Art Versus the Sandbar
The moral of this story: If you see seagulls walking on water, you are not having a religious experience.........
The story opens on what was supposed to be another fun-filled Labor Day weekend down at Barnegat Bay, New Jersey, the place where I had spent a few summers back in the early - mid 1980's. This time, we were marking the end of the summer season of 1984. A season which had found me keeping a boat in a slip and tasting the marina life for the first, and ultimately the last, time. I was currently running my 23' 1970 Westwind as my primary boat, and I had also brought my newly acquired 18' 1975 Tahiti jet boat down specifically for that weekend so that I could blast around on the bay at a speed faster than that of a fast jog. Also new this season was my friend Art's 22' sailboat, as well as his own jet boat , which he had also brought down to the marina for the end of the season festivities. We planned on pulling out all the stops, since Labor day traditionally marks the end of the summer season, so we wanted it to be extra special. Little did we know just how special it would become.....
Here is a picture of Art's sailboat taken on Saturday afternoon, only a few hours before the "fun" really began:
And Art's ill-fated Jet boat.......
Like in years prior, we were preparing to see the summer season out with one last hurrah. Despite the reality that this was the end of the season, and winter would be looming large just around the corner, spirits were running high all throughout the marina. This was setting up to be a party weekend of biblical proportions. My marina neighbors were planning some cookout-style, BYOF-BYOB parties starting in the late afternoon and lasting all night. Art and I planned to hang out in the bay enjoying our own party during the day. I had brought my soon-to-be in-laws along with my soon-to-be wife, and we had anchored the Westwind out in the bay during the day, to use as a home base for our on-water hi-jinks. Likewise, Art had his wife and another couple along on the sailboat and were anchored out as well. Art and I then spent the afternoon running around the bay in our jet boats, stirring up water, running an impromptu race or two, and generally goofing off. For me, it was also a chance to finally explore the Bay beyond the infamous #68 buoy which had been pretty much the end of the line for my cruises in the Westwind. The jet boat could cover a greater distance than the Westwind, and do it in a much shorter time. So, with the speedo topping the 50 MPH mark, I happily blew by the #68 buoy and thumbed my nose at it as it quickly came up on my starboard side and just as quickly left again. My first taste of high speed boating in the bay was a blast for sure but, unfortunately, like they say, time flies when you're having fun and before we knew it, the transition from afternoon to evening commenced as the sun began its daily plunge toward the horizon. As darkness started to descend and envelope the area, I was forced to call it quits and head back into the marina, since my jet boat was not equipped with the Coast Guard required navigation lights. So we all decided to head in and continue the party back at the marina where the cookouts had hopefully begun in earnest. We pulled up our anchors and prepared to head in, with the exception of Art's wife Marcelle, who had decided to stay out a little while longer by herself and take a leisurely twilight sail in the sailboat. And why not? The evening was warm, the skies were clear, and we were witnessing yet another spectacular sunset in the making. But before we made our parting comments, and she headed out for the night, Art gave her a VHF handheld radio so she could call us if she had a problem. The rest of us then docked our boats and joined the party at the marina already in progress. Things started off well enough in the early evening. But as the night continued to move relentlessly forward, signs of trouble began to appear. Marcelle had been drinking liberally from a bottle of wine she had taken along for her cruise. So, as she was enjoying her sail, the inebriation began, and her judgment had begun to wane in proportion. Pretty soon she lost her bearings, found herself disoriented, and consequently ended up sailing aimlessly around the bay. Luckily, she was piloting a slow moving sailboat and not a fast moving powerboat, so she really wasn't in any serious danger. But despite her increasingly impaired condition, we managed to maintain radio contact with her from the marina, so there was no serious cause for concern yet. At some point during the night, she called us to say that she thought she had run aground since, as far as she could determine in her intoxicated state, the boat had stopped all forward progress. If that wasn't enough, she also informed Art that the boat's house battery must be dying, since the navigation lights were starting to go dim. It was plainly obvious to me at this point, that she was not in the best frame of mind to make a clear determination of where she was, or able to safely operate the boat. The thought occurred to me that maybe we should send out the cavalry (or better yet the Navy) to help her. But for some reason though, Art thought that this was a perfectly normal situation for her and he still wasn't all that concerned. He was of the opinion that he would let her solve her own problems. After all, there were still food to eat, and many cans of Bud left to drink and he didn't want some needless rescue mission to spoil that opportunity. Some time later, as the night slowly transitioned into early morning, the fires died out, the beer was finally gone, and the party had started to wind down. My in-laws had settled down to bed on board the Westwind, while my wife and I were getting ready to crash in the back of my van. Concern had finally registered with Art and he had decided to take off in his jet boat to look for Marcelle. I had wanted to go with him, as I was always up for a boat ride, and I was much more sober. But he took off while I was answering a nature call, and I literally missed the boat. At first I was bummed, but as the night's events continued to unfold, I would come to realize that I was much better off where I was......
