THE LEARNING CURVE
Alan Douglas remembers when an entanglement with a lobster pot became serious very quickly
A reader recalls how a lobster pot entanglement became serious pretty quickly
James Steven’s article in the February issue of YM ‘A question of Seamanship’ about snagging a rope on the prop, reminded me of our experience while sailing our Hanse 345 Fifty Fifty along the French channel coast in July 2018.
My sailing partner and co-owner Mick and I had left Boulogne some seven hours earlier, motor-sailing with gentle breezes en-route to Dieppe, a distance of about 60 miles. However, soon after midday, the winds dropped to dead calm. Sails were lowered and we started motoring the final 8 miles towards Dieppe when at 1300 our engine stopped dead and we quickly realised we were anchored to a heavy lobster pot dragging on the seabed. Too late, we saw a white 25-litre drum almost invisible off to port in the shimmering mid-summer sunlight.
By lowering the transom to form the swim platform, we were able to pull enough of the heavy-duty rope on board to cut us free from the pot. However, we were now unable to either motor or sail, and the increasing flood tide was threatening to push us even further away from our destination. Should we anchor
and try all known measures to clear the prop? We quickly decided it was a definite no. We didn’t feel comfortable about going overboard with goggles and a knife in the current, and with a sail-drive it wasn’t possible to turn the prop by hand.
Although we could make out the shoreline three miles away, the summer haze showed no other vessels, with only the odd speck on the horizon. Luckily we have an excellent Vesper AIS connected to the B&G Navicopowered plotter. By scanning in all directions I saw a target about 4 miles away. It showed up as
MTS Vanguard, a 50-tonne stationary tug undertaking geological surveys. I called the skipper on VHF Ch16. We were even luckier to hear Dutch Skipper Jan reply in perfect English. ‘OK, I see you,’ he said. ‘What do you want me to do?’ We asked him if he’d be willing to tow us into Dieppe, which he kindly agreed to do.
A GIANT TO THE RESCUE
As the speck on the horizon grew ever larger with a serious bow-wave and huge throbbing engines, we were amazed at its size. This was no coastal or harbour tug, but an ocean-going ‘shoalbuster’ vessel. We used the textbook recommended yoke towline arrangement through the bow fairleads to spread the load. Even so, under tow against the tide and with its 3500hp twin Caterpillar engines on tick over, we struggled to keep our yacht from yawing in the huge wash from Vanguard’s stern. Some three hours later and to our great relief, we were cast off to the care of the Dieppe marina staff, who kindly came out to tow us the short distance to an empty pontoon. Staff at the marina office pointed to the boat-lifting cradle, explaining not only the €200 lift-out and lift-in fees, but also that this was a Friday afternoon and we’d have to wait until Monday morning if this is what we wanted to do. However, as we both speak enough French to be understood, we also established that a local plongeur (diver) operated within the marina and that removing snagged ropes was his speciality. This welcome news was shortlived, however, when we discovered he was on holiday! As it happened, Mick had been given his mobile phone number so he decided to call him anyway. Thankfully he was spending his holiday resting on his own boat in the marina! With a good deal of ‘franglais’ he was persuaded to take a look at the underside of Fifty Fifty.
He was quite a sight with his full orange suit, flippers, air-bottles and an extremely sharp serrated knife. With a step off the pontoon and despite the relatively clear water, he disappeared from view. After a few minutes we saw lots of chopped-up bits of blue rope coming to the surface and after a full 10 minutes he surfaced with a very big grin. We were running at about 2200 revs when we caught the rope, so it wasn’t a surprise that our D-130 Volvo had literally fused the plastic into a solid lump around the sail-drive.
Our fee? A mere €60, but we insisted ‘Non, non Monsieur – € 70 as you’re en vacances!’ which went down well!
Having discovered that Vanguard was berthed in the inner commercial harbour, we delivered some bottles of wine to the skipper and his crew of five, who proudly showed us over their vessel. Built in 2014, it had visited both Arctic and Antarctic waters and was a truly amazing ship. The bridge control centre looked like an aircraft cockpit and the huge galley was as clean as an operating theatre. We were told that the on-board crane had a lifting capacity of more than 5 tonnes, which could almost have lifted our yacht above the waves for us to deal with the rope at sea.