A Day in the Life

That title usually evokes normalcy: explain to me a single day because the rest of them are probably similar. Well, that’s just not the case around here; very little stays the same day to day. So instead of normalcy, I want that title to induce a comparison; this is how we accomplish a set of tasks similar to your own under completely different circumstances.

The tasks for the day: Pick up a friend, do laundry, send emails, get groceries. The circumstances: Anchored in a rolly bay outside the breakwater in Santa Barbara.

The sky is overcast as we finish our coffee and collect the items we will need for the day: an overstuffed sack of dirty clothes, detergent, quarters, computers, extra bags, PFD’s, VHF radios. We hop in the dinghy and motor into the marina to pick up Gemina, our newest crew-member-of-honor, at the boat ramp at 11am. I clamor out of the dinghy laden with our stuff and John runs Gemina back to the boat to drop off her luggage. It has started to drizzle and I request that John return with a rain jacket for me. Task one: complete.

Santa Barbara is really not set up well for cruisers on a budget. They would like for you to pay for a slip in the marina, so don’t help you much if you’d rather anchor out and save your pennies for Mexican beer. There is no dinghy dock. Instead, what the harbormaster recommends, is heading to Stearns Wharf to tie up your dinghy, a long wooden touristy wharf full of restaurants and shops between us and the marina. 

The challenge is that Stearns Wharf is about 30 feet above the water. The technique is to bring your dinghy up to the side of the menacing looking pier, climb up the barnacle-encrusted ladder, scare the pants off the tourists walking by when you suddenly appear over the side of the barrier, tie the dinghy off to the railing and wander away.

Looking down at our dinghy from the wharf, 30 feet below us

So that’s what John and Gemina did on the way back, sans one rain jacket for Becca, forgotten in the apparent excitement of another human on board. Then we all set off on foot, already damp and weighed down by the day’s errands but energetic to see a new town. A meandering mile later, we found a very fancy Laundromat across from a coffee shop and settled in to washing clothes and sending emails. Tasks two and three complete.

With laundry clean and shoved back into bags, we set off to find groceries. This proves more challenging than anticipated; there is not a grocery store between the Laundromat and the boat. After a longer and rainier walk than any of us really desired, we find a Mexican market that meets our provisioning requirements.

The sun is setting as we reorganize groceries for the slow slog back to the dingy. Somehow, it has taken nearly 6 hours to complete the 4 tasks I would have done between work and home in Seattle without noticing. It certainly doesn’t feel like 6 hours, and I’m not sure I can fully account for what exactly took up all the time. But my watch, confidently reading 5:30pm, challenges me to do just that. With a satisfying “umpf” I finally set down the cumbersome bags at the top of the ladder on the wharf and peer over the railing for a sight of the dinghy 30 feet below.

We often refer to our dinghy as our car; perhaps it is to engender this “normalcy” I reference. It is the vehicle that gets us from home to wherever it is we are going – to the grocery store, to the bar, to a friend’s home, out exploring.

So in an effort of comparison for the dramatic end to our “day in the life”, assume you have come out of the grocery store, laden with your groceries for the week and soaked through from the rain, and discovered that a tree has fallen over your car. It has not crushed it, but each new gust of wind threatens to topple the branch tediously holding the trunk of the tree off the trunk of your car. There is no one around in this scenario – no AAA, no 911, no friendly neighbor. Instead, it is just the 3 of you (including the friend you picked up earlier in the day) puzzling over how to remove the car from under the tree without crushing the car or hurting yourselves. This is, basically, the scenario we find ourselves in as we peer over the wharf.

The dinghy is indeed at the base of the ladder, but in our time-extracting errands, the tide has dropped below the height of the bottom rung of the ladder, and then risen again. This is, as a side note, a dumb design. The ladder is there to assist anyone that might fall off the wharf to get back on. Unless it’s low tide, apparently, in which case…. you’re out of luck. Our innocent dinghy, gently floating with the rise and fall of the ever-present swell, allowed itself to get trapped under that exposed bottom rung that is now hammering away at its fragile fiberglass bottom, held securely in place between the inflated pontoons.

This is a problem.

John clamors down the ladder while Gemina looks up the tide tables. Yes, the tide is still coming up – for another 3 hours. We have to work quickly. John tries first to time a swell and push the dinghy pontoon down and under the ladder, but it is much too late for that. He deflates one pontoon, first just a bit but eventually almost completely and begins to fill the dinghy with seawater. I come down after him, slipping easily on the recently uncovered slime of the bottom steps. We crowd in and stand together on one corner of the mostly sunk dinghy. Timing our movements with the trough of a swell, we both push up on the ladder and kick the dinghy out from under us. It gets half way before the terrifying moment when the next wave brings the fragile deflated pontoon into the grips of the jagged edges of the ladder end. I hold my breath and tense my body, still pushing down with all my might, and the wave abates before the ladder is able sink its teeth in. I breath out and we push and kick again. The dinghy comes free, leaving John freewheeling from the side of the ladder and I ungracefully topple to the slightly more inflated side of the boat.

The whole thing lasted no more than 8 minutes. A crucial 8 minutes. Likely, had our errands taken us just 30 minutes more, we would have lost our vehicle completely, the ladder claiming victory as it punctured the bottom or ripped it from the pontoons and sunk the whole thing. Of course, 30 minutes earlier and it would have only been a minor inconvenience.

We are wet and covered in mud and slime. The entire bottom of the dinghy is filled with mussels and barnacles (and water – a lot of water). John doesn’t dare reenter the sinking boat. I bail most of the water out, start up the motor (it starts!) and slowly put-put back to Halcyon, crouched with my weight balanced in the center of the tippy deflated boat, to retrieve the air pump. I strain my ears at every whistle and creak as I refill the pontoons, braced for the dreaded “thssssssssss” of a puncture wound, but it doesn’t come. Our vehicle survives the ordeal unscathed.

With the pontoons once again full of air and the boat once again empty of water and barnacles, I power back over to the wharf to collect our mountains of stuff. One bag at a time, John lowers our laundry, our groceries, our backpacks, our guest and we put-put back to Halcyon, so very thankful to