As much as I would like the whole process to be done with, I think that may be a good outcome. I think it’s valuable to have that mental conditioning to understand that there are other boats out there, and that a few rejections are probably part of the path to finding the right one. With that, however, we’ve pretty much eliminated as a possibility everything currently on the market up here in terms of either price or condition. It’s spring, and brokers are excited, and indeed there have been an uptick in sales, so perhaps they have some reason to be. However, it’s made it difficult to negotiate on price, and we haven’t found the sweet spot of a boat we like at a price we think it is worth yet.

We were somewhat prepared for this, because the local market has a reputation for good boats and relatively strong sales, but when you are looking at specific boats and particular price points, reputation counts for nothing. We are looking for a solid platform to live and sail on for the next decade or more and it’s going to absorb a significant percentage of our savings to buy it, so the boat itself absolutely has to be worth the money, not simply the beneficiary of some presumption that Northwestern boats are “better.” So we were all ready to head south to California to continue our shopping spree.

We hear bad things about California boats, particularly those in Southern California: a climate unfriendly to rigging, dark murmurs of general neglect, aspersions of un-seamanlike conduct. How much of this is the generally negative disposition native Pacific Northwesterners hold toward Californians and how much is grounded in fact remains to be seen, but in general, the pricing for like models tends to be lower than we find up here and perhaps that’s indicative of the common condition.

What I suspect is that you find good sailors and well-maintained boats all over, just as you can find bad ones. If it’s smart to buy the worst house in the best neighborhood, maybe it’s also good policy to look for the best boat in the worst marina. In this case, California represents the worst marina within easy reach. We know folks who have found very solid, well-found vessels at excellent prices down south. So we started looking at airline tickets and packing our bags in preparation to take a late May swing through the Golden State.

Then my wife sprained her foot. Suddenly, the prospect of stumping around the hills of San Francisco and clambering on and off of rough docks and shifting boats seems considerably more daunting and unlikely. It’s too soon to say how soon she’ll be up and moving again, but for the moment, our boat search has slid to a halt into a big windless stretch of water.

Although it’s unpalatable, it may also be a good time for a pause in the process. We fully expect many of the boats that have just come into the market to drop in price the longer they sit, just as their predecessors have, and the longer the owners are making payments and writing checks for slip fees, the stronger our negotiating position. Although sales have ticked up, they have hardly exploded, and the surge is unlikely to last past spring, while financing remains difficult and we continually see deals implode. While it’s too complex of a process to over-generalize, we think time works for us, even as we find it painful to look out the windows on sunny days to watch rippling white triangles cutting across the Sound while we sit firmly ashore.

We also have to do some hard thinking about our long-term plans. While we can still come out ahead by buying a boat in California and trucking it up here, we’ve often talked (never more so than this past winter while our hatch was frozen shut) about wintering in Mexico. If that’s a goal, then it seems a little dumb to pay to have the boat moved up here when we’re just going to take it right back down there.

But what then? If we are going to make that move, we need to start structuring our businesses to accomodate it now; and in any event, we have commitments in Seattle through early fall. It seems equally silly to buy a boat now and let it sit down there all summer… so should we even be shopping right now? And if we’re not, then our decision to forgo leasing an apartment in favor of a quick search and purchase needs to be re-visited, since everyone who has generously been sharing their homes with us so far this spring never signed up for an all-summer stay. Would the cost of that apartment outweigh the shipping costs of a California boat to Puget Sound? And in that case, should we be shopping right now?

Beyond that, what of next year? If we do wait, buy in California, and winter in Mexico, would we come back to Puget Sound next spring, either taking the long, hard slog up the coast or via Hawaii as others recommend? Or would we continue south, heading for the Canal, and more distant goals: the Caribbean, the East Coast, Europe? These are big questions that are suddenly very real and very relevant, and we weren’t really ready for them.

If time suddenly seems a little fuzzy for me, it may be because all the decisions of the next five years are suddenly crowding into the room, creating some sort of wormhole effect, and months seems like years and years like days. It’s my nature to try to understand things as best I can before I make decisions about them, but there is too much that is now unknowable and my feeble brain is having difficulty sorting out what is important. Mandy may have sprained her foot, but I feel like I have sprained my brain. There isn’t enough ice in the world to bring that swelling down.

An acquaintance told me recently to relax and enjoy the process. Either I’m just not wired that way or it’s really a little more fraught when you are searching for a home that can also sink (a more optimistic take on this might be that we’re looking for a home that can also float; seriously, have you float tested your condo lately? No? Perhaps we’re coming out ahead of features), and also deciding on the course of your life for the next decade or so.

Mandy and I had been watching the house and minding the chickens for a couple weeks at that point, long enough to have soaked the cold of January’s snows out of our systems, and long enough that I had become used to the pre-dawn view of Port Townsend across the water, lights twinkling in the distance. That morning, as I looked blearily out to the north, I recoiled and did a double-take: a huge, sharply-contoured shadow was shifting subtly and ominously and right there outside the front windows.

The First Glimpse

I had first woken at 5 a.m. to a shrieking gust of wind, and had rolled over and gone back to sleep, fuzzily thinking that there hadn’t been any advisories for high winds the night before. Northwesterlies claim their share of victims every year up here.

But this late in the season, there is little damage left to be done by sputtering spring wind storms, and the most I expected to see was the usual random detritus blown down the bay on white-frothed rollers.

As soon as I realized that it was a boat ashore in front of the house and not some briny sea monster rising from the waves to attack, I also instantly knew which boat it was. Lotus was the only vessel that size left in the anchorage. A big, boxy 92-footer laid down in 1908 and launched the following year, Lotus was at the time the largest cruising yacht on the West Coast.

