15 Jul 22

Well, what a day this was!! I was awakened from a deep sleep at 06:30 by Terri shouting that we were aground. Sure enough, the rudder was dug into the beach and the stern was 1 ft above water, we were heeled to starboard at about 8 degrees and down by the bow by about 15 degrees; to make matters worse, we were still 1 hour before dead low water and had another 400 mm of tide to drop. Panic stations all round. We got Massilia’s crew up and they were in deep water and able to simply let go and get away; I was concerned that we would roll over on top of them. After they got away, I walked around the back end of the boat to assess the situation; the rudder was stabbed about 3 feet into the gravel beach, the prop was just touching the gravel and it was impossible to tell if the keel was aground, while the depth sounder was still showing 1.7 m (obviously, a very steeply shelving beach). John wanted to pull me off the beach, but so much of the rudder was in the gravel, that I was concerned that we would bend the rudder post trying. After a few minutes, we gave up on that idea and I spent 30 minutes rigging a line from the top of the mast, via the spinnaker halyard, to a piling abeam to port about 200 feet away; this was to keep us from rolling over further. With this line tensioned up, I reduced the heel to about 6.5 degrees. I also tensioned up the shore line to make sure that we would not slide forward into deep water and damage the rudder. Then, it was just a matter of waiting until the water came back; I figured we needed the tide to come up at least 5 ft to get the rudder free, which would occur about 12:15. Nothing to do but wait, so we had breakfast and coffee and spent the next 3 or 4 hours worrying about the rudder. By 11:00, the boat was sufficiently afloat that we were back on a more or less even keel, side to side and fore and aft, but the rudder was still stuck in the gravel and I could not shift the wheel at all. At this time, I untied the line from the masthead and recovered all of this line, tensioned up the stern line a bit more and eased the anchor line out, as the torque from forward seemed to be stressing the rudder post. At 12:15, we floated free, I released the shore/stern line and we swung to our anchor in 16 m of water. We had lunch and then got going about 13:00. As we left, we collected the prawn trap; unfortunately, all we caught was another jelly fish, which took nearly 20 minutes to clean out - lot of work with nothing to show for it. We had decided that we had had enough of McBride Bay, and headed down Esperanza Inlet to Queen Cove, where we were anchored (having first carefully circled the anchorage to confirm sufficient water depth at all states of tide) at 16:04. Queen Cove surprised us by having 3 or 4 houses, with floats/docks, and one float plane; not the wilderness anchorage typical of this part of the world. After a couple of restorative drinks at happy hour, I felt much better. We spent the evening on Massilia, down in the warm cabin, playing guitar and strum stick.

49-52.758’N, 126-58.939’W; Log = 13.7, Sum = 410.6; Eng hrs = 3.1, Sum = 2955.4   

16 Jul 22

Queen Cove being a bullet proof, and quite picturesque harbor, we decided to stay for a day to recover from yesterday’s stress and because I had an epoxy job to do. The support/anchor blocks for the auto-helm drive span across a joint in the bulkhead between the two starboard side lockers; when the auto-helm strokes one way or the other to turn the boat, the blocks rock/torque and work this joint, so I decided to epoxy in a couple of stiffener plates above and below the anchor blocks to see if that would stop the two bulkhead plates from working back and forth. To accomplish this task, of course, I first had to empty the locker, then lower myself way down inside so I could sand the surface of the bulkhead panels with 40 grit sandpaper. Then, I taped off around the area to be epoxied and covered all other surfaces (auto-helm drive, cables and conduit, etc., with masking tape, to protect them in the event of the inevitable epoxy spill. Rather than use two-part West System epoxy, I decided to use the Thixo 2-part epoxy in a tube. Unfortunately, my caulking guns were not manly enough (i.e., not enough mechanical advantage) to squeeze all of the epoxy out. With two tubes of Thixo, I managed to get just enough epoxy out to cover the surfaces of both pieces of stiffener plates and the corresponding surfaces of the bulkhead plates. It seemed to look alright after I finished, so I reloaded the locker, cleaned up the cockpit, put all the tools away and sat down to have a congratulatory beer. This whole operation took all morning and until 15:00. We spent the rest of the afternoon reading and relaxing. It was a beautiful sunset, with high overcast, but the sun shone through the clouds just after it dipped below the horizon and produced a beautiful view, worthy of a bunch of photographs. We sat in the cockpit enjoying the view until it was time for bed, just after 22:00.