Damage Pictures

You'll find more of these in our Flickr stream (click on the rotating picture panel at left) but I thought I'd put up some of the shots we managed to get while we were hung up in Boat Inlet and during the tow and recovery afterward.

This is from about the point we figured out we weren't going to recover on that tide:
I am exhausted after two attempts to winch us off; the white line stretching from the stern toward the camera is the spare anchor line we were using to pull ourselves off with, first with our spare anchor, and then tied to a tree ashore. Looking at the angle of the boat, it's pretty obvious we were too hung up to keep trying any such heroic measures.

By low tide at 3AM we were high and dry. I hopped off and splashed around to look for damage. All I found was some primarily cosmetic damage at the base and leading edge of the keel:

Everything else was obscured by the large rock we were resting against to starboard. I got a picture of that, too, but it is too dark to make out much.

I went to catch some sleep, only to wake up to this:

Well, it wasn't quite that deep when I first discovered it, but it got even deeper, despite our best efforts pumping and bailing.

The Coast Guard made it back out in their Zodiac about forty to forty-five minutes after I hailed them. We probably spent an hour after that getting both gas-powered pumps going and dewatering the boat. None of us could figure out where the water was coming in from, so we just concentrated on getting her afloat enough to get off the shoals. Once we were more or less upright, they dragged us off stern first... then Mandy spotted the hole in the starboard side. The helmsman, Randy, actually intentionally grounded us again at that point since we had disconnected one of the pumps (which was aboard their boat) and weren't sure if the remaining one could keep us afloat. With some patching, we decided it could, and he backed us out into more open water so we could rig a tow harness from the anchor bitt forward:

Then we started the long tow:
The portable pump ran out of gas once, which I think freaked everyone out but me; I had been expecting it but we were in rough water and it took a bit of time to refill the tank and get it restarted (with probably half the gas going overboard rather than into the pump). I kept the edge off the flooding with our internal bilge pumps, which didn't do too bad keeping up for a little while (we have a 1500GPH Rule in the main bilge and a little 800GPH Rule in the shower sump).

And this is the hole, interior and exterior views:



I thought I uploaded a shot of them tipping the boat sideways on the travel lift to dump all the water out, but I must not have... Mandy found it very amusing, so I suppose we'll post it pretty soon.

Anyway, that's about it. Spent more time bailing than taking pictures, and anyway it was pissing down rain the whole time so there wasn't a lot to see.