Hardly awake yet at 6:30 a. m. on Monday morning, we listened to Chris Parker's broadcast on SSB radio from his Marine Weather Center, where he provides a detailed weather report for the Bahamas and Florida Straits. He started his weather report by asking for any emergency or priority traffic. Usually there aren't any, but right then a station came in to ask Chris to make a phone call on behalf of Ken from the Canadian sailboat "Sail Away" to his family and report that the mooring he had been on had broken loose in the Frazer Hog Channel and the crew was unharmed, but the vessel was in trouble and aground on shore.
We were wide awake now. A few days ago we wrote about the uncomfortable chop we had experienced at that place and it was still blowing a good 20+ knots with higher gusts. There is no Sea Tow or Tow Boat US here on the island. There were three US flagged sailboats at the site swinging on mooring balls and that was it. We made the decision to lift our anchor right away and see if we could be of assistance. The going was wet and slow for the 5 nautical miles with the current against us. We registered 30 knots of wind at times. Finally we anchored right in front of the stricken vessel.
Ken, the owner, came over in his inflatable dinghy and we asked what we could do to help. He told us that sometime during the night at high tide; the mooring had broken loose and started drifting. Although he had deployed his Bruce anchor, with the strong gusts the boat grounded on its starboard side just a few feet from the rocky shoreline. He was lucky in a way that the boat was laying on a sandy bottom.
Benno offered to dive and snorkel around the boat to see if he could find a possible path to pull her off. The captains of the three other boats "Mutual Fun", "Kismet" and "It's About Time" were already in their dinghies and had helped to set additional anchors to stabilize the boat. Benno found that to starboard and port was sandy bottom and shallow, but straight ahead some 35 ft. the bottom deepened to 6 ft. and more. The "Rescue Team" as I call the four captains, did excellent teamwork and labored hard for the next 6 (SIX) hours it took to get "Sail Away" floating again. The two anchors were reset far ahead forward port + starboard in the deep water channel with Nylon lines which would act like rubber springs, when under tension to propel the boat forward once she got unstuck. Another anchor was set 45 degrees to port to steady the boat and another anchor was set far away to the starboard side and the line was tied to the jib and main halyard to crank the boat over.
Howard, the manager/caretaker of the closed Berry Island Club, who had just the day before collected the mooring fee from the four cruisers, had offered to try and pull the "Sail Away" off with his 225 hp driven "Mako" at the next high tide at 14:00 hours, but there was only going to be two feet of it. The tow line, 200 ft of yellow Polyethylene was provided from the people of "Our Way" who live on shore right at the mooring field. The originally plan to pull her straight out from the bow did not work, but when Howard pulled with the 225 hp on her halyards and cranked her way over to the starboard side, "Sail Away" came free while her skipper gunned her engine. At 15:00 hrs "Sail Away" floated on her own which put a big smile to the face of Ken, a fellow Canadian from Windsor, Ontario!