rescue party returns

Article By Shorty

About an hour had passed since Randy & Louis had left to get John and Cedric, we could see them, but they weren't making much progress at coming towards us. We thought we saw them waving a boat cushion in the air, so asked if Wayne could go checkup on them. He fired up the motor and left to go checkout the situation. Wayne has a habit of rescuing other guys, last time I was out with him at Canyon lake, he rescued a power boat that had run out of gas. Louis had a good rescue story from another sailing trip - a pwc was doing donuts around him and then dumped, stalling the engine. Louis being the nice guy that he is towed him in with his potter, while under sail !



Looking like a boat load of refugees, we found out the stories of what happened. John and Cedric in the Monocat had been slowly taking on water but didn't realize it at the time. It just wouldn't go to windward anymore and they had trouble even tacking. They were just about to head cross wind to the shore which they estimated was about a mile away from us, and then were going to walk the boat to us.

Do you notice something missing from the dinghy? A small wave had tossed some water into the dinghy and lowered her in the water. Then another wave splashed a little more in, and then another, and then another... Over the dinghy went, the motor to the bottom of Palacios bay, along with the anchor, vhf, and a few other things. The dinghy had positive floatation, so they were able to bail it out and get back aboard rather quickly, and were in the process of rowing back.

Most people would be pretty upset about loosing all that gear, but Randy was very cheerful about the whole matter. After a couple of hours we convinced him that it was a freeing experience and his true sailor soul wanted to be a purist.







Whew, that was a long day of sailing. We sort of had 2 groups at this point, the beach bums and the riff rafters.



Nothing like seeing a naked man in a Potter 15. :)



It was dinner time and out came the cooking equipment. Randy needed to open a can, but his opener was down in Davey Jones's locker, so he asked around. I offered the use of my Coglans combo spoon / p-38 opener -- but he rejected it with this "ew, it stinks" look and a couple of comments about not going to use that piece of cr*p , he wanted a REAL can opener. Louis offered his "everyone has one in the kitchen" type can opener, Randy gave it a try, and proceeded to dent the edge of his can rather than open it. With a short "uuuuuhhhhh.... how does that little piece of cr*p work ?", he reluctantly used my can opener.

I had a small sterno stove in the middle bottom there, Louis on the right had one of the pump type stoves, and Randy had the super propane stove with lots of accessories. Just as I was burning my finger trying to pull the top of the stove off, John walks up and says "yea, that is a p-38 can opener", and proceeded to open up a plastic container that his food came in. He didn't even bring a stove! Just had lots of goodies that were "open and eat". I know what I am doing next time, forget this cooking and clean the pans later. Besides, the stove and pans I brought took up space that I could have had 2 more days worth of food instead.

A few minutes after this photo, my dinner was almost washed over, a shrimp trawler buzzed by throwing a wake up the shore and almost into our cooking efforts. Luckily Louis's Potter 15 was sitting right there in front of us and sort of blocked the bulk of the wake, but his boat ended up sitting on the beach. That is OK, Louis is no stranger to the magical wonders of epoxy.



Right after I declare never to bring a stove again, Randy says "coffee anyone"? Can still stick to skipping the stove, I'll just bring Randy instead. :)



It was getting dark, so this is the last picture of the day. The riff rafters stayed on their boats out there in 3' of water while we made a bon fire on the beach. The wind was blowing about 5 mph, and suprisingly we had a bunch of mosquitos that were able to fly at us and grab ahold before being swept out to sea on the wind. Standing in the smoke of the fire really helped, so we gabbed till about 11pm.




back to main page