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M/V ILLUSIONS
ARTICLE TITLED
"ADRIFT"
August 23, 2000
Trent Severn Waterway
Fenlon Falls, Ontario
David and Angela Magill
M/V ILLUSIONS
“David, We’re ADRIFT!” called Wally
as he knocked quickly on my stateroom door.
Then he went up the companionway stairs and out to the aft deck.
It was
4am, and I was deep asleep. I
thought Angela was asleep; we had good reason to be.
We were tied up to the lock wall just upstream of the lock at
Fenelon Falls, Ontario, on the Trent-Severn Waterway.
We had just celebrated our wedding anniversary with a great meal,
and we were enjoying our boat cruise through the beautiful canals of
Canada.
Angela had suspected something
was wrong; she felt us move away from the wall and noticed it was
different. She heard Wally go
outside to check on a noise just before he called to wake me.
She was up and dressed before I was.
I was groggy; sleep had a good
hold on me. My first reaction
was to start the generator – why, I don’t know.
I dressed and went to the fly bridge.
We were in the middle of a narrow channel with the wind pushing us
towards our port side. Behind us were the lock gates; to the left was a new Sea Ray
cruiser, also tied up for the night.
We had been tied up to our starboard side, and there was a rental
houseboat just ahead of our spot on the wall.
I cranked the engines, put the
port engine into forward, and put the starboard engine into reverse.
That should turn us to the right and start us back to where we had
been. I then thought of the
lines: where were the mooring lines?
Were they in the water, and was I going to run over them and wrap
them around the props? I went
to neutral and looked over the starboard side into the water.
I called out to Angela and Wally, “Where are the lines?”
Angela said the lines were on
the boat, so I went back to driving the boat back to the wall.
I pulled the starboard gearshift towards reverse, and the shift
cable broke! The handle moved
freely in my hand! Which gear was it in, or was the transmission halfway
between gears? I didn’t
know, so I shut the starboard engine down.
The port engine was getting us over to the side, but it was also
carrying us forward. Wally
guided us to the houseboat with a boathook.
He then jumped down from our bow pulpit to their rear deck with a
loud noise. With a rope in
hand, he scrambled across their deck and up the wall.
Our boat bumped the houseboat,
but no one on board was shooting at us yet.
(No guns on board in Canada; that’s a good thing!)
Angela threw a line to Wally, who was pulling us to the wall.
We needed to be pulled backwards to avoid hitting the houseboat
again. Another line, and we
were almost there. Finally,
we were tied back up again.
Apparently our unwelcome
visitors had untied our lines and thrown them on the decks; that’s why
they weren’t in the water. That’s
probably what woke Wally as well. He
was in the forward cabin, and a noise on the foredeck would be heard
easily in that cabin. Angela
was subconsciously aware of the pattern of moving away from the wall with
the wind and our mooring lines pulling us back.
When they failed to pull us back that last time, she became aware
of it consciously.
The generator was on, so I
started the coffee. No one
was interested in sleep. We
were shaking. The new Sea
Ray, we found out later, had been delivered that day!
Any damage to it would have been expensive, not to mention
embarrassing and time-consuming.
The cell phone wouldn’t work,
so I went to the pay phone across the street and called the police.
They said they had three escaped criminals on their hands but would
come right down and see us when they were able.
They were not in Fenelon Falls but were in a nearby town called
Lindsay.
They never came, and the
houseboat people never complained about our noise.
Apparently they slept right through the whole episode.
We spent most of the next day getting a new shift cable installed
so we could move on.
The operator of a local tour
boat with glass sides and a glass roof said it had happened to him as
well. He said he always ties
up now with a plastic-coated steel cable and a padlock on at least one
cleat on the boat and one cleat on the wall or dock.
We had never had that happen to
us before. It was quite a
shock; the Canadians we had met had been so friendly and helpful to us.
We have since been told that area has had several such incidents in
the past, but the cable and padlock idea should prevent it for those who
are prepared.
Written for the "The Great Loop Link", newsletter for
America's Great Loop Cruisers'
Association
Published November/December 2001
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