Assisting a sailor through a discussion with the coastguard

On Saturday we decided to sail out to meet with Bob and Linda on Argon as they were heading back from their 3 week vacation. Bob has developed an app that shows in real time the location of Argon and we could see that they had headed out from Manchester by the Sea early and in a straight line course. Here is a link to the Argon blogsite and his real time app is linked on the right hand side. Given the wind direction (on their nose) we figures they were motoring and anticipated that they might head to Peddocks island, on of their favorite spots. The app, and a text message from Bob confirmed this so we headed in that direction.  Winds were gusting to over 25 knots with variable direction and generally we were on a beam or broad reach until we turned south to Peddocks, when we were close hauled. Here is a link Linda and Bob's blog entry about Peddocks.

Image of Prairie Gold taken from Argon Voyages

We met Argon just as she was about to weigh anchor -  a storm was forecast for later in the afternoon and we all wanted to be in harbor before then. As we turned we saw another anchored boat - ~30 foot Catalina sailboat – and on the bow a man waving his arms to attract our attention. Since my hearing isn’t the best I took over at the helm and Yolande went to investigate. The boat had a one man crew and in the strong winds he couldn’t pull up the anchor. He asked us to tow him forward to relieve the strain on the anchor rode.  As much as I would like to help this seemed to invite disaster. He wanted to throw us a line as we passed him, then we should pull. I had bad visions of line getting caught in propeller etc etc. Instead we circled and I thought of other possibilities. At that point I saw a coast guard RIB ½ a mile away. I radioed on VHF 16 to the coastguard to ask for assistance on the behalf of other vessel, got a response, switched to channel 22 and gave the relevant information and the coastguard vessel sped over and helped. I wasn’t certain whether the coastguard would help since he wasn’t in danger. However, over the course of ten minutes they sorted the problem out. Thanks coastguard, we all hope never to need you but its great to know that you are there.

This VHF interchange adds to my classics. We try not to use channel 16 as it is a working channel of great importance. But this reminds me of a channel 16 discussion we had with a naval warship in San Diego. As we were heading out of the harbor a fleet of warships were returning to port from the Pacific. Warship #4 radioed to us to request that they could pass starboard-to-starboard. Of course they could and we complied with their request. At the time I had thought this was a strange as we were not actually that close, they were one heck of a big ship and we had already made sure we were out of her way. However, on returning to shore we had a discussion back at the marina about this radio call and one of the locals told us that a cranky local from San Diego had issued a law suit against the navy because a vessel had made a starboard-to-starboard passage without requesting permission. Consequently, the navy now makes these VHF requests. Drives me mad when people take out law suits for no good reason.