More recently, she was put into a trust and has been a fixture at wooden boat shows around the region, and a delightful reminder of a bygone era of luxury cruising along the Inside Passage as she has entertained at her mooring or ventured out on tours. Any time I look out across the bay at her, I expect to see gay yellow lights arraying her broad upper deck and elegant ladies with parasols being helped down into gleaming skiffs to be taken ashore after an evening of entertainment aboard.

Now, I was seeing a vessel that gave every indication that it was about to be pounded apart against the concrete ramp on the point in front of the house.

I stumbled back to the bedroom to grab clothes and a coat and wake my wife. I doubted there was anyone aboard but wanted to be ready in case there was and they needed to come off. I didn’t know who owned her; I hoped that some of the neighbors did and suspected some other early riser might already have called. Still, I needed to let someone know; after my utterly fruitless experiences with the Coast Guard during previous storms, I opted for 911.

They were pleasant, but completely out of the water, as it were, when it came to nautical matters. Big vessels have big fuel tanks, but for better or for worse, the policy seems to be more about vengeance than prevention in the event of a spill. In any event, the only official response was a state boat that came around 24 hours later to take water samples.

Further down the beach, a neighbor who knows the director of the foundation who owns her gave her a call. In years past, Christian Gruye’s dinghy has washed up on the beach nearby. When she called back, she assumed that was the case again. “No, this time it’s the big boat,” he told her, setting in motion a frenzied salvage effort.

But for the first hour, as the tide receded, it was only my wife Mandy and I and a slightly asthmatic dachsund named Daffy we were taking care of, watching Lotus’ roll period increase as the wind pushed her and less and less water remained below to keep her upright. Around 0700, she went over on her port side. We could hear the crashing as everything not bolted down or braced let go and ended up against the port side. Fortunately, none of the windows were smashed out; equally fortunately, she lay down heeled to seaward, and didn’t come down with her superstructure in the trees and logs and the concrete ramp to shoreward.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Shortly afterward, the first rescuers began to find their way down the various driveways fronting the beach. Eric, an engineer, and Brad, a shipwright intimate with her structure, were among the first. I searched out the oars to the house dinghy and helped them launch into the heaving waves so they could get aboard and check the damage. The first reports were encouraging; a mess inside, but not making much water. No electrical, so no pumps.

She began pounding then, as the waves built and her buoyancy failed, but there was little to be done about it. Vessel Assist boats from Port Hadlock and Port Townsend arrived, and there was a discussion down on the beach, the first of many that would occur throughout the day, about getting a kedge out. Christian and her husband, Brion, and another friend, Suzie, showed up. A council was called; we put on coffee, and volunteers congregated in the living room to review the situation and discuss the options.

Too Close for Comfort

These were limited. iPhones were produced, tide tables and forecasts were consulted. Depending on whose phone and which app you looked at, the wind was either going to increase or decrease, continue or abate, at some point in the late morning or late evening or perhaps the next day altogether.

The tide tables were more closely in agreement with one another and were uniformly pessimistic: the tide she had come in on that morning was the highest for the next month. The afternoon high would be more than a foot lower; the next highest high would be around 0530 the next morning but would still be lower than the one she grounded on.

Hope that she could come off on the afternoon high faded rapidly as the wind continued to pick up, and options for lightening her receded … no one wanted to try to get the 350-pound main anchor off the bow in such conditions, and when someone broached the idea of off-loading fuel in the heavy swells I broke out in a cold sweat.

The kedge conversation happened again. Costs and benefits of using Vessel Assist versus a private vessel were debated. Someone brought up the idea of calling the Elmore, an old tug that had fared poorly in last year’s storms. She had been repaired and was moored nearby and had plenty of power, but I knew her transmission had been acting up recently, and tied onto a grounded vessel while working off a lee shore is no place to not be able to shift into forward.

All Aboard

It became clear at last that little was going to be decided so early. While she was still partially submerged, there was no way of accounting for damage to the hull; a hole below the water line might well mean she was better left where she lay than towed into deeper water, at least until a patch could be fashioned. Preparations could be made for de-watering, rigging a towing bridle, and making emergency patches.

While time and tide may wait for no man, the reverse is not true: it turns out that men and women are pretty much stuck waiting on wind and tide … no one who has been through a hard grounding in a broad tidal range can easily understand how little action there is versus how much waiting must be done. We brewed more coffee and made more sandwiches and people brought pizza and waited.

When the tide dropped enough, someone brought in a ladder and we rigged it at the bow on the shoreward side to allow easier access. Going aboard was every bit as surreal as seeing her for the first time heaving out there in the dark. She was canted at 45 degrees, so nothing about boarding her and moving about was in the least bit normal. After ascending the ladder and clambering over the rail, you clapped on to a line lead across the foredeck to a short ladder up to the upper deck. A hatch cover was the only footing until you reached the ladder, which you then ascended sideways, grabbing at the upper deck railing along the way. Once in front of the pilothouse, you grabbed another rope and pulled yourself up to the high side, where you could finally lean against the pilothouse and catch your breath for a minute. After that, you tried to scrape sand off your boots and keep your footing on the non-skid, holding onto the rail or a safety line that was later rigged leading aft to the entrance into the cabin.

Inside the cabin was even worse. Appliances, cabinets, dishes, tools, equipment of every type and description, all had come loose and lay piled against the port bulkhead. Footing was precarious and every handhold bore examination as loose joinery was ready to give way when weight was applied. The carnival funhouse angle induced vertigo and made some folks nauseous. “I didn’t think I was going to need Dramamine on a grounded boat,” one guy quipped.

As the morning progressed, more people started to show up. Uncertain about the condition of the hull and the need for manpower to ready her for towing, Christian called in friends from the crew of the Adventuress, currently hauled out in Port Townsend. Students and staff from the Northwest School of Wooden BoatBuilding, who had a fine view of the proceedings from their building across the bay, came to help. One student, a fellow named Greg, happened to be renting the guest house on the property we were taking care of; he opened up his bungalow as freely as we had the main house and worked tirelessly to help out. Vessel Assist put in at Port Hadlock marina, just down the beach, and came over with pumps and equipment. Daffy was confused, and then, when the pizza showed up and kind-hearted volunteers started sneaking her table scraps, thrilled by all the excitement.

