Running Aground in the Slip

     Or, Was my face red!

I’d had my Hunter and had been living aboard for about three months. It was February, and there was a full moon.

I didn’t think anything of it. I certainly didn’t connect that full moon with what the dockmaster had told me when I first took my slip, that one reason to keep the boat bow in was that the sand had built up at the end of the slip.

I looked at how the boat was tied up before I left for the evening, but I’d been on the boat for three months now, and I thought I had it all pretty well figured out.

I came home about 10PM and looked at the boat sitting perfectly centered in the slip. “Man, I’m getting good at this!” I thought. I grabbed the breast line to pull the boat over to the finger pier.

Nothing happened.

I pulled harder. Nothing happened

The boat wasn’t perfectly tied up at all. She was aground! She was actually tilting.

Other people might have been able to take a flying leap, or climb over the bow, but I really felt the boat was too far away for either of those options. I knew the cats had enough food and water. I called it a night and slept elsewhere.

By the next morning when I came back to the boat, the water had risen and she was afloat again, and I thought, “I really don’t want this to happen again.” My solution was to re-tie her so that she moved some in the slip. I actually like the sensation of the boat rocking, so that didn’t bother me, and the keel had a chance to dig herself a hole. I lived at that marina for another 21 months and never again had this problem.

LESSON LEARNED: use your depth sounder and/or depth line when you first move your boat into a new slip. Talk to others in the marina, and of course, the dock master. If you have a shallow slip, you need to know about it and what kinds of problems it can make for you.

Or you can just wait for Mother Nature to surprise you.  :)

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