I may have missed the boat, but Art didn't go out alone. He had taken another guy, Rob, out with him, as they headed out to start looking for Marcelle. But in his haste to leave, Art failed to take a radio with him, so I couldn't contact him to follow his progress, and he couldn't contact Marcelle directly either. As the minutes ticked on by, I walked to the end of the docks to give a good listen and I thought I could hear the rumble of his engine off in the distance, piercing the otherwise dead quiet of the late night as he moved across the bay. I relayed to Marcelle over the radio, that he was on his way and for her to keep an eye (or ear) out for him. Marcelle had stopped drinking (I think she had finally run out) a while back, so her judgment was actually improving at this point, so I felt hopeful for a quick resolution to this situation. But soon Murphy reared his ugly head to further complicate things, as the batteries in her hand-held radio started to die without warning and she abruptly faded out. Having lost all contact with her, and not being able to contact Art, I could no longer be of any help. I couldn't follow in my jet boat, as it didn't have navigation lights and the loud exhaust note from the open headers would have woken up the whole marina, which would not have made me the most popular person. My in-laws were sleeping in the Westwind, so I couldn't follow in that either. So faced with no other options, I shrugged my shoulders and did what any good friend would do, I went to bed!
Fast forward to the next morning (which was actually no more than about 4 hours later). I was slowly awakened by the sound of a persistent tapping on the outside of my van. Thinking initially, in my half-awake stupor, that the van was under attack by a crazy, rabid woodpecker, I eventually cleared the sand from my eyes and the fog from my mind and took a peak outside. Standing there, looking no worse for the wear, was Art's wife Marcelle. At first, I assumed that Art had found her, everything had turned out alright and she was waking us to go to breakfast (Hey! A guy can dream). But as I quickly pulled on my shorts and shirt and went outside, an entirely different picture was painted for me. It seems that she had indeed run aground for a while last night. But after losing radio contact with me, and sobering up somewhat, she managed to crank up the centerboard and broke free. Then, still not knowing exactly where she was and with only God as her navigator, she limped her way to a marina about 5 or 6 miles up the bay from where we were. She had tied up there and then walked the distance down RT 9 and then back to our marina. But she had no idea what had happened to Art (You mean he's not with YOU?!?!). With that sobering thought, the remaining fog in my mind cleared and we sprang into action. I could only imagine what might have happened knowing Art, his luck with boats, and the unpredictable nature of the bay. Trying to keep a positive attitude as we got ready, I joked that he probably ended up spending the night at some bar in Harvey Cedars (As it turned out, I was almost right, as he was at a "bar"). Since the sun was already up over the horizon, my wife and I went out in my Tahiti to look for Art (or a big oil slick). My in-laws drove Marcelle back to the other marina to retrieve the sailboat. I had no idea where Art might be (It is, after all, a very BIG bay), but I had a few thoughts where to start looking. So we decided to make a quick run around the more familiar parts of the bay, starting first with Harvey Cedars, and the marinas (and bars), along with the public dock where we had tied up Art's Pacemaker 2 years ago, thinking that this would be the most likely place where he might have gone. With the speed of the Tahiti, we finished our first pass quickly but had seen nothing that looked like Art's metalflake green boat. So we headed back toward our marina hoping that he might have returned while we had been out looking. Unfortunately, we didn't see Art, but we did spy the sailboat gingerly making its way back toward our marina under engine power. And for some strange reason, my father-in-law was at the helm "steering" the boat. I guess Marcelle was not too familiar with running the sailboat's auxiliary outboard motor, and was more than happy to let someone else do it. But my father-in-law was no boater, and he had made the mistake of trying to steer the boat by turning the outboard motor rather than using the sailboat's rudder. Consequently, he had bumped into a boat or two while trying to get out of the other marina. So to avoid any further mishaps, I went aboard and ended up docking the sailboat back at our marina. My father-in-law then joined my wife and I as we headed out to attempt another search for Art. We hadn't been out all that long this time, when we spied someone flagging us down from an approaching boat. When we pulled up alongside, Rob, the guy Art had been out with, jumped on board. Sensing that something was seriously wrong, we pressed Rob to bring us up to speed on the previous night's activities. So now, in the words of the late Paul Harvey, here's "The rest of the story":
