BoatUS.com - Seaworthy Magazine

Anatomy of a Bad Decision
By Bob Adriance

In the February BoatUS Membership eLine, there was an account of a sailboat that was abandoned on the way to Bermuda (“Lost at Sea, The Perils of Abandoning Ship”). The following account (Claim # 0913926) involves a highly experienced 78-year-old skipper who abandoned his 49-foot trawler last fall in the Gulf of Mexico during a trip from Texas to Florida. And while the story about the Bermuda-bound sailboat centered on the difficulties of getting from a small sailboat onto a giant ship in raging seas, in the following account, it’s the reason the trawler had to be abandoned that makes the story interesting.

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On Tuesday, October 27, the skipper was finishing preparations for his solo trip from Texas to Tampa, Florida where he was going to meet his wife for a leisurely, three-month cruise. He had hoped to take the Inland Waterway but at the last minute he learned that a lock in New Orleans was going to be closed for 45 days for repairs. After topping off his trawler’s tanks at a marina in Clear Lake, the skipper made the decision to take the “short cut” directly across the Gulf of Mexico. He’d made the trip six times before, always in a sailboat. With his trawler, he estimated the 825-mile trip would take five or six days.

Technically, it was still hurricane season but 2009 had been unusually quiet—no hurricanes—and when he set out on October 31, a Saturday, calm winds and seas were forecast for the upcoming week.

As predicted, seas were calm for the first two days and the trawler made good time. Since he was by himself with no place to put in for the night, the skipper developed a technique of looking six miles ahead on the radar screen, selecting a course that was clear, and then dozing for 20 minutes. An alarm would wake him up and he’d repeat the process.

Wednesday, as he was approaching the Florida coast, is when the trouble started. Seas built to four feet; not dangerous, but large enough to occasionally roll the trawler gunwale to gunwale. Sometime in the early afternoon, the starboard engine quit. Seconds later, the port engine quit. The skipper went down into the engine room and found water in the filter. He drained the water and then started the engines. A while later the port engine stopped again. He discovered more water in the filter. The frustrated skipper then switched tanks, but the problem immediately got worse. In desperation, he checked the depth gauge and found the boat was in only 200 feet of water. He dropped the anchor and 350-feet of line. Despite the lack of scope, the anchor held.

At almost the same instant the skipper was anchoring the trawler, a late season storm, Hurricane Ida, was brewing in the Western Caribbean off the coast of Honduras. Initially Ida was only a tropical depression with 35 mph winds, but four days later, on November 8, it would enter the Gulf as a Category 2 hurricane.

The skipper, unaware of the new forecast, was, “Racking my brain, trying to figure out a way to get clean fuel to the injector pump.” The fuel pump on the starboard engine was working. He released the plug on the injector pump and was getting clean diesel and no bubble. He tried pushing the stop button and the start button at the same to time to clear the cylinder. No go. He disconnected the line from the fuel pump to the two filters on the engine; he worked the lever on the fuel pump; and he continued cleaning fuel with the boat’s fuel polishing system. Nothing worked. There was so much water in the tanks he couldn’t seem to do anything about it. As he kept trying to coax the two engines back to life, his anger at the marina in Texas that had sold him the water-soaked fuel started growing.

The waves continued to build, making the engine room an increasingly more dangerous place to work. While he was cleaning one of the filters, the boat lurched suddenly, catapulting him into the battery box and giving him a nasty gash and a black eye. Later, the skipper was thrown again, this time cracking a rib, twisting a knee, and getting another cut on his head. The 78-year-old continued working, draining the muffler to keep water from backing up to the exhaust manifold. Later, up in the galley, he was thrown against the pantry and got a third gash on his head.

He decided that the time had come to let someone know his predicament. He tried raising a ship on the VHF. Silence. He shot off flares. Nothing. Finally, he raised a Japanese freighter that was late picking up a pilot and didn’t seem interested in helping him. Sometime later, he reached a tug that contacted the Coast Guard; help, he was told, would be sent out the following day.

By the time the Coast Guard arrived the next morning, Ida was well into the Gulf and seas were 14 to 16 feet and rising. According to the claim file, the skipper was reluctant to leave his boat until the Coast Guard told him Ida was quickly approaching and his chances of surviving were “nil.” The skipper said he thought about his wife and also how he was going to get back at the marina that sold him the “dang fuel” and decided to board the cutter. Revenge is a powerful motive. Before leaving, he set a second anchor, a 45-pound CQR, with 350 of line.

As soon as the storm had passed, BoatUS hired a plane and the skipper was flown to the site where his boat had been anchored. All they found was a small fuel slick. That’s when he finally realized his mistake with the fuel: “With nothing to do but think, I tried to visualize how the fuel could get out of the tank in small amounts. Finally, it came to me—the fuel vent! If fuel could go out, then water could come in. The fuel had been fine for hundreds of miles—until the boat started rolling. When [the boat] rolled 45 degrees, water came over the rail. The vents are two feet below the rail. Probably three or four ounces of seawater would come into the tank. A lot of rolls, a lot of ounces. If I would have thought of that earlier, I could have cut the hose and let the water go into the bilge to be pumped out.

“ If only I’d thought of it earlier.”

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Bob Adriance is the author of Seaworthy, Essential Lessons from BoatUS's 20-Year Case File of Things Gone Wrong.

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