Fixed Dock Wars-Cruddy to the Rescue
By Beth Tally
Into my fifth year of cruising, it’s sometimes fun to reminisce about the “beginning.” That’s the word I’ve ascribed to my first couple of years living on a boat. In my personal dictionary, the “beginning” is defined as that period in a cruiser’s development when ineptness supplants competence, bewilderment dumbfounds logic, and hysteria replaces calm. All of these attributes applied to me until recently. I haven’t quite conquered the bewilderment part, but I’m working on it.
In the “beginning,” you also get crew assignments which become permanent responsibilities over your cruising life. One of my tasks has, and always will be, to station myself on the bow of the boat when entering a dock slip and either throw lines to dockhands or, in their absence, secure the lines myself. When there are no dockhands, I loathe this duty because it’s fraught with mysterious challenges.
Fixed docks baffle me with their inflexibility regarding the tide and their insufferable pilings that, no matter how accurate you may be, tend to reject one’s best efforts at looping a line around them. If I have a preference, it would be floating docks. They rise and fall with the tide which makes a jump off of the boat uniform at all times. They also utilize cleats for tying off lines, much easier than pilings.
Floating docks are not without peril, however. Oftentimes, either through utter carelessness or outright stupidity, an obstruction rests on the dock strategically located right where I need to jump off the boat to get to a cleat. I’ve had to negotiate coiled hoses, buckets, tackle boxes and seine nets, but my personal favorite is the permanent set of steps nailed to the dock for easy egress off the boat once it’s in the slip. Nice touch, but deadly when you have to grande jeté over it from the deck of the boat.
Of all the places that we’ve docked, the most insidious slip ever has to be the one we secured at the Ft. Myers Beach Marina right under the bridge spanning the waterway between the mainland and the beach on Estero Island. We were at the tail end of our first year of cruising, very much still in the “beginning.”
We had anchored out the night before in Tarpon Bay and came into the channel behind Estero from the west end. As the bridge came into view, John radioed the marina to receive the slip assignment while I walked out onto the bow to begin my preparation ritual.
 We were given #1, the farthest one out on the main dock, on the opposite side from our entry direction, with a forty-five degree angle coming into the main dock, and an added lovely feature of a half-sunk sailboat about 50 feet off from the stern pilings. The wreck pretty much destroyed any swing room John had to navigate Up Jinks through the tight port turn needed to reconcile the bow with the lane of the slip, but he managed.
Once we made the turn, I assessed the situation. I could tell I was on my own. There were no dockhands. A solid, narrow finger of fixed dock ran down the port side with a piling for the port bow line. The port stern and both starboard ends had pilings as well. The high tide made it possible for me to jump off the boat onto the finger and I was very grateful to have the sliver of wood for a landing strip. I scrambled back to mid-ship, the bowline clutched in my left hand. I lifted my left leg then the right over the life line and planted my feet on the miniscule deck rim on the outside, all the while clinging to the mainstay with my right hand.
As the nose of the bow poked into the slip, I squatted in preparation for my leap. That’s when I saw it, the obstruction, a block of wood bolted to the deck forming three steps that at the moment were going to nowhere. They presented a true dilemma. If I jumped before getting to them, there was only a small amount of dock to work with, meaning I could actually jump right into them. If I waited to jump after I passed them, chances are my opportunity to secure the bowline before the bow hit the dock would be slim.
Sensing the indecision, Captain John yelled “Jump!” I careened off the boat, probably with my eyes closed, my paralysis shattered by his command. Miraculously, I landed on the finger avoiding the stairs. I secured the port bow and raced back to the stern, passing the steps a second time, to catch the stern line from John and wrap it around the aft piling before the boat floated starboard.
It took several more minutes to wrangle the lines on the starboard side. The pilings were at least five feet above the waterline, way too tall to loop a line over the top. It took both of us to manage the situation - one slinging the line around the piling and the other catching it and wrapping it around a boat cleat. By the time we finished, I had pretty much renewed my disdain for docking and vowed to John that we weren’t going to leave this slip until we headed out of Ft. Myers for good.
I felt pretty safe in offering up this demand because we had come to Ft. Myers to visit John’s cousin, Sid, and his wife Sandy. They had invited us to spend a few days with them at their new house which meant we would be off the boat entirely.
Little did I know what was in store. Sid grew up in Nashua, NH. Throughout high school, his best friend was a guy named Ron Wentworth whom Sid affectionately called “Cruddy.” We had met Cruddy on a couple of occasions and I knew him to be one of the funniest people I’d ever met. What I didn’t know about him was that he loved to sail.
Sid and Sandy came down to the marina to pick us up. We had a very animated conversation out to their house, catching up on them and their grandchildren. During a lag, Sid dropped the bomb. “Oh, by the way, I told Cruddy that you were here. He’d really like to come down and go sailing, if it’s okay.”
John’s immediate response was “That would be great!”