But as the tide began to rise, the wind continued to scream down the bay, and Lotus began taking on water. We had already hoisted several electric pumps aboard and a generator; now, I rushed to get another generator aboard before the waves blocked off the ladder again. I filled my boots and a wave sprayed the generator with salt water. Wiser men, Brion and Brad, set up a tagline to ferry more pumps and fuel across safely. We ran an extension cord from the house to the boat, first across the beach, then overhead as the tide rolled in. Later, we added a second cord on another circuit. I lost count of how many pumps went aboard. But they could not keep up with the water, and Eric and Suzie on board could not find where it was coming in. I worried that she had come down on a rock, piercing the hull out of sight of the beach and inaccessible from the interior.

But once it had become clear that there was no pumping her out and no righting her on the afternoon high tide, there was a sudden sense of focus. To the extent she was coming slightly afloat, she was simply getting pounded by the heavy surf, driven into the sand and against the sandstone shelf where she lay; better to let her flood and keep her stable, and to know that everything rested on the chance at the 2300 low tide to get her patched and ready to come off on the next morning’s high.

There was a period of calm, then, in the afternoon. Eric and Suzie stayed aboard to man the pumps and stabilize her. The mooring ball was still attached at the bow and a long length of chain disappeared back toward her original mooring; a plan was devised to retrieve the ball and chain to avoid further entanglements when she came off. Christian and Brion finalized arrangements with Vessel Assist; they would be on station at 0400 with three vessels, including the 50-foot Cascade, ready to pass a line and pull.

There was time to chat; Christian, who had inherited the boat from her father, regaled us with all the other adventures they had been through as she was growing up on the vessel, frightening scrapes in storms, previous groundings, sales and re-purchases. Lotus, it became clear, wasn’t simply a historic vessel with a storied past; she was part of the family. Every decision Christian was making that day involved soul-searching with a raft of memories attached.

Taking advantage of the lull, I reconfigured the electrical cabling and set up floodlights I found in the shop to illuminate the beach, ramp and ladder. Patching supplies and additional pumps and tools began to show up and were stacked on the ramp, waiting for low tide. A supply of headlamps, batteries, and waders materialized. Darkness fell, and the hull finally stopped pounding as the tide receded again.

As soon as it was practical to get at her port side without filling our boots, we were looking for the hole. Several of the Adventuress crew, some of them previous graduates of the Boat School, duckwalked awkwardly along in the surging surf, minutely inspecting every seam and butt that wasn’t obscured in the sand. Although I don’t know the first thing about wooden boats, I joined them and made my own survey.

We rendezvoused on the beach at the bow and compared notes, mostly favorable. One woman found a seam that she thought might have lost the caulking; another spied a suspicious butt that seemed sprung. I’d found a spongy patch above the sponson where the plywood seemed to have sprung out. “But that’s above the waterline,” someone said. “Not today, it wasn’t!” I replied.

We walked back to take another look and show one another our findings. Although she had been taking on gallons and gallons of water, far more than the pumps could keep up with, nothing we had spotted seemed likely to have been the source. We crouched along the port quarter, squinting down at the drips coming from the butt, debating the likelihood of the waves leaking in behind the guard, while a few feet further aft, a gaping hole in the guard that we had all missed on our first two passes yawned over our heads. In the movie version, I could imagine the camera panning up from our debate and focusing on that obvious gap, bashed in by the afternoon waves.

Of course, sharper eyes soon found the damage. That entire section of the guard had been the suspect all along; while the rest of the hull above the sponsons was heavily timbered, financial considerations had forced a cosmetic patch with plywood in that particular area. As luck would have it, it was slated for more permanent repair later this summer. But for now, it was going to get more plywood and battened tarps.

A human centipede of volunteers conveyed boards, tools and tarps over the beach and floodlights were set up to illuminate the area. Another neighbor from down the beach, CJ, who had a long career in commercial salvage down in the Gulf, appeared with his son Carlos and more buckets of tools and gear. The kedge conversation happened again. But the tide window was open: it was time to get her ready for the morning pull.

What followed was like an intensive, compressed master-work course in rigging and salvage from some of the most experienced nautical minds on the West Coast. My own repertoire consists of the usual recreational sailing knots, bowlines, figure eights, a few different modest hitches. These folks were tying exotic knots and indeed entire systems of knots with variants and sub-variants and as much complexity as the opening moves of grandmaster chess players. Unfortunately, their fingers moved too fast for me to follow any of it and it was no time for giving lessons. Brion was kind enough to attempt to explain his bridle rig off the stern post, but the various yippees and whoopies and whatnot went right over my head, although the Boat School students in attendance ate it all up.

Neither am I much of a carpenter, but I dug in and helped roll battens into tarps and pound them into the hull and sponson, and found myself hammering nails inexpertly into plywood sheets to make a sandwich over the hole and other vulnerable areas.

Toward the stern, in a feat of endurance and strength, several people had crawled in under the hull and were using sledgehammers to bust apart two large rocks that threatened to hang up the rudder or keel if she were dragged that direction in the morning.

Brad and CJ supervised the patch work. When they were satisfied, we piled most of the remaining salvage material aboard, tucking it away in the jumbled galley off the after-deck, where it promptly got lost amidst the other debris covering the sole. CJ warned us to get our heads down for a few hours and get some sleep. But part of the battle was to be fought that night, as the tide came in … if the patch didn’t hold and the pumps couldn’t keep up again, she would have too much weight to come upright and off the bottom at high tide. Eric and Brad settled in for a long night in the dark, canted vessel. The rest of us trudged back up the ramp to get a couple hours of rest.

