carwreck.com: around Boston harbor...

I'm contemplating leaving Boston for the winter. I make my living on the water and there are just plain more jobs farther south. I have in fact been given a number of leads and even possible job offers which could lead to my living on a boat in the Virgin Islands for the winter. What do you think about that? I'm looking for feedback...

The last few days have been incredible at work. Saturday was below average with cloudy weather keeping many boaters at home. Not that we pray on the unfortunate boaters, but the more who are out there, the more work we will have. Work is good.

In any case, Sunday started out hazy and slow, but then all of a sudden we had several cases at once. I had finished doing a jump start for a boat off of The Graves when there was a frantic call on the radio for a boat on the rocks north of Boston. I was sent along with another boat from my work. We arrived along with the Coast Guard withing several minutes but, since the tide was dropping, the boat was already too far out of the water. I ended up coming back several hours later and dragged them off the rocks as waves swept over them. Luckily they didn't put any holes in the bottom of the boat. The rest of the day was moderately busy.

Then Monday came. Mondays are normally quiet but as I arrived at work at 3pm, I saw that we were already pulling a small sailboat out of the water which had swamped with several young kids in it. Within 30 minutes of being at work I was dispatched to a boat taking on water at Sunken Ledge off Quincy. I raced to the boat and arrived just after the Coast Guard and two MA State Police boats. The police boats moved right out of the way so that the CG and I could take care of getting pumps running to keep the boat afloat. I worked with the CG to assess how much damage had occurred as well. Within several more minutes two more coworkers arrived on-scene and we put another pump onboard. We then took the boat in tow, with my boat trailing behind the boat which we were working on. We had the situation well under control.

Soon enough, there was a commotion on the radio and it was determined that a large 84 foot motor yacht had hit the Lower Middle rocks off Logan Airport and was rapidly taking on water. My boss was the first on-scene along with the same two CG guys who had been with me only several minutes earlier. Since one of my coworkers had joined me on the boat we were working on, I was dispatched to leave in the boat we had trailing and go to this yacht to provide assistance. The yacht had ripped a stabilizing fin out from the bottom of the hull and water was pouring into the engine room at several hundred gallons per minute. After getting permission to enter into a legal salvage agreement by the owner of the vessel and after getting clearance from the CG, my boss and I started two gasoline powered dewatering pumps and several smaller electric pumps and were able to quickly lower the level of water in the yacht. During this time we also had used our small towboats to push the yacht onto a sandy beach to prevent it from sinking. It took us the next four hours to completely empty the boat of water and to send a diver over the side to temporarily patch the hole in the boat. We then very slowly and carefully towed yacht to East Boston where we secured it for the night. Since the boat was still taking on water (we had the flow down to about 30-50 gallons per minute), we needed to stay onboard the vessel all night to maintain the dewatering pumps. At about 3:30am I got a chance to go home, shower to get all of the oil from the boat’s engines off of me and then sleep for two hours. I went back to work at 7am where we continued to monitor the pumps throughout the day. The intention is to have the yacht taken out of the water so that structural repairs to the hull can be undertaken. They were not able to prepare the dry-dock at Boston Shipyard and Marina today, so we hoping that this will happen tomorrow. In the meantime I was let go for the night. Keep in mind that today was my “day off.” Tomorrow brings a whole new day and all new excitement.

This weekend I head to Maine, for the Maine Forest Rally. Wish Team Saabworks luck in racing in the Group 5 class of the ProRally.

Tonight my brother and I cooked our first big dinner in our new kitchen. We cooked dinner for Mark, the guy who was the contractor for our new kitchen, and Sarah. Both were friends of our's before Mark offered to do our kitchen for us. We made a cold zuccini soup, broiled salmon with a melon salsa, drank lots of wine and finished with a chocolate bread pudding. All made from scratch today in our new kitchen. It was fun and tasty. The preparations took us a bit longer than expected, but it all came out awesome. Thanks to Mark for an awesome kitchen; thanks to Sarah for introducing us to Mark; thanks to Pam for helping with dinner; and thanks to Aaron for being a good cook and a great housemate.