OOPS--MISHAPS, MISTAKES, BLUNDERS, WE HAVE MADE!

Yes, even after all these years we still make them--all too often it seems. I have only to direct you to our SetSail report of 18 March 04, The Andaman Rock. Now that was a WHOPPER!!! We still shake our heads in wonder at our stupidity in hitting that rock. Hopefully, we will have learned something. They say experience is the best teacher. Well, you'd think that our 35 years of experience would have taught us better than that!

	The results of hitting the rock in the Andamans. Now THERE was a MISTAKE!!!

Back in the archives of SetSail you will also find a report about choosing the wrong place to park the dinghy, and the upsetting consequences--quite literally!--of trying to get aboard a bouncing dinghy. Wouldn't have been so bad if our backpacks hadn't been full of expensive stuff: computer, cell phone, manuals, a full system of floppy disks, cords and plugs.

Speaking of dinghies, another mishap comes to mind. On our first trip to Chagos in 2000, we had changed anchorages to Bodum at the south end of Soloman Atoll. All the yachties monitor VHF channel 69 as a sort of local phone system--definitely a "Party Line"! Somebody had the mike keyed in the open position, and a squealing noise kept penetrating the cabin. Al knew the guy anchored next to us was doing some electrical work, so took the dinghy over to see if he was the culprit. No. Well, we tried. Al came back to the boat and we had lunch. For some reason we ate below that day, and when finished, I went up to the cockpit to scrape the plates. Just as I yelled, "My God, the dinghy is gone!" I saw another yachtie rowing toward us, towing our little yellow dinghy!

What an awful feeling! If Jean Claude hadn't been in his cockpit and noticed our dinghy afloat, but in a strange position, the wind and tide would have taken it right out over the reef. Next stop, Africa! Al was sure he had tied the dinghy when he had come back aboard. But maybe he did a sloppy job of it. The anchorage was choppy, and we had a shorter painter tied on for some reason. Al reckons the chop kept jerking on the painter until it worked itself loose and set the dinghy on a walkabout. Oops...

Double oops...The same thing happened in Langkawi some years later. We retire to the cockpit with our sundowners. Neither of us notice that the dinghy is missing. Al grabs the binoculars to see what that yellow thing was up by the new earthworks in progress behind us. Yes--it was our dinghy! This time Al had to swim toward shore, and make a yucky slog through knee high mud to reach it and bring it home. Again: short painter and choppy conditions. Now we NEVER use the short painter and he ALWAYS puts about 4 hitches or more on the cleat. And I often check to see that he has!

Can't blame the short painter and chop if the whole boat floats away though, can you. Perhaps the scope was too short, perhaps the anchor didn't really dig in good, but we vividly recall an episode during our early days as beginners, rowing back to BACCHUS, our 40-foot wooden ketch, from the beach at Great Inagua Island, Bahamas. We had an awkward, heavy, plywood dinghy. No outboard. (That was another mistake--thinking we could row everywhere we needed to go with that dinghy. Mistake realized early on, and rectified when we got to Panama and could buy a small 2hp outboard to use.)

"How much farther?" says Al, stroking mightily onward. "Oh, about the same distance as we are from shore," I said, looking back over my shoulder. "I didn't think we had anchored out this far." "Neither did I. In fact, I think the boat is drifting away from us!" Well, a happy ending to this blunder. With both of us rowing, singly, and as a team, we finally got back to the boat, which had indeed drifted away from where we had anchored her. Chain and anchor are now hanging straight down. We motored back to shore and re-anchored--making sure we were well dug in with plenty of scope this time.

