[Rhodes22-list] Grounded My Boat on a Sandbar

[brad haslett]

David,

Way to go dude! At least you didn't have to spend the night on the boat. When I beached mine a couple of years ago I called Mike A$k at n at his home on the lake (I was less than a mile away by water) about 6AM and said, "I didn't wake you up did I?"  "Well yeah, I just got in from Tokyo".  "Whatever, I'm stuck on the lake and freezing my ass off, would you please get out her and get me off this friggin' boat?"  When I went to work the following week he had put a laminated map of Pickwick Lake in my locker.

Brad


--- On Wed, 11/5/08, David Culp <dculp at hsbtx.com> wrote:

> From: David Culp <dculp at hsbtx.com>
> Subject: [Rhodes22-list] Grounded My Boat on a Sandbar
> To: rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org
> Date: Wednesday, November 5, 2008, 6:41 PM
> After 3 years, I finally did it.  My lake is shallow in
> places and I know
> most of the spots.  The wind forecast was 10-20 mph with a
> cold front
> approaching but not forecast to arrive until the evening. 
> The wind at that
> time was only supposed to pickup from 15 to 25 mph.  10-20
> is my perfect
> forecast for Rhodes sailing and a friend was going out in
> his boat and we
> agreed to meet down the lake about 6 miles from where I
> slip.
> 
> We met up and were going to have a race as we sometimes do.
>  At the time, we
> were in a very narrow area and we were trying to sail into
> one of the bigger
> basins.  To expedite getting there, I was cutting across
> and just adjacent
> to one of those shallow areas.  As we rounded a bend in the
> lake, the front
> hit.
> 
> We have a very sudden and dramatic wind change around to
> the north and my
> friend estimated that it was about 30 kts almost
> immediately.   At the time,
> I had full main and about 150% of the jib out.  Neither one
> of us could tack
> into it and my only option was a jibe toward the shallow
> area.  The result
> was that I ended up in the shallows and sliding up on a
> sandbar in about a
> foot and half of water.
> 
> I had the board out at the time and I wasn't moving
> very fast.  Predictably,
> the boat just came to a smooth stop as the board retracted
> into the keel and
> then rolled over like a drunken whale to about 45 degrees. 
> I had gotten
> most of the sails in by then thank goodness.  The wind was
> blowing so hard
> at that point (we estimate between 30 and 40 mph), that I
> really thought the
> boat was going all the way over and so I secured everything
> and the just
> climbed up on the high side and sat there.
> 
> My cellphone rings and my friend is asking "What are
> you going to do now"?
> I said " $#*t, I don't know what I am going to
> do"!  What can you do?  Have
> a drink I guess because surely nobody is going to come out
> on the lake and
> help in those conditions.  It's not like I can wait for
> high tide either.
> Fortunately, I didn't have to ponder my situation very
> long.
> 
> The wind let up a little bit and I convinced myself that
> the keel was heavy
> enough that the boat wasn't going to broach.  I climbed
> down on the low
> side.  With all that wind pushing on the hull and just
> enough water; my
> weight on the low side floated the boat just enough to
> where it eased off
> the sandbar.  I used the motor to make a quick turn to get
> out of the
> shallow area.  A quick assessment showed nothing had been
> damaged except my
> pride and now all we had to figure out was how to make the
> 6 miles back
> home.
> 
> Now the wind is still blowing about 25 kts at this point
> and is out of the
> north.  The waves are at least 2 feet or higher and I have
> never seen so
> many white caps on a lake.  It's a reach and then a run
> home, so I must get
> back on this "horse" and be a sailboat again.  On
> a b
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