Here it is! Day Five of Dire Wolf’s southern jaunt. This Tadventure©, starring your author in a cameo role as MacGyver, will keep you on the edge of your seat, wondering aloud, “Will the intrepid voyagers make it out alive?!?” Others may disagree but I think you may also utter, “Gary must really hate Tad for objectively recording and reporting each and every day, exactly as it occurred.”
You may recall from your careful study of Day Four that Dire Wolf escaped narrowly the confines of Whittaker Creek, the Captain’s reconnoitering mission questionable at best (a capital offense, punishable by hanging, at worst), and anchored in the placid waters of Adams Creek, an impending gale threatening to reduce the depth to a point less than necessary to keep the Wolf afloat. The skipper took his place on the bow, lowered the anchor, deployed 60 feet of chain into the murky deep, and repaired to the waiting bosom of a gin and tonic. With the promise of bad weather on the horizon, we made sure to anchor directly in the middle of the creek, its deepest part, hopeful that we would be able to make it out at first light.
An otherwise restful night was interrupted periodically by the wind howling in the rigging and the boat rocking from side to side. When we disengaged finally ourselves from our cocoons (no panty raids having taken place the night before), we looked out a gray and dreary sky, the wind having not abated. The sight confronting us was, to put it mildly, troubling.
During the night, the Wolf had dragged its anchor about 300 yards and we were hard (very hard) aground, the wind directly on the nose, the water becoming more shallow with each passing minute, the mast of a sunken sailboat a constant reminder to all that anchoring in Adams Creek was not to be taken lightly, within spitting distance. I turned to the Captain and said, “Delta, eh?” [There was, as usual, history involved with this particular anchor. When first I met the Aston-Jones Party of Two, we were frolicking about in the Caribbean and, as most things of great import are often wont to do, the subject of anchoring tackle arose during one of our daily cocktail hours (5 o’clock each day…EXACTLY). Dr. Aston-Jones waxed prolifically to such an extent, expounding upon the unquestionable holding power of the Delta 55, that other soiree attendees, not then possessing that particular anchoring device, felt the need to question their very masculinity; as Dr. A-J put it, “Only a [fill in a naughty bit here] would equip a proper yacht with anything other than a Delta 55. It holds in EVERY condition!”] Dr. Aston-Jones, a man of great repute in the neuroscience community, but clearly lacking in anchoring acumen, made a nasty comment directed directly at me.
I made a trip to the bow, assessed quickly the situation, and instructed the skipper to retrieve: two snap shackles, a long piece of stout line, two chain hooks, and a toothpick; the solution to our dilemma planted clearly in my mind. Gary scurried off without questioning my instructions (first and last time ever) to retrieve the material requested. Agu, beer in hand, started the engine and took the helm in an abortive attempt to drive out of our dilemma. I had surmised, correctly, that no amount of forward thrust by the Wolf’s engine would extricate the keel from its current position. I ignored Captain Danger’s foolishness and sallied forth with Plan A as the rain began to fall.
I went over the plan with Gary as we stood together, wind whipping through our thick, manly hair, upon the foredeck. He rigged the elaborate series of trusses as instructed and I took up a position back in the cockpit near the port winch. The key, in my mind, was that the anchor had dragged but it was not directly in front of the boat. By attaching a chain hook to the anchor chain and then to a line around a winch, I surmised that we could pull the bow out of the wind, in this case, to port. Moving the boat out of the direct path of the wind (then straight ahead), we could raise the mainsail causing the boat to heel over, thereby reducing our draft which, in turn, would allow us to float freely, the engine propelling us easily to deeper water. I thought such a scheme would occur to anyone in that situation; it was simplicity itself; elementary, as it were (see: Holmes, Sherlock).
Gary, the wind carrying clearly his voice to the cockpit, was consumed by the nefarious embrace of Aston-Jones Syndrome. I detected, in his ranting, that he harbored no small measure of doubt about my plan; nonetheless, I continued to turn the winch, my schoolgirl-like strength multiplied easily by the winch’s 4:1 ratio. The line stretched but held as we gathered in about 20 feet at a time, replacing the pulling chain hook with the retaining chain hook and then swapping the two three times or so (we had one hook for pulling the chain in and then another to “hold” the chain while we reattached the first hook to the chain, further away). At some point, with about 40 feet of chain on deck, the bow turned out of the wind. “Now, raise the main,” I shouted, my voice carrying against the malevolent wind. Gary raised the main. Over we heeled as the wind’s force was brought to bear on the sail as Agu applied power. “She swims!” I cried.
And that, without embellishment or exaggeration, is how your author (see: MacGyver) saved our collective asses in Adams Creek.
[Stay tuned for the conclusion of Day Five (as part of Day Six) including our arrival in Beaufort, NC, and the Captain’s remarkable (see: scary as shit) docking maneuver, reminiscent in every way of Captain Ron’s (see: the movie, not the Indian) classic marina entry. It is not to be missed.]
