I was unable to join the Bask Skills Clinic for their last camping weekend, this time on Angel Island, because I was on my yearly dive trip to the Channel Islands on September 13th. While there we did have a little bit of excitement.
On the last evening diving we were getting ready for a night dive. The sun was setting but we could not see it through the thick fog. Up on the “sun deck” two of the divers heard another boat running hard. It appeared out of the fog heading straight toward us, so they ran over and shouted to our ship captain. He looked up and leaned on his warning horn. I was down in the galley reading and the sound of the horn lasted just long enough to get annoying and make me look up. What I saw was beyond comprehension. A green and white super-structure was moving past us very fast, and then there was the shock and noise of a collision. The thought that came into my head was that we had come adrift (we were anchored fore and aft) and run into a buoy. But how did we get moving so fast? I jumped up and was able to see down to the water and saw the wake of a large boat, still going fast but with engines at full reverse. It turns out that the National Park Service has a large (100 foot) aluminum cutter that had just ran into us!
The park service was using the cutter to deliver lumber for a construction site on San Miguel Island where a helicopter was lifting the supplies to the site. My guess is that the helicopter pilot must have told them he would take one more load if they got there ASAP. So the cutter was running at full speed, (16 knots) in the fog, at dusk, into a harbor commonly used as an anchorage, right next to an island. All this might have been OK if they had been watching their radar or even looking out the window. Gross negligence if you ask me.
The park service cutter has a very steep V shaped hull so it slid up over our hull, breaking off the railing and hitting the cabin 6 feet above the deck. One of the large galley windows in front of me shattered into safety glass pieces but I didn’t notice at the time. There were lots of cracks in the corners of the galley and lots of things tossed off the walls, like the clock and books out of the shelves. Our captain got in our Zodiac and inspected the hull all the way around and assured us we would not sink. The night dive and all the diving the next day was canceled. We stayed where we were that night and limped home in the morning when the light was better. But if we had started taking on water, who would we have called? The local rescue boat is the one that ran into us!