On looking towards OB's snug
berth between the dunes I could kid myself that I'd been in bed so
long that my bearings were off or that the sand had piled up
obscuring her from view. But as I neared a hole seemed to open up in
me, corresponding in size almost exactly to the gap in the dunes
where my boat wasn't.
Onawind Blue, gone? I couldn't
comprehend.
Before clear thought returned my
feet were taking me off at quite a pace along the beach downwind and
downsea of the weather. Had she been stolen? The local boat club had
suffered several robberies over the winter—even the Admiralty
Pattern anchor had been ripped from its pedestal at the entrance, but
why would anybody steal OB, no sailor surely, and what worth was she
but to a sailor? I began to consider that she'd been taken by the
sea. A fearful hypothesis, I knew well what would happen to her in
the surf—she'd be rolled, filled, rolled and filled, sunk and
dragged along the bottom by the strong current until she jammed on
underwater rocks or came upon the sharp breakwater further down the
beach. But mine had been the highest boat on the beach, how could she
have gone when others stayed? Was she pushed?
All further conjecture was
arrested by a shape, 500 metres away in the dunes. It was her, I was
sure. But now I was crowded by fears that all I was seeing was the
boat cover crowning a pile of matchwood.
Should I keep my head up as I
neared and let the details reveal themselves to my myopic eyes, or
stare at the sand and so receive the full impact. I looked down at
the dog, still bouncing around my heels—he'd known something was
afoot since we'd arrived at the beach—and boldly crossed the sand
to the dunes.
The boat cover gave her a vaguely
collapsed form but I could make out her fine unbroken line below. If
she'd rolled she would certainly have lost the cover, why hadn't she
gone into the sea, I wondered as I peeled back the heavy tarp to
reveal a couple of wheelbarrow loads of sand. I dug about a bit. All
the kit was intact and in place, she hadn't rolled or even tipped on
her side. She'd had a sedate journey from one place in the dunes to
another.
As I've learned, watching heavy
weather over the years, waves push bigger boats with deeper draught
up the beach into messy pile-ups while lighter, shallow draught boats
float off on the backwash and go through an invariably fatal rinse
cycle. Why had OB behaved like a heavy boat?
The evidence was under the sand.
The drain plugs were open. She had virtually no buoyancy, a large
amount of sea would have lifted her but water would have surged in
through the drain plugs and she would have sunk back down again
before she could travel too far on the backwash. The next gush of
water would float her up the beach and again she'd ground out on the
backwash. As she filled with sand she'd need bigger waves to lift
her. Maybe she'd taken all of 24 hours to move those 500 metres, the
big seas didn't last longer.
There was still some detective
work to be done, how had she left her original place on the beach?
Several people had commented how safely she was stored, at least 1.50
metres above mean sea level. She'd weathered several winter storms in
exactly this spot. Storms that had denuded the beach and uprooted the
shower installations. I was sure she was safe here. But the
alternative? I've seen abandoned boats used as trampolines and
trashed by children, even burnt on bonfires, but I still couldn't
help thinking that it was far fetched to think that someone might
come down to this deserted corner in a howling gale and give OB a
shove.
Back at OB's spot the situation
rapidly became clear. The wind, that had blown for two days before
the rain arrived and the sea rose had excavated the sand from under
OB's keel, lowering her considerably with respect to the water level.
And there on the summit of the dune was a pile of seaweed. The wash
from that one wave would have been higher than OB's entire freeboard,
no wonder it sucked her from her den and filled the streets with
spume.
I had a boat again. The mystery
was cleared up. The lesson learned—tie the boat to something. Now
all I had to do was retrieve her.
The long roll home. |