I know you all are expecting to hear from Joe, but he
hasn't shown an interest in sitting down and writing
yet, and I'm having fun, so I'm going to go with it.
Now we know what all you people who think we are crazy
are talking about! That fog sucked (sorry mom).
Although it was EXTREMELY tense, Joe and I managed to
keep our cool and worked well together as a team. The fog rolled
in around 11pm when were still fairly far out in the
Ocean. The real tension set in when we got off
Montauk Point. We started to worry about
commercial traffic and other boats either heading out to
the ocean or into Long Island Sound. We had the
VHF radio tuned to the emergency and hailing channel
(16) as well as channel 72, which we were using to
communicate with Cenou. We
were still following close on her tail. In fact,
if we let her get more than 20 feet in front of us, we
would completely loose sight of her. That's a pretty
close range when you are going 5 - 6 knots with waves pushing you along as
well. This was stressful for Joe, who had been
driving since 11pm.
I had lost Cenou on my watch. I did periodically
look for her light on the horizon, which I could still
decipher, but it was awfully dark and I couldn't spot
her. I did not realize that we were in fog
until Joe came up a little early for his 12pm watch.
We dropped the sails and started motoring, giving us
much more control over the boat should an emergency
situation arise. Dropping the sails takes a
relatively long time, and a lot of accidents happen when
you are rushing around in a panic trying to lower your
sails to deal with a crisis.
I came back on deck at 3am, ready to take over for my
watch. Joe said that we needed both of us to keep
track of the situation at that point. We were
relying on radar to see other traffic in our vicinity.
We were getting close to a high traffic area so I stayed
down below, looking for "targets" on the radar screen
and watching our boat's progress toward Block Island on our Nobeltec computerized
charts. Joe was glued to the throttles, speeding
up and slowing down as needed to keep Cenou in sight,
while at the same time trying to avoid ramming him from behind.
Not only was it comforting having someone to follow, but
if we lost sight of our companion ship, we ran the real
danger of running into him, literally. We were,
afterall, both heading for the same location from the
virtually the same spot. Luckily, we managed to
keep him in sight ... for most of the rest of the
passage, at least.
I had my first lesson in radar that night. I was
feeling slightly militaristic, looking for "targets" on
this 10 inch square monitor with lots of little dots and
rings on it. I started feeling pretty good about
it, however, after I was able to match several radar
buoys that were marked on our charts with blobs on our
radar screen. All the same, we were getting very
close to Block Island, it was almost 7am, and we knew
there must be traffic out there. Joe suggested
that we broadcast our position on the VHF channel 16.
I reluctantly picked up the mike and bumbled through a
message "we are two sailing catamarans about a mile and
a half southwest of the entrance to Great Salt Pond in
Block Island, heading northeast for the harbor."
We didn't really expect to hear anything back, but
figured it was prudent to let everyone know where we
were. There was nothing in front of us on the
radar screen.
Seconds later, we hear a reply "the sailing catamarans
southwest of Block Island, this is the tug the AMARORIK
(not sure about the spelling on that one). You are
dangerously close to my position. Divert
immediately. I have a long cable and am pulling a
barge. Make a 90 degree turn towards the island to
avoid a collision." Holy sh**. Where was the
fog horn he was supposed to be blowing every 60 seconds?
Or even every 5 minutes for that matter. No time
to worry about that now. Claude was still only
listening to channel 72 so I switched over to 72 and
told him to turn starboard 90 degrees immediately.
There was a tug in front of us and we were dangerously
close. He was as surprised as I was, but didn't
waste any time changing course. The tug told us he
was shortening his cable and slowing down. We were
about a mile west of land, and we headed straight for it
for about 5 minutes. Claude got on the radio and
spoke with the Amarorik captain. We were able to
establish that we were out of danger relatively quickly.
I think we finally compared GPS coordinates, which we
should have done earlier. Actually, my original
broadcast should have included them.
In hind sight, I don't really think we were anywhere
close to the tug. We would have heard his fog
horn. Wouldn't he have seen us on radar too?
We have a nice big radar reflector on Zia which makes us
look a lot bigger than we actually are. We think a
professional tug captain would have called us on the
radio if he saw us heading straight for him. We
heard other captains doing that all night long.
Regardless, we are going to give ourselves a much better
lesson on the radar before we leave our anchorage again.
Frazzled, but relieved, we resumed our course to the big
red mark at the channel entrance. We had lost
Cenou in the fire drill and were on our own. It is
a very narrow channel and we still could only see twenty
feet in front of the boat. At one point, Joe
called down that he had the red marker on the starboard
side of the channel, but 20 seconds later he said
"hold it the red marker is casting a fishing rod - it's
a guy in a red tee shirt" then we found the real
red channel marker 30 seconds later. Fog! is a
four letter word when you add the exclamation point. We
navigated our way into the harbor without any trouble,
although we were still extremely wary. We started
looking for a spot to anchor immediately, but every time
we thought we saw a good spot, another boat would loom
out of the fog at us. It was still blowing 25
knots. We finally picked up a private mooring,
damn the consequences. We were exhausted.
The kids slept peacefully through it all (thank
goodness). Soon after entering the fog, well
before our ordeal with the Amarorik, I had gone down and
put their lifejackets in front of their doors, just in
case. Joe and I were both wearing inflatable
lifejackets, as we had the night before while we were
sailing in the ocean. We talk a lot about
emergency procedures and we enforce strict safety rules
for both the kids and ourselves. I guess the
bottom line is that we are taking some risks out here.
I'm glad to say that at this point, I still think they
are worth taking.
Wishing you all safe passage,
Christy, Joe, Cassie and Juliana
Next entry >>>>>>>
Many thanks to our friend Craig Homenko for his
assistance in setting up the website.
We also would like to thank our buddy Scott Brunner who
has been kind enough to host the website on his server.