I counted myself fortunate to have a bed; everyone else was relegated to couches or the floor in the main house and Greg’s bungalow, or, in Brion’s case, to his car. “He sleeps great in there,” Christian said dismissively as she claimed the living room couch.

I was up at 0330. I had gotten a couple hours sleep but woke up around three and finally couldn’t take the strain of laying there without knowing if she was coming upright with the tide or not. I threw on my wet, dirty clothes and headed outside. It was frigid; I looked up and the stars shone clear and bright overhead. A spotlight was crawling south from Port Townsend. Initially I thought it was, finally, the Coast Guard, who had made some vague noises about being present for the pull, but in fact it was the Cascade coming in. The two smaller Vessel Assist boats, Gabriel and Negotiator, were putting out from Hadlock, their own lights flashing eerily in the dark.

Vessel Assist Arrives

When I got down to the ramp, Greg was already industriously ferrying people and equipment back in forth in the dinghy. The tide was already over the base of the ladder, and they were hauling it aboard. To my immense relief, it was dead calm out, and Lotus was beginning to come upright on the tide.

Vessel Assist put a couple crew aboard, and Brion, Eric, and Suzie were joined there by some of the Adventuress crew, including one of her captains, Joshua Berger. Josh went aboard by dinghy and stopped off briefly on the ramp. He’d brought fresh poppyseed muffins. In addition to being, by all accounts, a superlative captain, he also bakes a mean muffin.

On board, they had a quick safety meeting, and with a little yelling back and forth we coordinated disconnecting and retrieving the tagline and the electrical cords that were connecting her to shore. One of the two smaller Vessel Assist craft ran in the main tow line from Cascade and they connected her to the bridle rigged from the stern. Gabriel took a second line to the bow to assist. At around 0445, they took a strain and started gently pulling.

I stood on the ramp with Christian and watched as the Cascade put on more and more power. Lotus rolled to port, but didn’t budge. The process was repeated, then again, then again in tandem with Gabriel hauling on the bow, and each time the top rail on Lotus dipped out toward the water, I could feel Christian tensing up a bit more.

Finally, I turned to her and said, “Are you sure you want to watch this?” She turned, looked at me for a beat, and said, “No!” then marched directly up to the house and parked herself in a back room, where she sat waiting for news in a state of private torment which I could not even begin to imagine.

For 45 minutes, they rocked Lotus back and forth on the sandstone shelf where she lay, with only one very slight bit of movement. Cascade and Gabriel, pulling in tandem, weren’t making any headway at all, and despite all the considerable discussion beforehand and the clear safety protocols that had been set up to maintain her structural integrity, I was worrying they were going to break or spring something. And indeed, as they switched the bridle to the bow and took up strain there, Brion yelled out to stop–the capstan had begun to shift on its mount. They slacked off, inspected it, then took a strain again more slowly. It held. But still the hull would not budge.

As high tide passed, I was sure it was done … she was not going to come off, and the storms predicted for the coming week would surely beat her to pieces there without extraordinary measures … a crane, perhaps, or a thorough gutting to lighten her enough to come up on a lower tide. None of the options would be cheap or pretty. You could hear in their voices on the radio that after another few pulls, the Vessel Assist captains were getting ready to come to the same conclusion.

Then, on a surge with both boats pulling, the bow shifted a couple feet out.

Instantly, hope returned. “We’ve got movement on the bow!” Lotus called out dramatically on the radio. “Lotus is coming off.”

With slow majesty and accompanied by loud cheers rising over the rumble of diesels in the pre-dawn murk, she came free and headed for deeper water.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Her rudder hit something as the stern dragged off and shifted a few degrees starboard, causing her to tow oddly and Negotiator nearly got caught in the tow line. They halted the tow and let her drift a bit while they inspected for damage below, got the steering gear straightened out, and rigged for a hip tow for the five-mile stretch up to Boat Haven in Port Townsend.

Back in the house, Christian was shaking, Mandy was smiling and Daffy was still asleep. It seemed very empty, suddenly, with everyone gone and no huge boat sitting out front. Christian thanked us graciously for the hospitality (I find it’s easy to be hospitable when it’s someone else’s house) and headed for Port Townsend to meet Lotus when she came in. Mandy and I listened to the radio traffic as she made the slow, hour-long transit north, gathered up the odd bits and pieces of gear left around and ate cold pizza in celebration.

And now, the real work begins. Lotus was both amazingly lucky in where she came in, and very fortunate in her friends. The expertise and dedication that materialized around her were what saved her, from Brion’s rigging knowledge to Brad’s familiarity with her structure to Eric’s knowledge of her systems (it was he who pumped free the water tank forward that lightened her bow up enough to slide off despite being several feet higher ashore than the stern) and the general but deep expertise of the Adventuress captain and crew in all matters nautical.

In retrospect, it is even more impressive. Not only did everything that needed to happen, happen, but it was done safely and in a seamanlike manner without argument or yelling. The only amateur out there was me; and even that was not without value, since none of the other luminaries out there had probably ever been so lubberly as to have grounded and flooded a boat before, whereas I had. So even my lack of expertise resulted in the availability of some hard-won experience, which I hope was not utterly worthless.

Part of that experience is the knowledge that getting the boat off, as difficult as that may be, is actually the easier part of a salvage job. Putting her back together again is the long, arduous, unromantic part that grinds against your soul and forces you to question your dedication to boat ownership. And particularly with a wooden vessel of Lotus’ age, without insurance, it’s sure to be an expensive proposition.

So, I urge you to stop by the foundation’s web page when you are done reading this and make a contribution. Someday soon again I hope to look out and imagine those elegant ladies and their parasols enjoying a sunny day on Puget Sound aboard the Lotus.

Well, most of those things are pretty universal experiences, and you can have them anywhere from Port Hardy to the Yucatan, and if you mention them in the company of sailors you will get a chorus of nods and a healthy raft of “That’s nothing! One time, I…” replies. But it turns out there is a whole other subset of things they never told us that are exclusively cold-weather related! That’s boating in a nutshell, isn’t it? Just when you think you’ve seen it all….

