Insufficient Upriver
Copyright © 1999 by Dave Badtke
What you don’t know most certainly will hurt you.
Last Labor Day weekend my wife and I decided to sail our catamaran upriver to Napa. Since I learned to sail on the tranquil waters of a small Michigan lake devoid of the strong tidal currents, underwater obstacles, intimidating ship traffic and precipitous depth changes that characterize our Bay waters, I’m careful when we go sailing. I check everything and check it again and then worry about everything I haven’t checked. Certainly we planned our transit to take advantage of tidal currents, and we read the chapter on sailing Napa in our trusted guidebook.
We got up early Sunday morning and headed for Vallejo. We passed under the Mare Island Causeway as the bridge tender raised the bridge just high enough for our mast to clear, and we white-knuckled our passage through the wide southern portion of the Napa river where broad shallow water hides a narrow channel that must be followed with one eye on the depth gauge and the other on channel markers.
Proceeding upriver, we passed quaint houses with boat docks and miles of shore covered with dark green pickleweed. We consulted our guidebook, located the recommended anchorage, and followed instructions to deploy bow and stern anchors to hold our position against wind and current. We checked our depth, which was good, and felt comfortable with our distance from shore given the slack in our anchor lines.
Our trip had gone flawlessly and our sense of security and tranquillity was steadfast as we fixed dinner, enjoyed a brilliant red sunset and fell asleep to sounds of the river.
"David," my wife said shaking me in the early morning.
"What?" I said groggily.
"We’re stuck way up on the mud," she said staring at me with dilated eyes on the verge of panic.
"What!" I said rolling out of bed, noticing that we were far from level.
I dashed to the cockpit and saw a beautiful morning mist covering a river that had shrunk by half.
Looking over the stern, I confirmed what I already knew: I had not raised the rudders and engine. When raised, the rudders clang during the night as the boat gently rocks, and I find it more difficult to sleep. As a result, though the depth had been extravagantly adequate the night before, the buried rudders and engine now held the stern several feet higher than the bow.
"#$%@!" I yelled as helpless panic enveloped me.
"How could this be?" and "Where’s the water?" and "How could I be so stupid to leave the rudders and engine down?" I said pleading with seafaring gods for answers.
I asked my wife to check our guidebook certain that I had missed something. Perhaps I had missed that one paragraph, that one sentence that cautioned me to beware of ebb tides that drop Bay waters by feet while draining upriver waters dry.
"Should," my wife read to me shaking her head; the guidebook said our anchorage "should" be a good spot to overnight. In my book, "should" is leagues from "is" when the guidebook author is off somewhere sailing upright, and we’re a beached whale.
"Nothing about extreme tides," I said incredulously.
"No," she said again.
Overcome by fear that I had damaged the stern drive and that we were now permanently stranded, I failed to test the river bottom before stepping off the back of the boat: Dressed still in my pajamas, I sank beyond my knees into sucking ooze that would have sucked me under, I’m sure, had I not held the boat railing with a death grip that saved me from the fate of countless B-movie actors lost to primordial quicksand.
"#$%@!" I said again, or perhaps it was a variant, realizing I had layered a mistake with foolishness.
Of course the soft mud meant the drive was fine, which I confirmed, and I made my way hand over hand along the boat lifelines toward the bow, which was near the water, so that I could wash some of the mud from my body before pulling myself up over the fore railing.
Sitting on the bow, exhausted, I watched the water rise up the bank – my wife had awakened me near low tide - and within a short time the wily Napa river erased any sign that it had ever been less than a respectable and navigable size.
Our halcyon river morning was rent by helpless and retrospectively comic foolishness, because everything we planned, checked and did was necessary and sufficient save one small and important detail that fate would have us learn from personal experience.
- Dave Badtke is founder of the developing Carquinez Review literary journal. Find him on the web at www.CarquinezReview.com.
Contact him at:
Dave@CarquinezReview.com or Dave@Badtke.com