As we sat still in the middle of the bay, Rob captured our attention as he re-told the story of his harrowing maritime experience. We learned that while I was sleeping peacefully on my firm "bed" (which consisted of no more than the van's thinly carpeted floor), blissfully unaware of the night's events still unfolding, Art & Rob were out in the bay trying desperately to find Marcelle. Art was running in a sort of criss-cross search pattern, as they tried to look for signs of the sailboat's lights. Now anyone who's familiar with Barnegat Bay knows that the bay is shallow to begin with and is loaded with shoals and sandbars, and it's tricky enough to navigate them even in broad daylight. But there's Art, running his jet boat at 20-25 MPH in the middle of the night, and slowly losing his bearings (he had had more than a few Buds under his belt as well). Rob wasn't much help as a navigator, since he wasn't a boater himself and he wasn't all that familiar with the landmarks on the bay. At one point, Art spied what he thought were the spreader lights of a sailboat, so he headed toward them. But as it turns out, what he thought were spreader lights, were actually the perimeter lights at the top of the Barnegat Lighthouse. So as he headed toward the lights in a generally northeast direction, he was also heading toward what is locally known as Double Creek Channel. Double Creek Channel is a twisting narrow channel which winds through clusters of sandbars and eventually dumps you into Barnegat inlet on its way to the ocean. Inside the narrow and poorly marked channel, the water is fairly deep, but venture a scant 5' outside of the marked channel and you're in inches of water, even at high tide. Well, at this point, Art did not know where exactly he was, so it was a pretty safe assumption that he wasn't running in the marked channel. The first hint that he was about to find himself in serious trouble, occurred when he lightly skimmed the first sandbar, and it slowed him down somewhat. Thankfully he was in a jet boat, which can run in as little as a foot of water while on plane, and there is no prop or drive hardware hanging below the bottom which could be damaged. At this point, a normal, non-Budweiser-influenced, sane person would have reversed course, or at the very least dropped the speed back to a slow crawl. But remember, we're talking about Art here. Instead of stopping after the first sandbar "bump", Art figured a better strategy would be to gun the throttle a little harder with the notion that he would just "plow through" any more sandbars. Amazingly, this strategy seemed to work for a short while, but eventually Art's apparent luck would run out (remember Murphy?). This time, after hitting another, and this time much larger "bump", the impact with which sent the boat nearly airborne, the boat stopped dead in its tracks in about 3 inches of water. Oh, and did I mention that it was already high tide? The jet boat had now become, for all intents and purposes, high and damn near dry, and much too heavy for two guys to push back off. Since it was already high tide, his predicament would only get worse with time. So lacking any other practical options, Art and Rob had no other choice but to spend the night out on the sandbar, with nothing but the sound of small crabs scurrying by. It's funny what you can hear when it's dead quiet. Fortunately it didn't rain, although it did get a bit cool as it was, after all, the beginning of September. And so it was that the Skipper and Gilligan found themselves stranded on the sandbar island, trying desperately to catch a couple hours of sleep inside a 16' boat with only one bench seat large enough to stretch out on. Once the sun had started coming up, Rob decided that he had enough, and had walked out to the edge of the sandbar, waved down a passing boat, and hitched a ride in and that's where we found him. The skipper elected to stay with the "ship". Although no one could have taken it, as grounded as it was.
Once we heard the story, I turned my boat around and we headed back out to where Rob directed us. As we carefully proceeded through Double Creek channel (the right way), we soon came within sight of Art's newly created "sand castle". It was indeed a strange, and at the same time comical, sight. It was now a little bit past mean low tide, the next high tide still hours away, so the boat was sitting in the middle of a very large patch of white, dry sand, looking very much like someone had planted a jet boat seed and the boat had sprung up out of the ground, like a patch of crabgrass. My only regret was that I neglected to bring my camera along to record this for posterity. In any case, I carefully beached my boat and picked up a visibly worn out and agitated Art. He was not too happy, which was understandable under the circumstances. But surprisingly, his main source of angst was not so much the boat situation, but rather because he had been stranded out on a sandbar all night with no beer, no food, no radio, no guitar, and while he did have a pack of cigarettes, he had nothing to light them with. So he was seriously bummed. I thought his sense of priorities were just a bit off, but I guess that was Art's way of making light of a bad situation. After some ribbing about his skillful piloting, making the wrong turn at Albuquerque, and for trying to use a boat as a plow etc., and realizing that we couldn't do anything more until the tide came back up, we returned to the marina to formulate a recovery plan and to finally eat some breakfast. So now it looked like one boat had safely found its way home to the roost. Now all we had to do was get the other one. A task that didn't look to be an easy one to accomplish. But we were determined to at least try..........
