Weekend Boat Cruise

It feels like the weather gods have been really angry with us this "spring," but at long last, they finally relented and deigned to grant us one day of perfect weather in Brinnon.  On Saturday, the temperature was about 60F, and the sky was cloudless except for a few streaks of contrails.

I spent the sunny day in the grandest possible fashion. Jim had conscripted his boater-friend Ralph to chug us up to Port Gamble to pick up the 32' x 12' ex-State Park float that was donated to Camp Parsons. Ralph has spent more of his life at sea than on land, and the evidence of this lay both in his profanity-laden speech and in the amazingness of his 34-foot trawler. The boat was fitted out with four radar systems/depth sounders, two GPS systems, auto-steering, a full kitchen and barbecue—the whole works.

A view of Brinnon and a peek at the Olympics

So we shoved off together at about 9:15 a.m. to take advantage of the ebb tide. It was speedy and wonderful trip up Hood Canal on calm seas with a full panorama view of the Olympic Mountains, from the Brothers to Mt Townsend.  We passed by Bangor Naval Base without incident, and slipped under the east side of the Hood Canal Bridge.

The underside of the Hood Canal Bridge

At Port Gamble, we spotted our new float in a little cove lying alongside a dilapidated pier, and we crept in closer. Everything was going great until...the incident. I heard the thud, but I didn't think it was anything serious. Standing at the transom, I looked down into the water at our stern, and with my polarised sunglass lenses, I could see a submerged line making the shape of a V, coming to a point at about where our propeller should be. Then I saw the V begin to twist...

Our propeller had been fouled on a submerged line.  There was a lot of swearing at this point. As the youngest guy, it was my job to get into the inflatable dinghy and try to saw at the line with an harpoon-like contraption specially designed for this purpose.  We were so glad we had this thing, because it was going to spare us the nightmare of jumping in and cutting it by hand. We had just managed to cut through one part of the knot, however, when the multi-hundred-dollar knife snapped.

More swearing. At that point, it was either game over, or someone was jumping in. Just sticking my hand in the ice-cold water to handle the knife was enough for me to know that I didn't want to put my whole skinny arse in it.  Jim, however, was not as lily-livered as I was. Luckily, the skipper had a dry suit (but no hood) and a mask for Jim to use.

In about five dives, he was able to cut another major portion of the knot, breaking another expensive knife in the process, but because he couldn't get all the air out of the suit before he went in, he was very buoyant, so he was getting stuck upside-down on the underside of the boat. When he came out for a break, they decided to have me try to tow the boat closer to the shore so Jim could stand under the boat and cut. So I started rowing my little heart out, and lo and behold, that tugging action managed to free us.

Once free, we weren't about to start the motor again while still in the cove, so it was up to me to tow us toward the float, which we then married to our hull with our stern facing out toward deep water, and then Jim and I got on the float and moved us seaward by pushing on each rotten, barnacle-covered piling of the pier by hand. Once the stern was in deep water, we got back in the boat, turned the motor on, and set out for home with float in tow. The nightmare was over.

We pass slowly back under the Hood Canal Bridge, float in tow, after an aggravating two hours spent freeing our fouled propeller

We literally proceeded at walking pace back south toward Brinnon—a necessity, given the resistance from the huge 12-foot-wide float behind us. We were making an aggravating two knots, but the tide was shifting from an ebb to a flood tide, and it eventually began to carry us with it as it filled into Hood Canal.

It was getting so late, and we had already lost so much time, that we decided not to take it back around the Toandos Peninsula to Camp Parsons, but that we would instead go directly back to Pleasant Harbor in Brinnon and tow the float up to camp some other day. We finally made it back to port at about 8:00 p.m.—a full eleven hours after we had set out.

An enchanting view of Hood Canal as we headed back toward Brinnon

The trip ended up being quite a bit more than I had bargained for, but honestly, what better way could I have spent such a beautiful day? This float, by the way, doesn't look like much to the casual observer, because most of its decking is missing, but even my untrained eye could tell that it's very solidly built (the timbers are huge and in good condition), all of the flotation is there, and it's so big that four dinghies could be moored to it and 30 people could easily stand on it. Perfect for a sailing class, in my opinion. Ken's already committed to buying the timber for the decking, so this thing is getting fixed up for sure. What a great find, and what a great weekend it made.

Our huge new float - a thing of beauty, though maybe not at first glance