Today was a complete total, Utter Kaos disaster!
We left Santa Cruz where the boated was berthed. Ideal conditions since the water was pretty flat.
On the way out, we started hearing a noise from the engine compartment. It was the gimbel bearing acting up again on the outdrive. We've dealt with it before but it keeps working. Plans were to take the boat in early this week to get it replaced.
Then around 9am as were trolling, I hear a sharp pitched beep beep coming from the dash. It sounded just like the shallow water warning that you in too shallow. However, we were in 400 ft. deep water.
Bob my friend who owns the boat says..."pull the engine cover off"
As I did that, water was spraying everywhere! "Holy #*%* we're taking on water!
The engine galley was filling up with water. 2 feet high and rising.
We shut it down and need to find out why. So the ice chest is emptied and we begin pouring dumping water out manually. The bilge pump stopped working to make the matters worse. Bob's dumping water with the ice chest while I use the cut open milk gallon piss bucket to keep up with it from getting any higher. Just as we're doing that, another Striper boat just like Bob's comes around our back side to see what we're doing. They pull up and ask if we had Vessel Assist. Bob replies..."no I don't" Bob and his friend offer to tow us into Moss landing harbor which is about 3 miles away.
We couldn't risk running slow even though the engine was running fine in fear of water finding a way into the block. We gladly accepted the offer. About an hour and a half later, we slowly come into the jaws of the Moss landing harbor. There were over a dozen Sea Otters playing on the surface. I watched one use a rock on his belly cracking open a Mollusk. It was fun watching them. Further down there were numerous Sea Lions swimming about and barking in chorus.
So we get the boat to the launch ramp and tie it up. Now it's really filling up to the edge of the floor. The back end is beginning to tilt down and submerging the outdrive in the water completely.
As this is happening, a truck is backing his trailer into the launch ramp to get his boat. My friend Bob runs up and explains the entire situation up to this point. Tom volunteers to pick Bob's boat up out of the water so we can drain it.
We get the boat partly out and it's gushing out the back near the outdrive. A little later, we put it back in, put it on the trailer better, and pull up higher. NOW we can see what happened! The exhaust bellows clamp up inside the outdrive, broke off allowing all the water to come gushing in.
Later on in the conversation, Tom offers to take Bob's boat back over to Santa Cruz to where his boat trailer is. We get there about 40 minutes later. Now we had one more obstacle to overcome. We needed a way to transplant the boat from one trailer to the other. We didn't have a big enough truck to do that. (remember the boat was in a slip earlier so we came over in a car)
Some time goes by and Bob sees these two guys returning from fishing into a big truck w/no trailer. Bob explains everything that has expired up to current situation. Andrew goes w/Bob, gets the trailer and we sucessfully transplant it back onto Bob's trailer and park the boat in the holding yard.
Where can you find such helpful comradery? Salmon fishing community here in Monterey Bay!
We're are incredibly grateful to those who rescued us today. We also feel lucky nothing seriosly bad happened either thanks to the fishing community here.
