Grounding score update

For those of you who are interested, or like to keep score….Larry is in the lead again…..3-2.

As we were leaving Vero Beach, he somehow strayed out of the channel….and now we know what “hard aground” really means. This wasn’t an easy pull off.

Tow Boat US came by to see if he was needed but we told him we were going to give it a try.  Larry had his dingy down and was rowing his anchor out to “kedge” off.  You drop your anchor as far from the boat as you can…hopefully in deeper water and pull yourself off. It didn’t work. While he was talking to the Tow Boat guy his dingy drifted away and Jim went on a retrieval mission.

The small white thing in the lower R corner is a float cushion. We had tied all the long lines we had together and Jim motored as close to Larry as he could. When he ran out of line he tied the end to a float cushion and headed over to get Larry’s line. That is what he is getting from the back of the boat. He used his stern anchor rode and all long line...and believe me….he has quite a few. We couldn’t get any where  near him the water was so shallow.

Jim figures we had over 900 ft. of line out.

Tow Boat motored around and found the deepest water and we tried to get Larry dragged into it.  Larry even got in the water and walked around looking for as much depth as he could find. We don’t have a water temp gauge on our boat but I believe it had been in the mid to high 60’s….that is cold.

I think the saying on the ICW is “It’s now if you will run aground…but when.”

Tow Boat hung around and gave as much advice as he could, even though it looked like we were going to get the job done.

As we were making a final try…..a big boat was headed up the channel….with a nice big wake. The Tow Boat Captain yelled over to let the wake help us. As soon as the wake started lifting A Dollar More up and down we were giving it the fuel and off it came. It was nice of the captain to give us advice even though he wasn’t going to  get the job of towing A Dollar More off the bar. We thanked him and continued on our way.

We had to stop a ways down the channel to return Larry’s lines. He didn’t have anything to load the dingy on the back with. Once that was taken care of we were off again.

I post these things…because they are a part of boating, especially on the ICW.  Most people don’t like to admit they run aground, but there are a lot of new boaters out there that need to understand some of the things that are involved or can go wrong when on the water.  If we can help someone else not make a mistake that we’ve made…then it’s worth it.  No boat damage…no expensive towing fees…so all in all it was just a few hours out of our day on the water….a lot of work and  perhaps a little frustration. So now..you sit back and laugh at it and hope you don’t make the same mistake again.

I posted this out of sequence because I always like to ask Larry’s permission. When I did….he just laughed and said “go ahead”. Guess he feels the same way we do.

Even though, now, we are having some chuckles with him about it…the thought is always in the back of minds…the next laugh could be on us.