New on our list for winter:

- Winter storm forecasts made with the benefit of the expensive new coastal radar are no better than the summer ones made without it

Sliding Hatch

- Snow piled up on deck in front of your sliding hatch will make it difficult to open. Snow, topped by a glaze of frozen rain, will weld you inside your boat like you’ve been sealed up in a space ship about to be shot off on a six month voyage to Mars

- The drip-lip inside your deck-accessible anchor locker that tends to accumulate water in the summer will freeze that hatch shut in a solid block of ice when it snows. If your water tank fill happens to be located in the anchor locker, you will run out of water at just this time

- That doesn’t matter, because the faucet at your slip will be frozen anyway and you’ll have to hike up to the restrooms to fill up your spare water jugs

- Hatches with ice and snow layered atop them shed condensation at approximately 300 times their normal winter rate

Frozen Fender

- Frozen, ice-encrusted fenders banging against the hull in a windstorm are every bit as annoying as squeaky fenders are in the summer

- Marina access streets are not high on the city’s “to be plowed/sanded” list

- Dock carts do not come in an “all wheel drive” version

- Ice in the rigging really does increase the roll period of the boat so that a 20 knot breeze at your slip feels like crossing the Strait on a bad day

- All that long expanse of dock you appreciated in the summer because it kept you away from the hustle and bustle near the ramp has become an impassable wasteland of treacherous ice, snow drifts, and frozen heron crap

- Despite all this, when you finally reach the head of the dock, you will feel like Roald Amundsen and your sense of triumph will outweigh all the hardships

I think I can see the Pole down there

So I was intrigued when I came across the website of the Cascadia Region Earthquake Workgroup. CREW is a non-profit organization of representatives from the public and private sectors working together to envision and reduce the effects of earthquakes and related hazards. They have put together a number of good resources for understanding the effects and preparing for them; most interesting are the scenario papers discussing the most likely local quake effects from a big-picture perspective. They factor in not just the first-order effects but also many of the likely secondary effects, such as major passes being blocked by landslides, ferry service disruption from terminal damages, and state-wide economic effects from port disruptions.

Unfortunately, like every other source, they either haven’t calculated or haven’t published any detail about Puget Sound tsunami effects or timing. It shows how far our region has to go that even the basic data isn’t available; without it, planning is going to be haphazard at best. So I’m left with my original speculation, which is that there just isn’t much time to react if you live on the water and significant event occurs. The warning time could be so short, and the shaking last so long, that it could prove impossible to get up the dock before it hits. Should we make it that far, there’s no guarantee that the ramp up to the parking lot would still be attached shoreside; the recent remodel here at Shilshole beefed up our docks quite a lot, but they don’t look to me like they were designed for lateral sheer. If the ramp is out, the seawall would be insurmountable in the time available. But, if even after all that we made the parking lot, high ground still requires a 100 meter sprint across train tracks, through brambles, brush, and weed, and finally onto a hillside that might well be coming down to meet us at the same time we headed up it… local landslides are predicted to be extreme.

I’m beginning to think that our best option may be simply to stay with the ship, as it were. While it’s true that a lot of boats are demolished in tsunamis (particularly those in marinas with lots of stuff to bash into; concrete floats, pilings, other boats), it’s equally true that a lot of them stay afloat for quite a while after the waves. Most sailors are familiar with the axiom that one should always step up into a liferaft; maybe it’s also best to step up ashore in the wake of a tsunami. Certainly our hull would fare better beating against other boats and debris than our frail carcasses would. Getting rattled around during the ride would be unquestionably dangerous, but it’s not entirely unlike getting bashed around in heavy weather, which is something we’re reasonably equipped to cope with.

This seems a little unorthodox and runs contrary to every published bit of advice I can find. On the other hand, none of the published advice seems to contemplate the situation faced by boaters here in Puget Sound.

Staying aboard has other virtues as well: you retain all the resources of home. Emergency management people suggest a gallon of water per person per day for three days, but as long as we have the boat, we have about thirty, along with fuel, limited electricity and generation capacity, communications gear, regular and emergency food stuffs, and tough, warm clothing and footwear. In fact, we will have pretty much everything we have now, with the caveat that it may be damaged. But damaged is not missing entirely, as it would be if we abandoned it for high ground. A run for the hills precludes much more than a backpack, if that.

Even if the hull is breached, a dinghy or liferaft to get ashore with plus the ditch bag still probably provides most boaters with a more complete emergency kit than most lubbers will have in their homes. If you’re equipped to deal with sinking off-shore and surviving in a life-raft or on a desert island, you are certainly equipped for sinking right in the marina and living in a parking lot until help can arrive.

What I have realized is that I was looking in the wrong places for answers about preparing for disasters as a liveaboard or cruiser. For one thing, there just aren’t enough of us to make it worth the while of any official or agency to look specifically into the matters that most affect us. But more importantly, this is a lifestyle that requires self-reliance. There is a great community of boaters, most of who will go to great lengths to help one another, but at the end of the day you have to be able to count on yourself, your boat, and your crew in tight spots. If you don’t have the resources or cannot make the decisions yourself when disaster strikes, there is little chance that anyone else can do so for you. That is a lot of responsibility, but it goes hand in hand with the freedom that comes with the lifestyle.

When it comes to earthquakes and tsunamis, then, I need wake up and check my own lifelines, just like the rest of the time. Hunkering down or running for high ground isn’t a decision I can expect anyone else to make for me; I can debate it with others, look for every bit of relevant information I can find, and put some consideration into the options and consequences, but if the moment comes, it’s just as surely my sole decision to make as if I were facing a storm at sea. Unorthodox or not, I’ll have to come to terms with rolling my own dice and taking my own chances if this winter brings the third in the set of Pacific Rim mega-quakes.

