"There is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats simply messing." (Kenneth Graham, The Wind in the Willows)

We were not only doing a fair share of messing about, but our boat was quite a mess. However, unlike the Water Rat in The Wind in the Willows, we did have a destination. It lay twenty miles to the east Block Island.

I tried to keep the sharp edge and panic out of my voice as I asked Sharon, my green deckhand, to pull up and release the centerboard again. Something was awry. We were making too much leeway and would not clear Montauk inlet's west jetty. Unless we got some board down soon, the mess on our boat might include splinters of the fiberglass hull.

Somehow she managed to find the correct line amongst the tangle of sheets and anchor line in the cockpit, and struggled with the centerboard. Sharon had come along looking forward to a pleasant, relaxing sail far away from the demands of the store she owned and managed in East Hampton, and left only an hour ago. The whole rendezvous and pick-up had not gone well, and chaos, not relaxation, had been the theme of her leg of the trip thus far.

That leg thus far, by the way, was approximately twenty minutes and less than one hundred yards. It's amazing how many things can go wrong in such a short span of time, and how they can build on each other incrementally such that several minor problems gradually lead to a serious one of potentially dire consequences. That, in my experience, is the nature of sailing and the sea.

Thinking back, the trip developed an odd hitch right from the start. Shortly after daybreak, armed with a perfect forecast for the passage, Dick Lynn and I arrived at our home port of Accabonac Harbor to ready our respective boats for the journey. Both were small (nineteen feet in length) but seaworthy sailing craft: his a gaff-rigged Buzzard's Bay Sloop and mine an O'Day Mariner. Moments after dropping us off and wishing us a bon voyage, a friend drove away with the key that locks Dick¹s dinghy in place.

With a favorable tide steadily dropping, Dick worked on his lock with a borrowed hacksaw while I secured a borrowed outboard on my transom's motor mount. A bit behind schedule, we hoisted sails, cast off mooring pennants, and flew out of the inlet and down Napeague Bay on a broad reach. This was fine.

With the help of an outgoing tide and northwesterly wind we covered the ten miles to Lake Montauk in well under two hours. Dick hove-to while I sailed on toward the beach on the jetty's west side where Sharon waited to be picked up. I was very familiar with this stretch of water, or so I thought, having surfed here on the rare occasions when ocean storms and southerly
winds pushed overhead, disorganised swells around Montauk Point and into Block Island Sound. By the time they passed the west jetty, four miles from the Point, the swells were often arranged in perfectly clean waist-to-chest high lines.

The plan was a simple exercise I had done hundreds of times. Sheet the main in tight, round up into the wind, free the jib sheets and drop my Danforth anchor within two hundred feet of the beach, the limit of my anchor line. Pull the centerboard up, and ease out on the anchor line as the wind pushed the boat toward the beach. When enough line had been played out, I made it fast to the bow cleat to set the anchor. This was done out of habit, with no thought to the possibility that the anchor would not hold.

It did not. In short order my boat and I drifted closer to shore where the see-saw action of the boat on the small swells pitched the rudder's pintles up and out of their respective gudgeons. Fortunately, I caught a glimpse of my rudder and tiller assembly drifting along the surf line before they got too far away. That's when I abandoned the idea of a controlled, smooth pick
up and bellowed a crude sounding order to Sharon, "Take off your pants!" just before jumping overboard in pursuit of the steering mechanism.

Sharon hesitated, looking up and down the beach, and not seeing any onlookers, stripped down and began wading out to the boat with jeans and a daypack slung over one shoulder. In the pocket of those jeans, for a short time at least, were my car keys. They slipped out and into Block Island Sound during the boarding process.

With crew and rudder aboard, all that remained was to retrieve the anchor and sail off the see shore. I decided the easiest and safest way to accomplish that was to swim out the anchor, reset it by hand, and haul the boat out to deeper water to give us more sea room. While doing this I learned why the flukes of the Danforth failed to dig in: rock bottom. Back on the boat, and dripping blood all over the cockpit, I realized those same rocks were covered with razor-sharp barnacles.

But we were soon sailing. I had hauled the anchor in to put us on a port tack, and even on a beam reach we would easily clear the jetty. That is, of course, if we had the centerboard down.

Two boat lengths from the rocks, unable to head up into the wind, I freed the sheets to slow us down and backed the sails to come about. All of the sudden the centerboard plopped into position. Apparently the jib sheet had caught on the board and prevented it from dropping enough to give us steerage.

The actual passage from Montauk Point to Block Island was uneventful. But within a hundred yards of the entrance to the Great Salt Pond, our wind completely died. I was reminded of Yogi Berra's saying, "It ain't over 'till it's over." This meant cranking up the outboard. Adjusting the mount bracket into position, I realized that the shaft of the borrowed outboard was a bit short. We broke out the oars for a spell, but the outgoing tide overwhelmed us. That's when we tried a form of "hiking out". Our combined weights on the transom drove the stern down enough to enable us to motor in, one boat towing the other, to a safe anchorage for the night after a long day at sea.