Eight years and one boat ago, on a Tues day morning, I got a phone call at my office (in Connecticut) from my wife Jackie. She was in Maine and I was in Connecticut, 310 miles away, a 6 hour drive. She had just received a call from the Belfast Harbor master, asking if we were the owners of a Ranger 23 named Blue Parrot, delivering the news that the boat was laying her side on the beach just outside the harbor. This is about 4 miles from where I last left her on her mooring in the Bayside (Maine) anchorage. This was mystifying as there was no chafed up pennant still attached at the bow and the previous evening had been exceptionally calm, but there she was lying high and dry on the beach, totally out of the water at this point of the tide. Being that I was 310 miles away, there was no possible way for me to get there in time to do anything about this before the next high tide. If you’ve ever seen what a Maine beach looks like at low tide you know how perilous it could be to leave a fiberglass boat laying around through a full tide cycle. I was beside myself, but my wife said she would see if she could get some help and sit tight she would call back. Within a half an hour she had organized a party of friends and family and found the boat up in Belfast. The harbor master (Cathy Messier, now Cathy Pelletier, and she is the best!) had gone way above the call and had already attached an anchor to the stern to hold the boat in place as the tide came in and had her assistant spend time cutting up a huge driftwood tree with protruding roots and branches into small pieces. You can see this to the left of the boat in the second photo. Blue Parrot had found one of the few fairly harmless stretches of beach in that area, she lay in a patch that was mostly gravel with a few small rocks and no particularly large rocks. If it had landed ten yards in either direction, there could have been major damage; however they found it there with no discernable scratches or dents. The big concern was getting it upright and afloat. With the tide already coming in, they waited until the water began to fill under the boat and slipped cushions under as the small waves begin to lift the boat to prevent any pounding. When the tide got high enough, the harbor master’s assistant came back with their work boat and pulled Blue Parrot off the beach as gently as possible while my friends kept the boat heeled. By the time I saw her, she was back on her mooring in Bayside. There was nothing even fallen off a shelf inside, and I could only find one pinhead sized small ding in the gel coat. At haul out in fall I expected to find some gouges in the lead keel, but other than some scratched up antifouling, there was no damage there either. My wife called it the “luck of the Irish, and I can’t argue with that.

As to how it happened, the moment I got the call I realized how with a feeling that made me sick. I had been out cruising for several days and coming back on the mooring I dropped the pennant’s loop over the cleat, planning on coming back after dropping the sail to secure it. With all the things to be done when one first comes in from cruising, I never did go back to secure it. As long as there was wind or tide pulling, it was fine, but the next night, in calm weather and probably at the turn of the tide, the pennant slipped off the cleat and she took a ride on the incoming tide. It was a minor miracle that she came ashore where shed di, and that this happened on an incoming rather than an outgoing tide.
Now I secure the pennant immediately every time, no matter how hard the wind is blowing and how hard the main is flogging.
As you get old and forgetful, you have to remember that you might forget.