Aground: Who Cares?

Shell Point, Florida
January 19, 2006

Regular readers know how much angst is caused by our occasional running aground incidents. Especially poor Libby because it makes her feel awful every time it happens. Here’s the story

Today we went to the Ding Darling nature refuge on Sanibel Island and we signed up for a guided nature tour. The tour boat is a big pontoon boat with electric power. It had a crew of 2 and 20 passengers. Pretty nifty vessel. Anyhow, after the guide finished explaining how shallow the bay was and Libby and I both thought of how impossible it would be to go there with Tarwathie, the tour boat ran aground. The tide was very very low and the captain had tried to take us out of their little boat basin but there was a sand bar across the front. I looked out and it looked to me that the water was less than six inches deep. I was just about to ask the captain how shallow he could go when we ran aground.

An electric boat doesn’t have much excess power in the screws, so it did no good at all trying to get itself off. We moved all the passengers forward, then aft. It did no good. The captain did not suggest the obvious. We were only 20 feet from a beach and the water was only six inches deep. The obvious thing was to order everyone to walk to shore then float the boat away. Perhaps he was intimidated by all the joking onboard about Lake George.

After about half an hour another motor boat came out and towed us off. They had to cancel today’s tour and refund our money. No matter we had fun anyhow, and we learned a lot from the guide while waiting.

The thing I didn’t tell onboard was how thrilled Libby was the whole time we were grounded. In this case it was not even a little bit her fault. Nor would she be called upon to perform bravely to get us off. Nor was the grounding a threat to her home. I could see her grinning the whole time.

After our return Norman and Martha took us to the Sanibel Marina for lunch. (See the picture.) That was a pretty nice place. It was very crowded because they were hosting a power boat show. Pete Lemme would have loved it. The cruisers were on sale, marked down from $800,000 to only $775,000. What a bargain.