Scott Williams - The Pulse

“Sailed dat boat too close to de beach, dat mon,” Scully said.

“Or, he could have been out here and dragged anchor when those squalls blew through the other night,” Larry said.

“Could it be a trap?” Artie asked. He’d seen enough at Isleta Palominito and the Cay Sal Bank to be suspicious of everyone they encountered on the water.

“I don’t think so,” Larry said. “But why don’t you bring the shotgun on deck anyway, just in case. I think what we have here is simply a fellow mariner in need of help, and he may be able to give us some useful information about the conditions ashore, if he’s local. Scully, let’s come about and sail within hailing distance on the other tack. I don’t see a dinghy of any kind on the beach, so he must have waded ashore when he couldn’t get it off.”

Artie laid the shotgun in the cockpit and helped Scully with the sheets. There was just enough wind to power the sails and allow them to maneuver, but with the ocean swell blocked by the island, the water was nearly smooth. They came around and sailed to within 50 feet of the beach.Then Scully put the bow through the wind again, allowing the jib to go aback momentarily and stall the boat long enough for a quick conversation.

“I’ve been stuck here for two days!” the man on the beach yelled back in response to Larry’s inquiry. “We had some hellacious thunderstorms that came through in the night, and once my anchor started dragging, I couldn’t get another one set before I was swept onto that sandbar. I went aground at high tide, and there’s no way I can get her off by myself.”

Artie started to relax. The man’s story certainly seemed plausible, and the boat was hard aground. Though the depth at this distance was probably three feet and no issue for the Casey Nicole, this man’s monohull obviously had a deeper keel. Larry yelled back that they would try to help, and then pointed to an area of deeper water out beyond the stranded boat where he wanted to anchor.

“What can we do?” Artie asked.

“We can try to pull him off if we can get a firm set on our own anchors. He doesn’t have a windlass or a decent winch on board, besides being alone. I can’t do much with this arm, but if you can work our winch, and Scully and the owner can get on board the boat and try to heel her over some more, then I think we can drag her to deep water. That’s just a little J/27, not very heavy for a keelboat, but draws almost five feet.”

When anchor was set, Artie helped Scully launch the two-seat kayak and, once he was in sitting in the boat, passed him the end of a long length of spare anchor line. Then Scully paddled away, first taking the line to the bow of the stranded boat, then continuing on to the beach to get the owner and explain what they were going to try to do. Artie and Larry waited until Scully and the owner returned to his boat and climbed on board from the kayak. Scully secured the end of the line to the main bow cleat of the J-boat, and at Larry’s direction, Artie took up all the slack from the other end and wound several turns around the big drum winch mounted in the center of the catamaran’s cockpit. This centrally mounted winch served mainly to handle the jib sheet and halyard loads, but Larry had sized it to do double duty as a windlass in just such emergencies. As Artie began putting tension on the line by cranking the winch handle, Scully and the boat’s owner used their combined body weight to heel the boat much farther over on her side by hanging on to the boom, which Scully rigged to stick out perpendicular to the hull. By leaning her over and getting some of the weight off the keel, it was a fairly simple matter to pull her free of the sand, but it was still a lot of work for Artie, who was sweating profusely by the time the job was done. Scully helped the owner reset his anchor just downwind of the catamaran, then the two of them paddled over and came aboard.

“I can’t thank you guys enough,” the grateful sailor said as he shook hands with everyone. “I didn’t think I would ever get out of this fix. I’m Craig, by the way.” Craig went on to explain that he’d decided to take to the water as a last resort, but really wasn’t prepared to do so and didn’t have much experience cruising or much of what he needed on board.

“I bought the boat for day sailing, mainly, with the idea of getting into racing later. I never thought I would try to go somewhere on it, but as things got worse, it occurred to me that leaving by water might be the best option. Trouble is, I didn’t have paper charts for this area, and of course the GPS is down. I knew some people from the marina that used to sail out here to these islands all the time on long weekends, though, and they talked about what a good anchorage this was. It was my first time to sail out of the lake, believe it or not, but I found my way here okay, I just wasn’t counting on those storms.”

“Lake? Do you mean Pontchartrain?” Artie asked with great interest.

“Yeah. I kept my boat at South Shore Harbor Marina.”

“Is that on the New Orleans side of the lake, I’m guessing?”

“Yeah, it’s just a few miles east of the Causeway, but west of where the I-10 bridge crosses the lake.”

“Oh man, that’s fantastic!” Artie said, then seeing the look of confusion on Craig’s face, he explained: “We’ve sailed all the way from St. Thomas to get to New Orleans to find my daughter. I can’t believe we were lucky enough to run into someone out here who’s just come from there since the lights went out.”

Craig shook his head. “I feel for you if your daughter is still in New Orleans. There’s nothing good happening there, and I would hate to know I had to go back there looking for someone I loved. What a nightmare that would be!” Craig went on to describe his experiences in the city since the pulse had occurred. If what he said was true, and they had no reason to doubt him, the entire city had descended into anarchy and chaos. Craig described gun battles between the police and large gangs, and rampant, unchecked looting, burning, and rioting. He said some people began trying to leave the city by the second day, mostly on foot, and then a much larger number began leaving within a week, when everyone finally realized help wasn’t on the way and the grocery stores were cleaned out. Craig said he would have been completely out of food, too, with no way to get any more, if not for the fact that he’d had a key to his dock neighbor’s larger cruising boat. The absentee owner lived in northern Louisiana and kept the boat at South Shore for vacation cruising. Knowing they would never be able to get to the marina until all this was over anyway, Craig said he didn’t feel bad about going on board the boat and taking the leftover provisions that were still there after her last Florida trip. He said he’d often driven to the marina in the middle of the night during storms to check the vessel’s dock lines, and he knew the owners were grateful for that and would want him to utilize supplies that wouldn’t do them any good.

“After that, I thought I might be able to just hang tight there at the marina for a while and see if things got better, living on my boat and keeping a low profile. But it didn’t get better; it just got worse. I knew I had to leave when some guys came in at night and stole a Catalina 42 that was a few docks over. It was just a matter of time before every boat in the marina would be taken, as people got desperate to get out of the city. I was afraid they’d just kill me and take my boat, so I got out of there the next morning, as soon as there was enough wind. I didn’t know where I’d go, but I knew I had to get out of Pontchartrain, because it’s just a big bowl surrounded by land. I knew about this place and planned to hang out here awhile and then decide about going to Florida, or who knows where. But then that storm blew me aground, and I’ve been on the beach ever since, until you guys found me.”