Sailing Mishaps: Confessions and Comments

If you have read “Lady Alone” and already have sailing experience, whether on a lake or the open ocean, the main character’s saga after she finds herself alone on “Atmosphere” was no doubt a reminder of embarrassing moments for you on-board a boat. This blog offers a chance to stow your pride in the cockpit locker and fess up to bloopers you made as a crew member or captain and who knows, you just may find that confession is indeed good for the soul.

I’ll start with a confession of my own, a poorly executed departure on “Bucephalus”, my Creala 36, for a five hundred mile passage from Boat Lagoon Marina, in Phuket, Thailand, to the Andaman Islands. My two crew members and I cast off at high tide a few hours before daylight from the marina and motored down the mile long tidal river that connects the marina to the Andaman Sea. As it turned out, we could have waited for daylight, had a hearty breakfast and lunch at the marina restaurant and still reached the open sea hours before we actually did.

Boat Lagoon’s tidal river passes through a mangrove swamp and has a mud bottom with buoys marking a dredged channel but at the time our departure, those buoys had been removed for badly needed dredging. At a dog-leg still within sight of the marina entrance, the depth finder jumped from three meters to one meter and that was at high tide. Needless to say, it wasn’t until the afternoon high tide and a lot of photos taken from passing tourist boats that a marina service skiff was able to assist us on our way.

Steve T