When we were in high school, some friends of mine dubbed this sort of illness “The Mongolian Death Flu.” It’s the one where you start to sound like Boris Karloff in “Frankenstein” and fluids begin to emerge from every bodily orifice in prodigious quantities that no earthly box of Kleenex can hope to keep up with. This sort of cold laughs off common medications, reducing NyQuil to a quivering, half-hearted fraction of an hour of relief so shallow that it seems like a hallucination. As you lay prone on the settee waiting for death to take you, hallucinations may be your best form of relief, in fact.

I usually get this once every couple of years but this is the first time it has struck while I have been living aboard. As miserable as it always is, being on the boat has magnified the suffering immensely.

For starters, it’s just not possible to go lay someplace and pass out until you either recover or pass away. As long as there is more than one person aboard, the ineluctable Laws of The Sea dictate that wherever you are, is someplace that eventually they will need to be. So rather than rest in peace, I am forced to slump about the cabin, muttering ungraciously, as my wife finds necessities located in lockers beneath or behind my current berth.

All that hidden storage works against me in other ways, too. Should I need rapid access to medications, toilet paper, or more Kleenex, I am flat out of luck… it’s all stowed with varying degrees of inaccessibility, each little puzzle exacerbated by my diminished mental capacity and badly reduced dexterity.

Dexterity is also in play when it comes to something so simple as moving about the cabin. Balance is a great necessity for graceful movement in an always-moving structure with unpredictable and curving decks, and sinuses clogged to overflowing with green slime badly inhibit proper functioning in the inner ear. As if that weren’t bad enough, all the cold medications add their own flavors of loopy, causing me to crash about wildly during any ambulation requiring more than three steps.

If this were all taking place on one level, that would be one thing, but there are also ladders to be negotiated, lifelines to be crossed, and berths to climb into. I like to think I am pretty flexible for my age, but with every muscle aching and my head pounding, it is now utter agony to clamber out the companionway without first removing (and then replacing; it’s cold out now!) every single hatch board. After doing that, I have to rest in the cockpit (in the cold) for a good five minutes to recover before I dare to attempt to step over the lifelines and onto the dock. And god forbid it’s been raining and made things slick along the way!

Oh, being on the boat like this is not entirely without its advantages. I’m always close to the head, for example, and should I succumb to the attraction of an early exit, I can always throw myself overboard into the sweet, compelling throes of hypothermia. So far, though, the thought of having to negotiate the companionway ladder again to get out there has been keeping me alive.

Aerial view of 2011 Japanese tsunami debris

That massive, unprecedented debris field, driven by ocean currents slower but every bit as implacable as the tsunami wave itself, is now headed inexorably our way. Still fighting to control other after effects, searching for dead, and working to distribute aid to the injured and displaced, Japan has neither the time nor the resources to attempt any cleanup, if such a thing were even possible on such a scale. Spreading out as it comes, the detritus of disaster is forecast to reach our shores between one and three years from now, with lighter, smaller objects arriving first and larger, semi-submerged debris coming later.

While the density won’t be anything like it currently is off the coast of Japan, you have to imagine that a pile of junk that is causing concern for nuclear aircraft carriers and massive freighters is going to pose some increased risk to the recreational boater. Something that is going to put a dent in a freighter prop traveling at speed is going to do a lot worse to the hull, keel, and other hanging parts on the average cruiser.

Enough study has been done on ocean currents and the so-called Pacific Gyre of late to attach a fair degree of confidence to the prediction on the timing of the arrival. Even without all the science, the not uncommon finding of intricately blown Asian glass fishing net floats along our shores is enough to tell you where items lost at sea in the Orient eventually end up. What is less certain is what a debris field of such magnitude and variety will look like once it arrives. There is a lot of research that has gone into what happens with the odd bit of styrofoam that gets tossed into the ocean; none that I am aware of has looked seriously into what happens when a whole intact house goes in the water.

A house adrift

Houses might show up on radar but it seems more likely that by the time it all gets to us, it’s going to be in smaller, and more waterlogged, pieces. In some ways, this is bad news. A semi-submerged dishwasher is harder to spot than a whole roof.

Fortunately, we here in the Pacific Northwest have been well-trained for this coming onslaught by the natural features of our region. If you haven’t had to slalom through a field of massive logs in poor visibility around here, you’ve been staying tied to the dock too much. I don’t know how it is in other parts of the country, but slash and debris are such a regular feature in the waters here that keeping watch out for them often takes precedence over watching out for other vessels; that is to say, we watch out for other vessels while we’re at the helm, but the real concern is crab traps, deadheads, loose nets, and the like.

Still, household items are unusual and may prove more difficult to spot until our eyes are trained. Beyond that, sailing in poor visibility may become much more risky than it ever has been. There have been passages we’ve made at night or in heavy fog where we could count on radar to keep us clear of other vessel traffic, but where we’ve simply had to play the odds when it came to debris… in the inky blackness, there was no spotting logs and we could only hope not to run across any. Those have been reasonable odds in many places at many times in the past here. Starting next year, particularly out along the coast, they may be much worse.

We’re not actually on the boat right now, but we are on the water, and since we’re near Port Townsend we are far more exposed to tsunami damage than is the boat, tucked away far down Puget Sound in Seattle. It was for that reason that the night before, when the first tweet came in about a 7.9 quake in northern Japan, I sat up and took an interest in the developing story. As I watched the news, they upgraded the estimate from 7.9 to 8.4 and then to 8.8. The Pacific Tsunami Warning center almost immediately issued an advisory, then a warning, for Hawaii, but the West Coast and Alaska center’s board remained green even as I headed to bed around midnight. Nonetheless, I took my phone along and set an alarm to wake me just before the first waves were due in Hawaii.

