The man on the beach

July 2024

By Bob Muggleston

A good friend of the magazine who lives in Maine recently sent me the photo below, which he’d taken in the vicinity of Brunswick. In the subject line of the email he wrote, “A bad way to start the boating season.” Indeed. Anytime you leave the dock and don’t return on the same boat, it’s usually bad. This was the case for these folks, who found ledge near the cribwork bridge that connects Bailey and Orr’s Islands. After being visited by the harbormaster and the operator of a local lobster boat, and as nearby fire and police officials watched from the bridge, the operators were removed from their vessel, presumably to return at high tide. Supremely embarrassing, of course. But thankfully no one was hurt and, in theory, a valuable lesson was learned.

We live in an age in which people are quick to condemn. I could write an entire editorial on that topic alone, but in the interest of not straying from the confines of a boating magazine I’ll say that my own personal reactions to initially seeing the photo were, in this order: 1) Thank God it wasn’t me; 2) I feel bad for the operator; and 3) Is there a chance that this is a relatively new boater? The Covid-19 years spawned so many. Statistically, one would think, a rise in the numbers of boaters would lead to a rise in seemingly avoidable boating accidents.

But even experienced boaters make mistakes. Here’s a doozy of my own, which falls into the “disaster narrowly averted” category, and demonstrates such poor seamanship that I’ve only ever told a handful of people.

Several decades ago I worked for Cruising World magazine in Newport, Rhode Island. At the time, staff members of both Cruising World and its sister publication, Sailing World, had access to a 26-foot engineless sailboat built by the Swedish company Albin Marine. The boat’s name was Another Opinion. I’d sailed Another Opinion all over Narragansett Bay without incident, and knew that, in general, the waters there were deep and relatively obstacle-free. I rarely, if ever, looked at the charts aboard.

Over time I became obsessed with the idea of circumnavigating Aquidneck Island, where Newport was located, in the course of a single day. I recruited my then-girlfriend to join me, and on a Sunday we spent a long, windy day doing just that. By the time we emerged from the Sakonnet River, on the east side of Aquidneck Island, and entered Rhode Island Sound, we’d been beating for many hours and my girlfriend, horribly seasick, was curled into the fetal position. Did I know how to show a girl a good time, or what?

As I sailed by the south end of the island, a man approached the edge of the water and began frantically waving his arms. Was he trying to tell me something? And, if so, what? Honestly, I was exhausted at that point and convinced that the circumnavigation thing had been a bad idea from the start. I ignored the man, kept sailing, and eventually reached the familiar confines of Narragansett Bay. In no time at all we were back on our mooring. Mission accomplished. I collapsed onto the deck, spent.

The next day, at the office, I told the guy in the cubicle next to me, Jeremy, about the man on the shore. “You sailed out far enough to clear Brenton Reef, right?” he said.

“Say what, now?”

Jeremy found a chart and showed me the southern end of Aquidneck Island, where Brenton Reef was clearly marked. It wasn’t one solid mass that rose to a defined point, but a whole area of outcroppings that varied in depth, some to within three feet of the surface at low mean. Another Opinion drew five. The man on the beach waving his arms: This is what he was trying to tell me! I’d wandered through a minefield. If we’d hit the reef that day, extreme embarrassment and possible property loss would have been two of the better outcomes.

Over the years, I’ve thought about this incident a lot. So dumb! Why didn’t I just look at a chart? Most likely it was because my girlfriend was seasick, and without her help it was all I could do just to keep us sailing.

One thing I know about the boating community is that, as a whole, we’re a fairly knowledgeable and forgiving group who love nothing more than to share what we know. Without a doubt, there are a ton of new boaters out there, many of whom would probably appreciate some guidance. It’s probably helpful to keep this in mind as the summer unfolds.

The boat on the rocks in Maine? Let’s hope that story, like mine, had a happy ending.

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