6-7-8 (later)(2nd letter) The time is circa 1970,place: Richardson Bay, off of Sausalito, CA --- It was one of those typical spring afternoons when the fog would begin its tri-weekly creep inland from the Pacific Ocean, just a few miles over the nine-hundred feet high (now: Marin Headlands Nat'l Park) coastal range foothills from my home bay of Richardson, off the Sausalito shore. At two P.M., it was too early for rumaging the Army Corps of Engineers' woodpile. Each Monday-through-Friday afternoon, the core's three net-dragging vessels whose charge was to keep the shipping lanes of San Francisco Bay clear of hazards to navigation, would come chugging up our bay with their day's catch of marine debris, flotsam and jetsam, for the crane on the core's debris-unloading dock to help them unload. After their 4:30 PM quitting time—by 5 o'clock sure—we would-be wanna-be piratically-inclined water rats were never denied ingress to the pile. Sometimes, this pile would grow to really outlandish proportions, often reaching more than two-hundred feet around its perimeter and forty-fifty feet high! Multiply my few tidbits of rejected parts being thrown back overboard by the thousand mile shorelines of S F Bay plus all the folks up both rivers for hundreds more miles who dump unwanted wood parts into the rivers, and maybe then one might imagine this awesome pile of ever-changing big-hunks! litter and its attraction to us of who thought in terms of marine dumpster-diving. I think we weren't ever hasseled by the army core's people was because we absconded with such a quantity of wood hunks and chunks and multitudes of assorted marine hardware scraps still clinging, we saved them a lot of their expenses of removing by truck to landfill. Docks, solid wood floats, whole and partial old sunk or abandoned barges, wrecked boats and boat parts, bumpers, lines, cleats, shackles, turnbuckles, throughbolts and drift pins: long thickish steel bars for use to 'nail' larger chunks of wood together with. The variety and surprises were always a regular source of 'entertainment' to myself and those whom I am pleased to refer to as my brethren—and those too few sisthrens--whose images, by the way, inspire much of the secondary (if not primary) thrust of my book-writing effort. In early attempts at designing its dedication page, I gushed overly over them—the women—ended it with something resembling:
”And to goddess-like boulders everywhere, without whose patient stewardship, this could never have been,” or some such. Yes: My somewhat-inherited and somewhat self-evolved fantasy images with respect to the old-timey sailors' superstitions about sea sirens, I have taken license to use this in the storyline, because to me, as a one-time serious sailing enthusiast, I 'like' the possibilities inherant in the fable, in fact, have encountered phenomenon wherein pressures from other-than-me appeared to my admittedly-addled mind of certain of those moments when, although I was not in command nor control of my vessel, it seemed to guide itself in my favor and on my behalf without me being in any condition to do damn near anything about it: At night, ten miles off the rocky Pacific coast and still twenty miles north of the entrance, through the mile long Golden Gate, to San Francisco Bay: At dusk, hear Point Reyes and Drake's Bay, the north wind had come honking down on me in my 28 feet long (open!) steel lifeboat and now, an hour after dark, the wind is a steady forty knots, with gusts to fifty; the seas, whose tops (boiling crests) are phosphorescing bigtime; and whose heighths are ranging upwards of maybe twenty feet, at least. The only saving grace was that it was something on the order of 400 feet between these mountains of wavetops being urged along by this fierce north (and off-the-land) wind. In awe and amazement, almost in a state-of-shock, I huddled in the open bow of my boat, under a blanket with a kerosene heater between my legs and watched those waves creep up to within desperate few inches of the top edge (gunnel) of my tiny pathetic excuse for a real boat. They came up and up the sides as my boat rose and rose up the oncoming swell—facing stern on to the oncoming swell—surfing for some many seconds until the crest of foamy swirlings passed underneath us and we slid down the backside to the three-hundred feet calm drifting in the nearly windless hollows—while the wild ass wind is shrieking just above the wavetop line, maybe twenty feet overhead. I've got a tiny triangular flap of a corner of a sail hung on the mast, but it seems mostly just show and very little go, and then got too scary to keep trying to fly as the night intensified. Oh: Did I mention that with the onset of this big north wind, also shortly thereafter brought on a similarly-intense fog, further denying all visuals for the whole damn rest of the night, and I hadn't much clue