Here you see the business end of what would finally be the savior of Art's firmly grounded jet boat, pictured here shortly before the weekend's festivities:....
A quick look at the tide table showed that the next high tide would occur again at about 1:30 that afternoon, and would actually be slightly higher than the previous high tide. Lacking access to a helicopter and a lift sling (helicopters are never around when you need them), we instead decided to wait until just before the peak of the high tide and then head back to the sandbar to try to push Art's boat back into deep water again. We hoped that at the highest point in the tide and with 5 people we'd be able to overcome the weight issue and push it back to the channel. Well, that was plan "A", but things didn't start off quite so well. When we got back there, the tide had indeed come back up, and we were now standing around the boat in 8" to maybe a foot of water, but the boat was not yet fully floating, and still too heavy to move with people power alone trying to get traction in the soft sand. Plan "B" then involved trying to dig a "trench" in front of the boat to make the water a bit deeper. But without a shovel, and using just our bare hands with more than 70' to get to the deep water, the job was not an easy one and we soon abandoned it. Then, in desperation, we finally came upon plan "C". This plan involved using the power of my boat to pull Art's boat off of the sandbar. But there was a problem. Since Art's boat was a good 70 feet or so from the "good" water, we would need a LONG rope. Luckily I had a 50' ski rope with me, and Art had a few dock lines, which we figured would do the trick. We tied them all together to reach the distance between the deep water, and the not-so-deep water. So that I could be sure of having enough deep water to run in, with the shortest amount of rope, I attached the rope to the bow eye on my Tahiti, and the other end to the bow eye on Art's boat. I started up, and tried using reverse to pull it off. However, the reverse gate on a jet boat is designed to channel only enough water to move the boat when a maneuver dictated, and not to apply the full available thrust, and it quickly became obvious that there just wasn't enough thrust in reverse to pull the stranded boat off the sand. So I was forced to turn my boat around and place my drive ever so close to the sandbar and I moved the rope to the ski-tow eye. I pointed the Jet-O-Vator trim nozzle full down, and proceeded to apply some throttle. The thrust in forward was considerably stronger and I moved a lot of water, but not too much boat, at least not initially. But the effort was not for naught as there was some definite, albeit slow, forward progress. Each burst of throttle moved Art's boat a few feet forward. With help from the people pushing, and the thrust from my boat, we moved Art's boat about half the required distance in about 15 or 20 minutes. As the water slowly got deeper, Art got the wild idea to start his boat and use the power from his own jet drive to add additional thrust. While operating the hand throttle from outside the boat, Art gunned his throttle at the same time that I hit mine. I'm not sure if his boat was actually adding thrust or merely sucking down to the bottom at the intake. I also don't think it occurred to Art (or me at the time) that by doing this, his boat could potentially break free and take off on its own, likely resulting in me being run over, which would certainly put a damper on my spirits. But thankfully that didn't happen. One thing that would soon become apparent though, was that he was sucking a lot of sand into his engine. Eventually, thanks to our sheer determination and perseverance, we got the boat to the point where it would float again, and we undid the ropes. As a final "gotcha", or maybe an example of twisted divine inspired Karma for rubbing Art's predicament in a little too much, I received a payback. This happened as I walked back behind my boat to undo the line. I had been standing waist deep in about 3 feet of water, but as I stepped directly behind the boat to untie the line, the bottom gave way and I slipped in well over my head, glasses and all. It seems that the sustained thrust of my boat had blown a large, deep hole in the sand. Art got a chuckle out of my disappearing act, and I found myself a little more wet than I had wanted to get, but I guess that's all part of the experience. In any case, we ended up having to cut the ropes apart, as the force of the pull had fused the knots together beyond any hope of untying.
When we finally pulled away from the sandbar, I gave one last look back and noticed a flock of seagulls walking on the sandbar in the couple of inches of water they were standing in. At the same time, a large sport fisherman plied the deep water channel directly in the background. The whole scene took on a very surreal appearance. It looked as if the seagulls were actually walking on top of deep water. This scene gave me the inspiration for the moral of this story: If you are out boating, and you see seagulls walking on water up ahead, you are NOT having a religious experience, and you should plan a quick course change.......
As we headed back in, Art noticed that his engine was running a little hot. It seems that sand had clogged one of his exhaust manifolds. We would have to pull them and flush them out. But otherwise both Art and his boat were no worse for the wear. Thus another summer season ended and miraculously no one died or was seriously injured (Egos notwithstanding). And no animals were harmed in the making of this story either. But this little adventure is one story that gets retold whenever we get together and start reminiscing about boating (just ask me). It's one of those special memories that life's made up of.