Disastrous Dave

Things aren’t going so well here on the boat. Dave is a sweet guy, but makes everything more difficult than it has to be. A constant stream of things have gone wrong since we left Rimouski; we got stuck in Sept Iles for a few days, left and then realised there was something wrong with the engine so had to go back. Dave’s parking is getting worse and the worse it gets, the more ropes he puts out to try and compensate - all in all, he’s a bit of a disaster

Finally, it looked like things were going our way. Mike thought so too.
“Today is going to be a good day. I can feel it.” he said the day we were leaving Sept Iles. I glared at him. What a stupid thing to say. Perhaps he was right though; the sky was blue, the sun was shining and we were gliding along flat seas at 7 knot in the right direction. It even looked like we were going to hit our spot early. 4pm - which is unheard of for us.

The bay we went to anchor in got shallow. Dave thought he could get past the shallow bit into deeper water. He was wrong. CREEAAK! The boat scraped the bottom. Dave kept his nerve. CRUUUNCH. We hit the bottom again. And again. I don’t know much about boats, but I’m pretty sure crunching sounds are bad. Dave consulted the map again and made a very quiet ‘oh’ sound. We were in the wrong bay.

We’d gone almost an hour past the bay we were aiming for. Once we got back there, Dave looked at the map again. This was definitely it. The book said to go in from the right hand side of the island., but Dave didn’t like the look of that and decided we should go in from the left.
It started getting shallow again. Creak. We hit the bottom. Dave persevered. We hit ground again, but this time we didn’t come out. The boat was stuck.

“Hard to starboard” Dave screamed at me.
It was no use. The wheel wouldn’t budge. He grabbed the wheel from me in a frenzy and tried to reverse. Nothing. We were stuck in the mud.

Dave was starting to panic now. Mike and I waited calmly for our orders.
“You two, grab the dingy and the boat hook and find us a way out of here”
“What, row?” asked Mike bewildered. The outboard motor still hadn’t been attached to the dingy.
“Yes, row!”

Mike rowed while I dipped the boat hook in the water trying to find somewhere deep enough.

Meanwhile, Dave was running around the boat trying to look in control.
“Maya” he bellowed. “I need you on deck. Come to the bow.”
Mike rowed us to the bow.
“Get on” said Dave
I looked up. It was 2 metres up to the deck with little to grab onto.
“Quick, grab my hand” he said dramatically.
I took it, unimpressed. As he hoisted me up, all I could think was ‘if you drop me into that freezing water, I will kill you and then I’ll hunt down your family’.

The 3 of us went on like this for the best part of an hour. Running around in our orange survival suits with a sense of urgency, while the sun beamed down on the glass-like, 5 feet of water below.

4 hours, and 1 bent anchor later, we arrived at our anchorage point. We came in from the right. Just like the map had said.