where I was all night, besides some terribly-fallible ded reckoning on the part of my substantially-subdued, overly-awed brain. All's well that ends well. For with the dawn, came enough lifting of the fog to then become able to zero in on trying to catch the incoming tidal flow free ride right on through the gate and into shelter from this mean old mad mad wind storm that was as close as I've ever come to biting the bullet. Or should that be: meeting Davy Jones? or the seagoddess neices of old man Neptune? Or even his wife, mother, or mother-in-law? Another case of me reminding myself that I am one lucky son of a bitch, again. Yes: Again. I will try to write further of this soon, but I wanted to focus this attempt at describing some nautical and marine-related things to do with a particular afternoon when I had sailed up (northwest toward the narrowing shallower areas) Richardson Bay and made such good time that I was way too early for to stop nearby the Army Corps dock for to check on what had come in that day. This had me rather lazily swooping in toward dropping anchor in sixteen feet of water about two-hundred feet off (east) from the core's woodpile dock. Approximately two hundred and fifty feet south of where I anchored was a long and very large pier sticking maybe six-hundred feet out into the deeper water of the fairly narrow deep water ships channel that the Army Corps' large ten-story-tall, four-hundred feet long world war two era Liberty ship that had been converted to a suction-dredge and charged with maintaining adequate depths-of-water in the ships' channels. Every few weeks, the big steel ship, with its monster fifty feet long three feet in diameter suction pipes hanging from amidships by gigantic wire cables and their monster block-and-tackle pulleys for raising and lowering, would come rumbling up our bay to swing around ninety degrees and scootch over to tie up at their six-hundred feet long old but beefy wooden pier; and it was in there, tied up, its locomotive engines slumbering mighty snores way down below, inside. I am also about two-hundred feet away from the giant log breakwaters of a small plastic boat 'yacht' harbor that stick out off from the land maybe two hundred feet or so. Outside of that is open water, albeit somewhat clogged or cluttered (littered?) with anchored out small boats, extending in toward the shore to the gigantic small boat harbor, a few hundred feet further up the bay, and the fuel docks. This small near-shore indent between the three shoreside barriers, wasn't more than a 350 feet wide where I had anchored, and I only had a couple hundred feet of space between me and the big army core debris-removal dock and the giant logs of the nearby small boat harbor. There were probably another half-dozen vessels at anchor within some few dozens of yards. The waterside vista widened out to the east for a mile and more of increasingly-shallowing water to the three mile long rocky lee shore over on the Tiburon peninsula and Belvedere Island. I only describe this because when I get to the real details of this tale, it is important to be able to visualize all the stuff that could have gone very wrong, even almost tragically wrong when the bleep hit my particular 'fan' that day. Obviously, I am still breathing, so not to worry. * * * Being that the afternoon was mostly on the balmy side and the normal westerlies of our afternoons hadn't materialized, I rather too lackadaisically did not let out as much scope (length) of anchor line as 'the book' says is safe: a seven-to-one ratio of length-of-line to depth-of-water, and laid down in my bunk to actually almost snooze out . . . except for the army core's giant four-hundred feet long ten story tall steel ship with two railroad locomotive engines rumbling a duet down inside its innards with such force as to cause ripples of sympathetic vibrations to gyrate across the surface of the water and trouble my dream. As it happened, while my snooze was materializing, the ship began its ultra slomo departure from its pier; involving its backing out far enough to swing the stern just about right at where I was anchored. My inner being's intuitive 'sense' was warning me to: Wake up, you fool, the ship is getting too near. and when I woke and looked out of the hatch, the ship's eighty feet high stern end loomed high in my field-of-vision barely a hundred feet away! It then throttled forward toward the south and deeper portions of the bay, aiming its bursts of acceler-ating thrusts directly at me snooze. Never having previously encountered the twin, oppositely-spiraling whirl-pools of the twin screw thrust of a ship's sixteen feet in diameter propellers, I was fully unprepared for what they were ultimately going to do with my little twenty-two foot home-in-a-sailboat. I awoke, remembering that I hadn't put out enough anchor line to accomadate