LandfallVoyages

Or 2:30 in the morning, to be more exact. I was deep under –we’re talking dead, asleep drooling on the pillow–  when Steve crawled over me, opened the head door and stood there for a minute. “Why is that pump running”? he asked.

There’s no sleeping through a question like that. Unless you want to wake up full fathom five, with all your important stuff now snugly berthed next to Davy Jones’ locker. I took a swipe at the drool and thought about it for a sec. “The pump in the shower sump gets wiggled around sometimes and migrates under the float switch. That’d make it run like that,” I said.

He reached down and turned the auxiliary switch to the sump off and we settled back down into the covers, hoping to catch the tail end of a little more sleep. After a minute, he said, “Do you hear that?” Yeah. I heard it. “Maybe the icemaker filling up?” I guessed, as my feet hit the floor. But as soon as the words left my mouth, I knew that wasn’t it. Grabbing the flashlight, I lifted a deck plate in the pilothouse and found a salty freaking waterfall cascading its way underneath the engine pan, dumping down into the deep bilge. Which was transforming into a shallow bilge at an alarming rate. Crap.

“Hit the bilge pump,” I yelled, bolting for the head. Eli popped his head out of his cabin, “What’s going on?” he asked. “Bunch of water coming in the boat,” said Steve as he turned on the bilge pump. I pulled up the deck plate in our cabin and the entire ocean was trying to pour in from the shower sump. I hit that switch, too and between both pumps, the water level in the bilge started heading south again. Eli took it in for a minute. “Are we sinking? Is there a hole in the boat?” he asked. “Don’t know”, we said.

Steve manned the main bilge pump, letting me know if our pumps were winning the battle or not, while trying to wrestle a nasty old oil-absorbent-rag off of the seldom used bilge pump with a boat pole. Eli grabbed his own flashlight and headed out on deck to check for anything weird in the water next to the hull. Debris, bubbles, a huge gaping hole… you know, the usual. I was crammed under the sink in the head, yanking out random spare rolls of toilet paper, the trash bag, and a bottle of bleach. I flashed the light over each one of the 150 thru-hulls that live under our bathroom sink. No cracks, no leaks. Awesome. Always good to catch a break in the middle of an emergency. I reached for the valve that closes the shower sump thru-hull and pulled. Hard. Nothing. The valve was frozen open. And the sea kept pouring in.

“What’s happening,” Steve shouted, “Did you find it?” Eli put his head back down the companionway, “Everything looks normal out here. I don’t see anything.” he reported, “Are we still sinking?” “Uhhh…yeah, hang on a minute,” I said, running through our options. I had my mouth open to yell for a screwdriver and a hammer from the DC kit, so I could wrestle the shower sump hose off the thru-hull and pound a soft wood plug down that sucker’s throat, when I finally figured it out. Face-freaking-palm.

I stood up, opened the cupboard above the sink and swept the bottles of hair spray and shampoo and stuff to the side, revealing the vented loop for our shower sump. Unscrewing the little cap at the top, I found the tiny ball that acts as a check valve kind of sitting on top of the vent. I tapped it once with my finger and 14.69 psi of atmosphere sucked it back down the hole, breaking the siphon and pushing the ocean back where it belongs, on the outside of our boat. “We’re good,” I yelled. “It’s all good.”

“What do you mean, ‘We’re good’,” said Eli, “Are we sinking or are we not sinking? Because that’s all I really care about right now.” “My bad. Sorry. We’re not sinking anymore. We fixed it. Not. Sinking…Good job,” I said. “Good job, the both of you. I’m so proud of you. You guys handled that emergency PERFECTLY. Like you’d been training every day for a year.” And it’s true. I mean, it’ll freak you out when the ocean’s trying hard to get friendly on the inside of your boat, especially when that boat represents every single thing you have in the whole world. When I was in the Coast Guard, we trained for stuff like this. We trained all the time, to the point where you don’t even have to think about what you’re doing, it’s just instinct. And still, you never know how you’ll react until you’re actually faced with that crisis, that moment…where everything hinges on what you do. Or what you don’t do.

When I was in the Coast Guard stationed in Morro Bay, we got a call about a boat taking on water as they were trying to make it back inside the bay. The water was coming in a lot faster than their bilge pumps could deal with. I wasn’t on duty that night, but after the first crew got on scene, they recalled my crew for backup. No additional info, just get your butt in gear. We roared up to the boat and the first thing I saw was my counterpart, the duty Engineer, standing at the rail of the boat, pure panic on his face. We nosed alongside and I jumped up. “Josh, what’s going on?” I asked, reaching down for the dewatering pump in our RHI. “The boat’s sinking. It’s gonna sink. It’s going to sink right here in the channel and there’s nothing we can do. The boat. is. sinking. That’s what’s going on.” he said dully. “I don’t want to be here anymore,” he said. “I wanna go back.”

It’s like the world slipped sideways for a minute, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I mean, this was what we did. And then I got pissed. Mad enough to one-arm that 60 lb. dewatering pump off the RHI and onto the sinking boat. All 110 lbs of me. “Dude, get your shit together and let’s save this boat. It’s not going down. Not on my watch. Now, where’s the water coming in?” He just kind of stood there and looked at me. I smacked him hard in the chest. “Josh, where’s the fucking leak? Did they hit something or what?” “I don’t know. Can’t find it,” he said, glaring at me. I glared back. “Jesus, get I grip,” I said, “Help me with this pump.” We dragged it down to the engine room, which was already halfway flooded. “Let’s get this pump started and find the leak.” He actually crossed his arms like a three year old and said, “No. There’s no way in hell you’re getting me down there. You’re going to get yourself killed. I’m not going.” I could have thrown him off the boat right then. “Fine,” I shouted, “Stay right fucking there and keep this pump running NO MATTER WHAT!” He yanked the pull cord, and as it rumbled to life, I jumped down into the engine room with the end of the pump hose in my hand. The cold black water came up over my knees and after I wedged the hose into an unobstructed corner to work its magic, I waded aft, towards where the shaft comes into the boat. Blind, working only by feel, I frantically searched for anything to explain all this water on the wrong side of the hull. Nothing. I wedged some rags into a couple of questionable spots and hauled myself out of the engine room. Josh glared at me some more. “If you move so much as an inch from this pump,” I said, jamming my finger into his chest, “I will fucking kill you myself. I’m going to go talk to the Captain.”

The boat didn’t sink that night. And nobody died. We found a broken thru-hull under one of the boat’s tanks. Nearly inaccessible. We got it mostly plugged up and they had a guy dive on it and weld the ruptured seam the next morning. The point is…with all our training, all our preparation, all the crap he used to talk, when push came to shove, that guy, who was supposed to be a professional, he crumbled. And if he’d been the only one there, that boat would be on the bottom of the ocean. My guys took an even scarier situation, where everything was at stake, and handled it like real pros. Whatever fear or anxiety they were feeling, they still managed to suck it up and do their jobs. Our boat didn’t sink. It’s easy for me to forget that they don’t have the same depth of experience that I have. The years of training for catastrophes out on the water. When we first started out, it was a shock for me to realize that, because they had virtually no frame of reference, stuff that I thought was fun and exciting was actually terrifying to them. Like trying to get around Point Conception. Later on, Steve said, “You know, for such a big deal, it wasn’t such a big deal.” And when I was quizzing Eli on all the different ways you could respond to holes in the boat, he nailed it. Every single scenario. I’m so proud of them. And I feel really lucky to know that my crew, the most important crew I’ll ever have, can be relied upon 100%. No matter what.