Friday morning I looked out my back window and thought that my row boat didn't look quite right. It had been tied up on my Jet Dock raft for the past 3 or 4 weeks. (I hadn't been rowing recently because of back pain for a week or two and then just reluctance to get all sweaty in the SoFla humid mornings.)
I dressed and went out to the dock to find that it was all but sunk but still tied to the raft and dock. The water was over the gunwales (side rails) so I couldn't just bail it out. How the hell did that happen?
The night before, I'd heard the neighbor's kids across the canal out running their jet skis at full tilt up and down the canal at 4AM, but it didn't sound like they could have knocked the Good Ship LOL off the raft.
Part of the problem leading to the sinking was that I'd removed the cork from the drain since heavy rain was in the forecast on almost a daily basis and I'm a little paranoid about the kind of foot deep rain I saw a couple years ago happening when I'm not around to pull the drain plug. When whoever knocked, pushed or pulled it into the water, it would have started filling with water even if it had been afloat. That it sank so completely was at least partly attributable to the cracked keel I had yet to repair, which let even more water in. The double wall construction should still have given it more floatation than it did.
I think the mysteries of how it got in the water and how it got so sunken remain. One theory I have about how it got in the water is that the next door neighbor's 34 footer caught the bow of my row boat when they pulled away from the dock. It is tied up only a few feet away. However, he hasn't gone out since Sunday and I think I would have seen my boat in the water before Friday if he had hit it.
So then I was faced with the need to get it afloat again. It turned out to be easier than I thought it would be. I had come up with a plan to tie both ends tightly to the dock before low tide so the tide would cause it to be pulled up and I could bail it out once the water ran over the sides.
I tied the boat up to wait for the low tide. I had to secure it so it didn't get stuck under the raft, and of course I had to put the cork back in the drain. Then I thought to use a couple water noodle pool floats to increase its buoyancy a little. It turned out that those, once placed under the seats, were enough to raise the gunwales just to water level so I could bail it out. A couple dozen buckets of water later and it was pretty much back to normal.
Lessons learned: 1) Keep the cork in it. 2) Keep the water noodles under the seat. 3) Repair the keel (most important). 4) Keep an eye on the neighbors.
Labels: good ship LOL, intracoastal, little river marine heritage, rowing, sculling, sliding seat row boat, south florida