I did so because, as I had watched the terrible pictures coming in from Japan, burning houses floating implacably inland on the debris-strewn waves, I had also been searching for some estimate of historical impacts of cross-Pacific tsunamis and the transit times… and I didn’t find out very much. There have not been very many to study in the modern era. Based on our previous experience, I wasn’t particularly worried, but since they kept upgrading the magnitude, I wasn’t exactly complacent, either. I wanted fair warning if it got upgraded again overnight.

It did, and WCATWC finally issued an advisory for one foot waves at Port Angeles, and my phone chimed, and I got up and got the camera out to see if I could capture any photographic evidence this time around. Almost a half hour after the predicted time of impact, this is as good as I got:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The tide was falling at the same time, and the actual measured impact was only six inches in Port Townsend, and ultimately those waves I saw could have just been the wake of a passing freighter. As with last year’s tsunami, I was distinctly unimpressed.

Despite that, I felt that this time around both the warning centers and the news media got it right; despite the relative accuracy of the predictions, in many respects this represents unexplored realms and the alerts had what I considered to be a respectable degree of excess caution in them… respectable in the sense that it was only clearly excessive in retrospect. The one death and several close calls suffered in California and Oregon hopefully underscore the wisdom of those who evacuated as directed, even though we now know most of them would have been fine.

The more time I spent looking into what is known and unknown about this phenomena the more seriously I came to regard it. One can scoff at the local outcomes of overseas earthquakes for only so long before having to consider the likelihood of such an event much closer to home. Japan’s warning systems and civil protection are the finest in the world when it comes to seismic activity; their infrastructure and population preparedness far exceed our own. Along their coastline, most residents had at least fifteen minutes warning that the waves were coming, and they have been drilled to a far greater degree than our own populace on what to do when they receive such a warning. Still, the death toll promises to be staggering.

In Seattle, it turns out, there would likely be no warning, or none besides the tremor itself. A quake along the Seattle fault could generate a 16 foot tsunami that would be on downtown’s doorstep in two minutes flat. Not only is that not enough time for a warning; it may not be enough time for the shaking to dissipate enough to make your run for the hills… the Sendai quake lasted five minutes. You’d have been under water for three by the time you could start to evacuate. How long can you hold your breath?

Based on what we saw from the Nisqually quake in 2001, most people in the inundation zone (you can check the prediction map here (PDF)) aren’t thinking about evacuating anyway. Video from Pioneer Square, sure to be hard hit, showed crowds milling around watching the facades crumble afterward. Without knowing that the origin of the quake had been the Nisqually fault, far to the south, for all practical purposes they should have been lacing up their shoes and sprinting up Yesler in an impromptu marathon.

If you’re aboard your boat, of course, you’re in even worse shape. I can barely get off my dock in two minutes on a good day, still less if it’s on an elevator ride down as the water is sucked out before the wave. Of course, the two minutes is a worst case scenario for which the odds are essentially unknown, the Seattle fault being a relatively recent discovery and a poorly understood one at that. A more likely scenario, and one that allows more response options, has to do with the Cascadia subduction zone, fifty miles off the Washington coast. That’s neither wine nor roses either, though, since it has potential for much larger (Sendai-size) quakes and more significant wave heights. And despite the yeoman’s work that NOAA, the USGS, and local civil defense authorities have been doing spreading the word about quake and tsunami threats, and despite the proximity of the threat to Puget Sound, there is actually very little information that I could find from any of them on what a Cascadia subduction zone quake might mean in the way of tsunami waves in the Salish Sea.

The few predictions I found about transit times were vague and dealt only with the coast… around thirty minutes. I suppose an hour would be a reasonable minimum guess for locations in the Sound. But what to do in that hour? If you’re anchored out, do you dinghy ashore and run for it, or get underway? If you plan to stick with the boat, conventional wisdom is that deep water (better than 100 fathoms, according to NOAA) is good, and much of Puget Sound is that deep, but it’s unclear that the depth is as protective in what amounts to a narrow channel, or with what could be as much seiche as tsunami. If you plan to seek shelter ashore, where ashore? The inundation maps are based around the Seattle fault data and 16 foot waves, not the 100 foot monsters possible from the Cascadia zone. Of course 100 feet at the coast will be less in Puget Sound, but how much less? What about currents? What impact does the funnel of the Strait of Juan de Fuca have? How much buffer is Whidbey Island? Or does the refraction from those high bluffs spell extra peril in Port Townsend? No official estimates appear to exist.

I suppose the safest answer is just get as high as you can as quick as you can if you’re near-shore, but it’s not that simple… given ten to fifteen minutes, I can get up about forty feet from where I am sitting at this very moment. A half hour, I can be up to 400. But to get up to 400 feet, I have to go down again first; so if it’s going to hit in twenty minutes, I had better take my chances on a lower hill. If I’m underway, I imagine I’ll get as close to the center of the channel as I can and ride it out… we’re so slow that there may be no other plausible options, which I guess at least takes the worrisome guesswork out of survival and places it strictly in the realm of fate.

We have a long way to go, both publicly and privately, before we are even as close to as ready as Japan was, but with chances of a significant event running between 10% and 37% in the current fifty year window (depending on whose predictions you believe), it’s not a trivial matter. I’m trying to do as much as I can personally to be prepared, but it’s a little frustrating to not even have the basis of an official nautical scenario to plan around. Hopefully this spurs a renewed discussion of the issues.

One of the sailboats that had gotten slammed up against the marina breakwater during the Thanksgiving storm had returned to the mooring field, though, despite still having gaping holes in the hull and having been dismasted. I imagine money was tight and the owner had nowhere else to go. He may also have subconsciously had a sort of death-wish for the vessel, too (I know the feeling), though, because I happened to look out the window on Friday to see her stuck in the mud just inshore of the marina.

