(Life Anecdote – shared by Ken Brown)
A friend, who worked in a Winnipeg hospital lab in 1979 purchased a 52′ wooden boat that spent its entire life on Lake of the Woods, just beyond the Manitoba – Ontario border. The boat, named the Messalina, earned its keep initially as a fishing boat and later, hauling navigation buoys out in the lake each year. My friend asked if he could dock the Messalina at my cottage-to-be on Treaty Island, just outside of Kenora, ON.
He took this single-story boat and added a conning tower above the main cabin. Controls were run up to the tower, which when finished, stood 16′ above the water line. Rather high for a boat with a small beam (i.e.width). In the wind, the boat would either rock or lean over quite a distance.
He docked it at Treaty Island from 1979 to about 1984 and before moving to Vancouver in 1983 and asked me to sell the boat for him in 1984. Not an easy task. Old wooden boats were not in demand, then or now.
But sometimes you get lucky. I advertised and was called by a long-distance trucker who lived in rural Killarney, MB. He told me then and there that he was buying the boat, sight unseen. Fortunately, I painted and re-plugged the hull in 1983, so the boat showed well.
To my surprise, the fellow showed up two weeks later and purchased it. I suspected his cheque would bounce but it was as good as his word had been.
My friend was ecstatic, and when I visited him in Vancouver in 1985, he told me that his plan had been to abandon the boat when it was drydocked the year before. He was $6,500 richer and the boat had a future, I hoped.
End of Story…. except …
An incident occurred in September,1984 that could have changed the entire picture, I drove the boat three miles out into the Lake of the Woods for winter storage. While pulling away from the floating dock at my cottage, I found it nearly impossible to steer the boat into the channel. Despite the wheel being right over to hard left, the boat steered toward a solid dock on shore, and then suddenly reversed course to the left and into deeper water.
On the trip to the drydock, I noticed that the speed was unusually slow, in spite of full throttle. Oh well I thought, I just wasn’t familiar with the boat.
About a half a mile from the drydock, the channel narrows to about 75′ between rocks six inches under the surface on the starboard side and a small rocky island on the port side. Without warning, the Messalina lurched to a hard left and was heading straight for this island at full speed. I was about to kill the throttle lest I smash into the island when all of a sudden, I heard a “twang” just before the Messalina righted itself and turned to the middle of the channel.
On arriving at the drydock island, I discovered the problem – and how lucky I was.
On leaving the cottage, I had cast off all lines mooring the boat to the floating dock,….. except one. On the stern of the Messalina was a chock built right into the hull, Attached to it was a 1/4″ cable and on the other end, about twenty feet underwater, was a sixty pound anchor made of three square cement blocks. I made the anchor to ensure that the Messalina did not move too far when docked.
It now became clear why I almost failed to initially get away from the dock; I was dragging this sixty-pound anchor. It also became clear why the Messalina was not delivering full power. It was slowed considerably by dragging sixty pounds underwater.
When I entered the narrow channel between the rocks and that island, my underwater sixty pounds finally snagged on the bottom in the shallower water, putting me on collision course with the island.
Only the 1/4″ steel cable’s breaking saved me.
Sometimes you never know how lucky you were until you see the full picture of the disaster that you just missed!
– Ken Brown