BoatUS.com: Government Affairs

When the 53-foot Hatteras sportfisherman the men were delivering up the Carolina coast began taking on water in seven- to nine-foot seas, Harris and Schafer had only minutes to abandon ship. In that precious time they tried unsuccessfully to launch the boat’s inflatable life raft. According to a Coast Guard report of the incident, the two men grabbed life jackets, a strobe light and EPIRB, and jumped into the sea as Physical Therapy flooded and capsized in the pre-dawn hours.

The EPIRB signal alerted the Coast Guard at 4:40 a.m. and less than an hour later, a C-130 search plane took off from Elizabeth City, NC. The plane reached the position by 6:45 a.m. and flew over the men, still struggling to stay afloat in the 47-degree water and building seas. Harris later reported that Schafer, most likely severely hypothermic and disoriented, ditched his life jacket to swim after the plane that he feared had missed them.

But the aircraft crew had seen their strobe light and radioed the location to a 47-foot motor lifeboat from Coast Guard Group Ft. Macon already searching the area. The boat reached the site just before 7 a.m. but by then Schafer had disappeared. Harris had become so weak that he could not reach a rescue line that landed in the water two feet away from him. With seas by then running 10 feet or more, the Coast Guard crew brought the boat close enough to grab Harris and haul him aboard.

The 47-footer then searched for Schafer in worsening conditions until abandoning the effort about 10 a.m. A cutter and helicopter continued the search but with seas building even higher and near gale force winds out of the northeast, they gave up about 3 p.m.

Zach Schafer was a licensed captain with five years of commercial towing experience, both offshore and along the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. The irony of this sad story is that it appears Schafer opted for the open ocean route for the delivery to Beaufort, NC, from Charleston, SC, simply to save time.

At the time of the sinking, the Coast Guard had had a portion of the ICW closed to some commercial traffic due to shoaling since Dec. 8 of last year, notes Bos Smith, a Charleston tugboat operator and chairman of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway Association.

The controlling depth at Lockwoods Folly, roughly midway between Charleston and Beaufort, had been reduced to three feet. Although this is a busy section of the waterway, linking it to the Port of Wilmington, NC, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been unable to find the money for emergency dredging, approximately $800,000.

If the waterway isn’t dredged and maintained at navigable depths, more and more recreational vessels will be tempted, or even forced, to take their chances offshore, Smith says.

At press time, nearly three months after closing Lockwoods Folly, nothing has changed — except that Zach Schafer will never run a tugboat along the Atlantic seaboard again.

Worst Fears

“The issue I have with this situation is that Zach was a professional captain, an experienced ocean operator, and he drowned,” says Smith. “What will happen to less experienced recreational boaters who try to bypass the waterway because of the condition it’s in and the weather turns ugly out there?

“Take a man and wife in their 60s with a single screw trawler,” he goes on. “They don’t want to put up with delays on the waterway, they just want to get to Florida. They check the forecast; four- to five-foot seas at worst.

“They say, ‘Our boat can handle that,’ so they head offshore, the weather turns bad, like it did on Zach, and all of a sudden, the seas are running six to eight feet and they’re in trouble,” he continues. “What’s the cost of bringing them back — or worse, losing them?”

As it turns out, that’s pretty much the scenario Schafer and Harris faced aboard Physical Therapy, a decent forecast overrun by a gale that arrived off the Carolina capes well ahead of schedule. And what makes the loss even tougher for Smith is that Schafer had worked for his firm, Stevens Towing Co., for five years. He’d started as a deckhand, moved up to mate and finally became a licensed captain, towing barges along the south Atlantic seaboard, both on the waterway and offshore.

Smith called Schafer a talented seaman who understood boats. Harris, the survivor, had worked with Schafer as a deckhand aboard Stevens Towing vessels for two years and he agrees.

“Zach could do things with a boat most people could only dream about doing,” he told reporters from his hospital bed, recovering from surgery on the foot he broke when the boat rolled. “It was a natural for him.”

It would have been just as natural for Schafer to take the boat back inside to the ICW if necessary, Harris told BoatUS Magazine.

“That was the idea,” he said. “If the weather turned bad, we could jump in at Winyah Bay (SC) or the Cape Fear River.”

But the weather held until Physical Therapy had cleared Frying Pan Shoal off the tip of Cape Fear and was well into the final leg of the 200-mile trip to the inlet at Moorehead City, NC, leading to Beaufort, their destination.

About the sinking, still under Coast Guard investigation at press time, Harris would only say, “Something in (the boat’s) mechanics went bad.” He agrees, however, that the steady deterioration of the waterway is just asking for more — and possibly worse — incidents involving recreational boaters.

“Say they’re on a blow boat (sailboat) with a seven- or 8-foot draft,” he explains. “On the personal charts we keep on the tugs, we’ve penciled in maybe hundreds of shoals but the pretty-boy yachts won’t see those places on the charts that they buy.

“So the snowbirds hear talk on the VHF about problems on the waterway and they just want to get from the cold to the warm,” he goes on. “So they decide to go outside in the ocean — and pretty soon they’re floating in the water, like we were.”

What You Can Do

Navigation is severely restricted on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway at Lockwoods Folly, NC. Where there should be a 12-foot channel, at low tide the depth is a mere three feet and commercial vessels drawing more than that can only pass through at high tide and only with Coast Guard permission.

On other sections of the waterway, channel depth is as little as five or six feet and the Corps of Engineers is faced with steadily deteriorating conditions but no money for dredging. However, boating organizations as well as regular cruisers are raising the alarm.

“Can you imagine the chaos this will cause with the annual snowbird migration,” says Claiborne Young, author of Cruising Guide to Coastal North Carolina and other ICW books.

After the Bush Administration announced its budget for the Corps in February, Young, BoatU.S and the AIWA launched electronic mail campaigns to the cruising community far and wide as well as to marinas, yacht clubs, marine businesses, small ports and local governments along the waterway. Cruising boaters from as far away as the West Coast, and even Australia, have rallied to support the ICW.

“Imagine all northbound boats — large or small, sail or power — being forced to go outside from Charleston to Cape Fear, no matter what the weather, to continue their migration,” Young wrote in his electronic Salty Southeast Nautical Newsletter. “We can’t let that happen.”

For more information on the ICW crisis and how you can help, no matter where you use your boat, go to Atlintracoastal.org.