Vessel Aground

Fortunately, the tide was rising, the mud flats were partly sheltered from wave action by the marina docks, and it just so happens that Port Hadlock Vessel Assist is moored at the dock right next to where it was all happening. They literally just backed straight out of their slip and got a line on her. It wasn’t all a cake walk, though:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And it got even worse as they got out from behind the breakwater and put her on their beam to push her into a temporary slip:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Bouncy ride! I ran out of memory on the camera before they got her tucked away, but it took a few goes with the waves on the beam. Nonetheless, once again a very professional, tidy job by Port Hadlock Vessel Assist.

While all this was happening, a yawl that also happened to be over there (with a crew aboard; the grounded yacht was empty and unlivable) raised sail and took off south through the Cut into Oak Bay. The tide was against him and the roller coaster was operating at full speed off Indian Island as the current smashed into the wind, but he swept right down south under sail anyway. It looked like fun. I have often wondered why I don’t see more of the boats out there doing exactly that when the storms blow in; you’re a ten minute sail from safety, no matter how rough it is running in the Cut. I was happy to see someone taking the opportunity this time around. He was back later in the evening when the winds dropped, safe and sound.

A sad sight

It’s often the case with boats that the worst is not immediately apparent, and this has proven true with the November 22/23 snow and wind storm that pounded the North Sound. The day after was grim enough, with boats missing from the mooring field off Port Hadlock, and others smashed up against their neighbors or the marina breakwater. The carnage visible at first light was just the beginning, though. As the day wore on, the bad news piled up.

On the bank below the house, inaccessible at high tide with the waves up, a sixteen or eighteen footer was washed up, tangled in trees and rocks. The hull, at least, seems to be intact.

Cuttyhunk's tender responds

Out past that wreck, evidence began to accumulate that something worse had happened to something larger. A Coast Guard cutter, the Cuttyhunk, showed up and dispatched a tender in toward the marina. An ominous parade of debris marched past toward shore… a section of cabin trunk, an intact hatch, random bits of splintered wood. A float that I had mistaken for a drifting mooring ball turned out to be a scotchman, which in turn was still attached to a section of lifeline… which itself was still attached to a line of stanchions. The sailboat that we had noticed was missing from it’s mooring ball had broken up and sunk completely.

When the waves had died down enough, Vessel Assist ducked out to the outside of the breakwater and got a line on the catamaran that had been bashed up there most of the night. A parade of helpful folks made their way across a narrow, icy plank between the docks and the breakwater and began to salvage items from the boats and debris remaining there.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Across the bay, during the morning we had seen a fishing vessel moored next to a tugboat owned by a family friend drift downwind and finally manage to back into the wind and waves and tie up at the pier again. Today we got the rest of the story, as my stepfather called to tell us that the friend with the tug might need to come by to borrow a ladder… the fishing vessel had torn loose and stove in the tug’s bow (planking that had been painstakingly replaced only a couple years ago). There was three feet of water in the engine room by the time they got down to check on the boat.

Surveying the damage

Today has been about picking up the pieces… literally, in some cases. Vessel Assist was out and busy again after a long day out yesterday, and defying a high tide, folks were down working at getting the eighteen footer on the bank untangled and ready to refloat. The tug steamed north to the boatyard in Port Townsend and is up on blocks tonight, waiting for an insurance surveyor. The final toll is at least one sunk, four or five aground or severely damaged. But this was only the second big storm in a winter that promises to be filled with them.

Smashed boats and docks

It’s an eery thing to watch a boat die by moonlight.

Any time, if you are not accustomed to such things, it is jarring to see any vessel in extremis… the carefully designed lines canted at odd angles, water invading places where no water should be. But by the light of a full moon, further amplified by a frozen dusting of snow glistening from every available surface, it’s particularly surreal.

The winds in Port Townsend, which were forecast to dissipate by the early morning hours, continued to howl down out of the north unabated, raising four to five foot rollers which were marching south in gleaming ranks by 0500, pounding a loose catamaran against the breakwater at Hadlock Marina and dismasting her sometime in the night. Another vessel, a sailboat with her mast removed, had been attended by Vessel Assist only the day before with her decks awash. Pumped dry, she was riding high at sunset last night. This morning, there is no sign of her, just the infrequent gleam in the midst of the breakers that hints of the mooring ball she was resting on.

The weather station in Port Townsend is reporting winds only in the 15-25 knot range, but it’s probably ten knots greater than that here at the exposed south end of the bay.

At dawn, fuller measure of the damage could be taken. The bow section of the starboard hull of the cat had torn off. The mast, which had been rolling around on the cabin top last night, was nowhere to be seen. A smaller runabout which hadn’t been visible in the moonlight had joined her there pinned against the breakwater, itself smashing alternately into the cat and the concrete. Further along, a sloop had its rolled up jib come unfurled and it whipped itself into ribbons in the early morning light. From our angle, it was impossible to tell if it was in the marina or another victim forced up onto the breakwater… either way, the exaggerated roll was sure to be pounding it against whatever it rested next to. In past the marina, a mooring ball appeared in the bay that had not been there before, some random bit of debris still tied to it that I can only hope does not represent the remains of a boat.

In the marina, life didn’t look much better. A schooner near the outboard end had doubled and trebled her lines and stood watch on them most of the night. Nearby, a section of dock had partially torn away and was beginning to roll under water. Someone’s dinghy had torn loose from the davits and was dangling into the waves. The carnage made the single dock box that was swept off and onto shore last week look trivial.

There was one good point to the wind, at least; snow that might otherwise have built up and frozen on masts and rigging was blasted clear well before it could have become a problem.

Under a clear sky, the schooner crew decided they had had enough of being at the bottom of the washing machine and pulled out for a brisk, chilly trip north. As I write this, it’s still too rough for anyone to try to pull off the cat or stabilize the dock. Which brings out another uncomfortable realization of nautical life: sometimes all you can do is watch.

Edit: For some reason, my YouTube embed isn’t sticking here; you can watch a short video of the schooner pulling out here.