Guest post: Neverland's Scary Moment

Bath, NC
N 35 28.594 W 076 48.919

Today, I have a guest post from my friend David Wiencke. David owns the Westsail 32 Neverland. We met at the Crescent Boat Club last June. David gave me permission to post this story. I know that if it had been my story, it would have made my list for one of those moments you remember for a lifetime.

Let me tell you a story of our sail in Georgian Bay. First I must set the scene. Georgian Bay is about 120nm north to south with 30,000 islands (yes thirty thousand, no I didn't count them) all scattered within 2nm of the entire length of its eastern shore (think Milky Way). There are only a handful of marked entrance channels into this maze of islands if coming in from offshore. Also, scattered among all these islands are many reefs and rocks, too many to properly mark with nav. aids. Once in amongst the islands there is a well marked, yet torturous north-south "inside channel".

Of course, with "local knowledge" you can enter this area at numerous unmarked or less well marked locations. The water is very clear so one can see bottom at 20-30 feet in good conditions.

We found, from some local sailors, that our chart book didn't have a certain intermediate sized chart which showed several of the outside buoys marking some of the entrance channels. These local sailors showed us the location of a bouy to lead us into a marked channel, not on our chart, and save us several miles on our next leg. We sailed that leg without incident. In fact it was easier than expected, giving us confidence with navigating in this difficult area.

Our plan for the next leg was going to be a couple of short hops, but at the last minute we decided to take advantage of favorable winds before they changed, and sail it all in one day, about 60nm. We had to sail several miles offshore to avoid some unmarked reefs. The shoreline is rather low and there are no identifiable landmarks to confirm your position. I measured the lat./long. of two potential entrances and entered them into my trusty hand-held GPS. One route was well marked but 10nm longer, and the other shorter one, had no buoys (at least on our chart) to guide us in. The shorter one showed a promising finger of deep water going in towards the inner channel. It looked like it could/should have a buoy to guide us in. I also plugged in the lat/long of the nearest inside-channel buoy (off the more detailed chart) to the entrance.

The sun was getting low by the time we arrived off the shortcut entrance. If we sailed the long way we'd likely be feeling our way into harbor in the dark, so we decided to try the short cut. As we sailed in, following my GPS coordinates for the inside-channel buoy, we could see rocks, reefs and islands ahead and were trying to match what we were seeing with the chart. I was up on the bow with binoculars looking for any buoys. Then the depth sounder showed the bottom coming up fast, 20 ft, 12 ft. and I could see the bottom clearly now. I quickly doused the jib to slow us down. Water was breaking on the left and right and ahead. I could see some range markers and day markers on distant islands ahead, but couldn't find them on the chart. Unfortunately, we weren't anywhere near being lined up with the range markers. We found a passage between the breaking water on the reefs ahead (9' depth), but things were not looking like where we thought we were on the chart. Finally I spotted a red spar buoy ahead. We sailed near enough to read the number and found that we had come in 2mi. south of where we wanted, right through the reefs. Yikes. Turns out when entering the lat/long of the inside channel buoy I started entering the wrong one, caught the mistake, re-entered the correct one. Apparently some of the numbers of the mistake got into the corrected waypoint. I should have stopped to recheck when all my info didn't agree.

David Wiencke