What Do You Do?

As always seems to be the case, I have several different jobs at the moment. Among them (and perhaps the least predictable, seeing as how I never knew the position existed until it was offered to me) is working for the Monterey Harbormasters office. Technically, my official job title is "Harbor Security" (even though it says otherwise here) but I'd argue that security is just one of the many roles I've come to serve in the harbor. Case in point: I received a call from one of my supervisors at 6pm on a recent wednesday evening asking if I could get down to the harbor and assist the on-duty security staff member (let's call him "A") with a sinking boat in the marina. I don't know about most folks, but when I hear the terms "sinking" and "boat" in the same sentence, three thoughts immediately come to mind: medical emergency, environmental disaster, and boat load (literally) of money going down the drain. Fortunately, I live very close to the harbor and so I found myself 19 minutes later jumping aboard the harbor workboat with "A" carrying armfuls of whatever emergency supplies (first aid, lifejackets, booming material to contain fuel/oil spills) I could could scrounge up, still with no idea of exactly what the situation was. Turns out that a commercial squid light boat (just what it sounds like: a 30' boat with big lights on it) was mostly submerged while still attached to its mooring ball. After ensuring that there were no passengers aboard, the first step was to surround the vessel with "soft" booming material to contain any leaking fuel or oil. The marina is part of a Marine Protected Area (MPA) and is home to a surprisingly abundant and diverse array of wildlife. For this reason and many others it is always a high priority to minimize the amount of pollutants that enter the water. In order to bring a boat back to the surface, scuba divers must use lift bags (think: industrial inflatable pillows) which are strategically attached to the vessel at various points. Having been the diver in previous cases like this, I am still struck by how much simpler the process always seems than it turns out to be. If you know exactly where the hull has been compromised (in this case, a raw water intake for cooling the engines failed), then underwater epoxy and whatever else you can find is used to plug the hole or holes. The lift bags are then strategically and slowly filled with air from the surface in order to level and then raise the vessel. This is where it gets tricky. Water is very dense, which is irrelevant when it is surrounded by other water. When you are trying to raise a sunken vessel, however, there comes a pivotal moment when the water level inside the boat is higher than the water outside the hull. An object which was level and stable below the water suddenly develops a very high center of gravity. Add to that the already top-heavy nature of a light-boat, the gear and water moving around on the deck, and the constant movement of the sea around the vessel, and you can see why this is the most dangerous part of the whole operation. This night was no different. Four separate times the divers were able to raise the boat to the surface only to have it lurch sickeningly and come crashing down on its side at the very spot where either myself and A were positioned with the smaller workboat, or three others were on the opposite side in the vessel containing all of the scuba equipment which was still attached to various lift bags. It was now around 1 o'clock in the morning and, although the operation had gone fairly smoothly, it became clear that we weren't going to get the boat to the surface and de-watered before towing it to the boatyard. The two divers were cold, exhausted, and likely already looking forward to a day or two of feeling quite under the weather as a result of working in a diesel-soaked environment for several hours without pause. The decision was then made to partially re-submerge the vessel to a point where we could be assured of its stability and then tow it (side-tied, which is just what it sounds like) through the marina's mooring field to the boatyard, where staff there would meet us with the equipment to haul the boat out of the water and put onto blocks. I literally thought that this was going to be the day that I was involved in sinking a boat (in addition to the one we were towing), as the ungainly shape of the sunken vessel combined with the fact that it was positioned backwards to the direction of travel, and still had all of the lift bags and booming material attached meant the whole mess was about as lacking in maneuverability as you could imagine! My role at this point? Because the sunken vessel plus salvage equipment created a huge amount of drag, our workboat was constantly being pulled to port (left) and was unable to make any turns to starboard (right). This is a nightmare waiting to happen when trying to move the whole mess through the mooring field. No maneuverability = no control. The solution then was for A and I to attach a line to the workboat's starboard bow and pull at 90 degrees to the direction of travel, thereby keeping it in a straight-ish line. The workboat was towing the sunken vessel but, in a sense, we were towing both of them and the little skiff we were in really wasn't the vessel for the job. It was all we had though, and we'd reached a point of no return because there was absolutely no way to turn back without wiping out a handful of perfectly good boats. Imagine for a moment attaching a line to the center of the aft (rear) end of a boat and pulling an object this way. It seems rather straightforward, and it is. You pull straight ahead, and the towed vessel moves straight ahead. If you pull to the right, the vessel will follow the same path as you, thus turning right. When you tie that line somewhere off of center, however, it becomes an entirely different animal. The towing vessel (particularly an under-powered, one engined affair like ours) has a tendency to yaw (move back and forth) uncontrollably, making it nearly impossible to pull even the most hydrodynamic objects in a straight line. As you can imagine, the monstrosity that we'd become was about as far from ideally-shaped as you could hope for. Sure enough, as soon as I slammed it into gear, the skiff took off about 45 degrees to the right of where I wanted to pull. If I kept going that way, we'd eventually wind up alongside the harbor boat pulling straight backwards to the overall direction we wanted to go. There was no time for the harbor boat to slow down and wait for us to reposition though, because the only way it could maintain any semblance of maneuverability was to keep going forward. I barked a hastily improvised plan at A which involved shifting gears rapidly and aggressively, while reversing directions back and forth in what became a carefully/chaotically choreographed effort to continue pulling the whole operation to starboard while not running over the line we had tied to it. This would have fouled our propeller and put us in a world of trouble the thought of which made my stomach hurt. It took a very nerve-wracking 45 minutes to cross the small marina this way. In that time, A and I narrowly avoided being pulled sideways into four stationary mooring balls (with boats attached). Furthermore, at 3:30am, when we finally managed to put the sunken vessel into the sling for the Travel Lift to pick it up, we realized that we were standing in six inches of sea water. The skiff is designed in such a way that when you pull as hard as we did, the transom (rear) is pulled downward, allowing water to come in over the top. That, combined with the faulty bilge pump (which chose a HELL of a time to break down) meant that we were in the slow process of sinking ourselves throughout the operation. So when people ask me what it is I do for the Harbormasters office, I struggle to find an adequate response. I have operated a dredge, towed sunken vessels, assisted in the (ultimately failed) effort to resuscitate a drowning victim, disassembled derelict vessels, inspected mooring systems while on scuba, filled in for my boss running the office, and checked in dozens of transient (visiting) boaters in the span of a few hours, and much much more. In the end, I suppose "Harbor Security" is as good a job title as any.