not be exploring any new creeks or clam beds when the tide is dropping with the sun; you can get into trouble that way.
Gee.. good thing you have such a nice wife!
Posted by Carrie Spahr, on November 3rd, 2008, at 9:37 pm. #.