Just this past January we were in Phuket, Thailand. The NE winds can really crank up at this time of year, making the usual anchorage by Au Chalong quite miserable. So we usually go across the bay and anchor at Ban Nit. Quiet and protected, but with limited shore access and no transportation to town. We have anchored here plenty of times, and chose one of our usual spots to drop the hook. Funny noises the next day from the chain--unusual, because it's a sand and mud bottom. About the 3rd day we were there, I looked up to see a boat motoring by my galley porthole. Knowing that it shoals up pretty fast, and that there wasn't a lot of room between us and the shore, I went up into the cockpit to see where this boat was going to go. And realized--there was plenty of room ahead of us. WE were the ones to beware--WE had drifted away! In fact, he anchored in our old position! What was our problem? It's good holding; we always back down hard. We think we probably hooked the tip of the CQR on a stray piece of coral, or old moring block (there used to be a marina of sorts in Ban Nit). The wind gusts blew our bow off just enough to loosen our hold, and we were free to roam about.

And here's a funny "Oops" kind of post script to that event. Left Ban Nit a few mornings later to go north. Once outside, the wind and chop were fierce and coming NNE, so we opted to turn around and go back to Ban Nit. We were near to, but in a little different position than before. Our friends on BEAU JEU hadn't seen us leave and return. Later in the morning we saw them motoring around and re-anchoring. We asked what the problem was--they thought THEY HAD DRAGGED!

Japan, 1977. The Seto Naikai (Inland Sea) was really interesting cruising, and we made some interesting mistakes. There is this one very constricted section of water. It's about 20 miles wide with lots of rocks and islands scattered about. Most shipping goes through one clear channel. The currents in this channel can be pretty firece, up to 8 knots or more. There are sign boards and signal lights to tell you the conditions and allowed traffic direction. So we thought, let's just skip all that and go through these islands over here. It was a lovely day, good visiblity, and we were sailing along about 5 1/2K watching the scenery go by. Only it wasn't going by. In fact, the scenery started to do an instant replay--only backwards! We turned around and rocketed back to an island where we could anchor and wait for the current to change in our favor. We knew what the currents were going to be doing that day. Why did we think that just 20 miles away from the regulated channel they would be any different? Big mistake; could have been dangerous.

Then again a happy blunder a few weeks later, but still in the Seto Naikai. I'm pretty good at reading the chart information and picking out headlands or bays or whatever coastline features we should be heading for. We had chosen a river between 2 headlands for our anchorage that night. On approach there was a bit of confusion because the headlands didn't look quite right. But we couldn't see any other pair of headlands. This had to be it. Our mileage was too short, but this was pre-GPS, and we certainly knew about currents at that point! So in we went and anchored. The river was a terrible color and stunk of rotten eggs and then some. But it was too late in the day to move.

There was a sailboat and a power boat also moored in the river--something of an oddity to find in Japan in those days. Guam is our hailing port, painted on the stern, and we had our flag flying. The power boat promptly raised a US flag too! We launched the dinghy and rowed over--this was also pre-VHF days for us. Turned out to be an American retired in Japan with a Japanese wife--who were also friends of one of my teaching mates in Guam! They were the ones to tell us we were in the wrong river! This was Yagi Harbor, not Himeji! The color and stink were from pollution generated by the leather tanning factories upstream

Then a dinghy put out from the other shore. We were invited to dinner by a young Japanese man and his Canadian-Japanese wife. They lived in this traditional farm house ashore: thatched roof, shuttered windows, shoji screen doors inside, wood burning stove in the kitchen, and hibachi in the main room for heating. Did we want a bath? We were well used to a variety of Japanese baths by this time, but never had one like this before. They built a fire under this big iron pot which was in a little room on one side of the barn. The pot was only big enough for one of us to soak in at a time. Listen, we felt like those missionaries you see in cartoons, put in the stew pot by the natives!

We had a terrific evening. Lots of food, sake and beer, and we had brought a bottle of whiskey for our hosts. The neighbors kept dropping in to meet the "people from the yellow boat." And phone messages had been passed to the other yachties in the area to come join the fun. One of these turned out to be Jungi Inoue, who had built a ferro cement yacht in Japan. His first stop was Guam, where he ran the boat up onto the reef. It was destroyed in a matter of days. Junji had been to our house in Guam, and knew many of our sailing friends. The owners of the other yacht in the river telephoned their yacht club in Nishinomya, our next destination, and had an epic welcome laid on for us there!

WOW! What a wonderful MISTAKE we had made!