I had two options as to what to say. - “Sure!” or, what I was really thinking, “OHHHH NOOOO, Capt’m. Not so fast. Remember? We’re not going to leave the dock. We JUST got the friggin’ boat tied into the slip. What are you thinking?”
I opted for “Sure!”
 It really wouldn’t be so bad, I consoled myself. Cruddy knows something about sailing. Sid and Sandy would be coming along as well which swelled the crew from two to five. I already knew the assignment I would relinquish to Cruddy – the bow line, port side. He could deal with the sliver of dock finger and the block of steps. I would get some relief.
A couple of days later, Cruddy arrived after breakfast. Sandy ordered sub-sandwiches from a local deli and supplemented them with other picnic goodies. We were on the road back to the marina by late morning.
Once on board Up Jinks, John dispatched us to the four corners of the boat to undo the lines and monitor a balanced exit from the slip. Backing up and not hitting the wrecked sailboat behind us took some maneuvering, but soon we were able to pull away, out into the channel and back around the west end of Esterol Island into the Gulf of Mexico.
The weather cooperated beautifully, although early on, the wind hadn’t freshened enough to blow a ping pong ball off a table. This served as no deterrent to Cruddy and John. They were determined to sail even if it meant listening to a flapping headsail all afternoon. For the first couple of hours, they earnestly pondered the windvane at the top of the mast and tinkered with the degree of tack to catch any puff. They cajoled the headsail by first pulling in then letting out the sheet. Paralleling the beach, we made our way eastward at a snail’s pace.
By mid-afternoon, the cool breeze off the Gulf waters began to stir. When we tacked back towards the west at the end of Esterol, the air comfortably filled the sails allowing us a wonderful ride for the remainder of the day. The sun was starting to set as we turned the corner back into the channel behind the island.
Once the headsail was furled and the main down, I cornered Cruddy (as much as you can corner somebody in the cockpit of a boat) and told him that I was preempting the Captain’s authority to assign docking duties. Since I didn’t like docking anyway and absolutely, positively detested our current slip, he would be taking my place on the port bow and have the privilege of wrestling with the finger, the steps and the piling. I was looking forward to some mission with lesser implications for disaster. He accepted the responsibility with a chuckle.
John asked Sid to manage the port stern. He put me on the starboard stern and his instructions were very explicit. “Okay, Beth. When the boat comes into the slip, you need to be ready to get that line around the piling as fast as you can. There is a nail sticking out of the piling and I want you to throw the line above that nail. Get it around the piling, above the nail and fastened on the cleat. Got it?”
I had no clue how he knew there was a nail on the piling. Guess that’s what Captain’s are for. I was beginning to think I might have traded a pig for a poke by switching with Cruddy, but, I was determined to execute my task just as he asked.
John guided the boat towards the bridge. Turning her carefully to avoid the wreck, he pointed the bow towards the slip. I had been going over in my mind exactly how I was going to accomplish my part. I took the line in my right hand with about five feet of it hanging down. When I got to the piling, I was going to slap the line around the piling high enough to be above the nail and fast enough that the end would come all the way around and I could grab it with my left hand. Then, I would pull enough of it to loop back onto the stern starboard cleat and secure it.
As focused as a cat stalking a mouse, I stood poised at my station. The boat came into the slip. The piling came alongside me.
SLING! POW! WHOP! My plan went exactly as I thought. Once I had the end of the line in hand, I raced to the cleat and tied it off - SHOO, SHOO, SHOO, TA-DA! Raising my hands like a cowpoke who just roped a calf, I uttered “YES!” under my breath.
Then something weird happened. The bow of the boat began to drift starboard. What was going on?
I looked up to find that Cruddy was still on the boat. At this point, he was racing over to the starboard side to keep Up Jinks from butting up to the boat in the slip beside us. Apparently, I had done such a superior job at the aft starboard post, I had completely stopped the boat – stopped it short of the port finger pier, stopped it so Cruddy couldn’t get off at all, much less get down the dock, over the steps and to the piling with the line.
John called me out of my bewilderment to grab the boat hook from the deck and get it to Cruddy so he could push Up Jinks off of our neighbor and back towards the finger. I raced up to the bow and handed Cruddy the hook. As he extended it and pushed against the other boat, he laughed and said, “Well, I can certainly understand why you gave this job to me! Thanks.”
I apologized profusely.
We secured the boat and headed back to Sid and Sandy’s house. As we drove along, I leaned over to John and said, “If you try to take that boat out of that slip again before we leave, it’ll be with me standing on the dock waving good-bye.”
That was all “in the beginning.” Fun to look back on, but I wouldn’t want to go there again!
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(Previous Articles)
"B" Word
Unlikely Hero
Turning Sixty
Parking Violators
Hokey Pokey
God Looks After
Wishing for Silent Screen;
Red Button
Breaking Cycles
Soaking Up Some Intellect
Replacement bolts
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