the kind of turbulence that was assuredly fast approaching my boat and my somewhat still-foggy brain as I leaped up onto deck and hurried forward to start undoing the line at the cleat, which I just got done and wrapped back around the cleat and to hope for the best as the two rapidly- approaching oppositely-rotating hundred feet wide whirlpools enveloped me and us: my boat and I. And then it hit and threw the bow of the boat sideways with such force as to just leave my crouching body out in space over the water, into which I then became immersed. I had managed to grab some sort of a hold on some piece of something that was hanging nearby and cling to at the side of my boat as we took off on a wild ass ride of the three-hundred feet circumference of the first whirlpool, and then did a reverse 360 around the edge of the other large swirling mass of water. As the scene began to calm down and movement slowed, I swam alongside the boat to the bow (bad idea) and proceeded to try to climb up through the bowsprit guy wires, but lost my grip and fell, ker-sploosh, back in. I then swam back to the rear where I was able to use a notch in the rudder to step up onto and over the gunnels and onto my back deck, clothes cascading streams of water. I was already feeling a bit more than just somewhat embarrassed, when the bright and undeniably superiorly-intelligent large black eyes of a very large and very black sleek sea lion—no harbor seal this--surfaced just a millisecond after the top of his head (it might have been a she, but I don't think she sea lions would be quite so boisterous in her ridicule of my antics as mister sea lion was) surfaced not fifteen feet away from me and immediately began bellowing a hearty chorus of guffaws—I have no other way of understanding this—seriously: he was laughing, and laughing directly at me while keeping eye contact for the whole minute before he took a breath and dove; only to surface another 50 feet away for one more lengthy chorus of you idiot fool dummy human, you! I could only agree wholeheartedly with his sentiment at that point; while counting my blessings and thanking my (fig.) lucky stars that nobody's boat smashed into anyone else's or the shore, piers, breakwater logs, or rip rap shore section not that far off, either; and I'd gotten my anchor line untied before taking the tumble. And I had a story worthy of actually telling my grandchildren, someday about the skinny boatdummy and the sleek black, bright-eyed eight-hundred pound laughing sea lion. I have another two or three falling-out-of-boat or off of boat stories but will save them for another day when I have more energy to donate to this increasingly-uncomfortable sedentary sitting and typing business that I have only just re-begun to re-assume after a three year hiatus from all everything to do with attempted computer-generated orchestrations. And, as with any 'new' job regimen, it takes a few weeks to re-acclimatize one's (my) spirit, muscles, nerves, emotions, thinker, and physical body to grow the 'callouses' that allow lengthier sessions stuck in these irritatingly-sedentary poses that come with the writer's 'territory.'
The hard-to-find, (probably: nowadays) cast steel Danforth “Mark II” style anchor is vastly superior in its quick grip on the (soft) bottom and surer hold fast by far than the stamped steel Danforths so readily and cheaply available everywhere. Them darnn stupid stamped steel ones just bend and otherwise distort when push comes to shove. But, even the tiny five-pounder Mark II I once had—my 'lunch (and kedging) hook'--never let go. My best-ever cast 65 pound “Mark II” held more than fifty tons once in a gale of north wind one January—at least it held until the gusts of wind hit over sixty and it did let go. But I had had the tugboat's Caterpillar idling away by that time as I could just tell that the wind wasn't going to other than intensify that night and when the anchor finally dragged—and that was with nearly three-hundred pounds of chain stretched out!--I just eased the shifter into gear and held her (it was a boy boat: Herbert; built 1919, federal document number 218538) steady as she goes against the terrible gusts that finally began to let up just before the sky began to lighten. Part of any serious boat owner-operator-fixer's survivalist's requirements is that you have more than just one anchor rigged and ready to go for if and when number one lets g. Three's even better. Redundancies, redundancies, redundancy's the name of 'the game.' In fact, I practice the same regimen with my vehicles. I've never owned one newer than 13 years old . . Boy! I am apologizing for having just jumped way all over the map with this communique, but after all, this is Hardway here, and what do you expect? Perfection? Not a chance—70-30 aint too shabby. . .
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