The Wreck of the "Bonnie Dune"

 David Bixby

This is a story about poor judgment.  It is hard to write because I like to think that I usually make better decisions than the ones described here.  I’m sure that in writing down the events of Sunday, April 23, I will try to sneak in rational explanations and justifications for my actions.  Don’t be fooled by any of it. The monumental string of bad choices I made that day is embarrassing to face. 

I hope to achieve two things in telling this story: the first is to give others the opportunity to learn from my mistakes, the second is to go through the painful process of facing the poor judgment that led to a near disaster.  Without an honest review of the mistakes made in this situation, I can’t feel confident that I can, in the future, clearly assess risky situations unclouded by overconfidence, desire, or emotion.

Sunday morning dawned under clear skies.  A check of current weather conditions and forecasts around the state showed brisk winds and air temperatures in the 50’s to 60’s.  Wind forecasts looked like they moderated a bit as one went north, so I set my sights on Flathead Lake 80 miles north of Missoula .  Linda had a tough time making up her mind as to whether she wanted to go.  She was a little unsure of the weather and had some real concerns about cold water temperatures.  Ultimately she decided to load her new kayak atop the car and come along. 

As we drove north we passed many flags standing straight out from their poles indicating a northeasterly wind direction.  Approaching the south end of the lake, we saw white caps crashing onto the beaches of Polson.  As we had planned, we continued around the lake to the west to check conditions in Big Arm Bay .  We had often experienced moderate to calm conditions in the bay while the rest of the lake was being whipped into frenzy.

At Walsted, the wind was on shore and a launch would have been risky, so I told Linda we should drive around to the north shore of the bay were the wind would be blowing off shore giving us a sheltered launch area.  When I look back, one big mistake was in not thinking through a plan that extended beyond a launch.  I was determined to get on the water even though conditions would probably not be safe or enjoyable once we were out there.  Linda was hesitant but agreed to at least drive the five miles to Elmo State Park on the north shore of Big Arm Pay to check things out.

At Elmo Bay the seas were a little less fierce and the waves were not crashing on to shore, but the wind was still quite brisk and the water was cold!  Wading in to the launch the boats was painful.  I was wearing a fleece top and fleece pants.  In dry bags in the boat, I had a kayaking-style dry top and pants, and several more bits of warm clothing that would never get put to use. Linda was against launching, but I convinced her things would be okay, describing a half-baked plan to launch, stay close to shore, and run east along the shoreline staying out of the rougher conditions farther out on the lake. 

I put a reef in the sail and then brailed it so that I could control the boat in the strong winds as I launched.  One mistake I will never make again was brailing the sail without having the sheet attached.  Linda tucked herself into her kayak and began slowly working her way along shore to the east into the raging northeast winds.  I pulled up the anchor and flopped into Bonnie Dune planning to let the winds blow me under bare poles off shore a bit and then set the sail and beat to the east.

As soon as I was aboard, Bonnie Dune swung around, pointed down wind, and took off like a Nantucket sleigh ride.  In no time we were a hundred yards off shore and drifting quickly out and away from Linda.   Unbrailing the sail without the sheet attached was like unleashing a monster. It flapped ferociously with the clew out of reach and no way for me to clip on the sheet.  I stood up and grabbed a hand full of sail near the mast and work my way back to the clew.  As I got closer to the clew holding on to the sail we began to catch wind. I couldn’t move to the windward side of the boat because my arm was not long enough to go there without sheeting in the sail way too far and heeling the boat over dangerously.  Twice I repeated the stupid stunt, each time having to let go of the sail before making it back to the clew.  I gave up and brailed the sail. 

By now I was almost a quarter mile off shore and Linda was nowhere in sight.  I attached the sheet to the clew with the sail brailed and then unbrailed the sail again.  The sail caught wind but the boat was drifting backward fast and I had no steerage.  It seemed like I couldn’t get the boat to bear off the wind and make headway.  Each time the bow came off the wind, I had to let out the sheet to keep from capsizing.  At some point green water came over the lee gunwale.  I let out the sheet and threw myself to the windward side of the boat.  Danger bells should have gone off in my head, but they didn’t for some reason. The gunwale came up having only scooped a gallon of water or so.  I kept playing with the helm and sail trying to get some headway going.  I don’t remember the last moves I made, but again the lee rail went under and the seas flooded in.

The first thing that went through my mind was,  “DO NOT GET SEPARATED FROM THE BOAT!”  I slid into stinging cold water as the Dune lay over on her side. Immediately, I began making my way around to the daggerboard.  I pulled down on the DB and the Dune came right up.  Quickly I wallowed aboard.  Of course the sail was sheeted home and locked off in the cam cleat so she went over again.  I released the sheet and played the game again.  Again she went over.  By this time I was screaming for Linda who I could not see anywhere.  My strength was fading fast in the cold water; I began to realize that this might be the end if I did not get some kind of assistance.  By about the fourth futile attempt to right the boat, my ankle became fouled in the sheet. 

The realization hit that I was not going to sail away from this situation.  My plan B was to use the floating hull to get my body as far out of the water as possible.  As I climbed the hull, Bonnie Dune went full turtle. I pulled my torso as far up onto the bottom of the hull as I could with my ankle looped in the sheet at the stern.  This was not going to buy a whole lot more time because the swells were still washing over my body and I did not have the strength to move much anymore.   I cranked my head up as high as I could to see where Linda was.  She was fighting the high seas and wind making her way toward me.  As she approached, the wind made it hard for her to get in close.  I told her my ankle was fouled and that I could not swim to her.  I pulled the knife out of my lifevest pocket but hesitated, not having the will to slide wholly back into the frigid water to reach the sheet.  Linda could see the loop around my ankle and said that it might slip off if I moved toward it and eased the tension in the line a bit.  It did. 

We both knew that the only way I was going to get off this lake alive was aboard Linda’s boat.  Linda maneuvered in within a few feet, and I took the plunge sliding off the hull into the water. I knew that what ever happened to me, I could not risk capsizing Linda’s boat.  I positioned myself at the widest part of her kayak and eased my torso out of the water.  I lay across the deck just in front of her. With my pelvis and legs dragging alongside the boat She began the awkward paddle for shore. The closest shore was to the north, but we agreed that the wind would not allow us to reach it soon enough.  Linda began paddling west downwind toward the end of the bay about a half-mile away.

My body made it extremely difficult for Linda to paddle efficiently.  It seemed like several minutes had gone by when I looked back and saw the white island of the Dune’s turtled hull only a few feet astern.  The west shore was so far off that I almost couldn’t see it from my low angle on the kayak’s deck.  The cold was biting and my strength was fading away.  In shivering bursts of speech, I begged Linda to paddle with all she had, as if she was not already doing so.  The following seas and me shifting my weight around were unsettling to Linda.  I assured her that I would let go of her boat before I let her capsize.  Paddling with me draped across her lap was almost a joke.  The winds and seas, however, continued to do their work moving us slowly to the west.  Tailwinds and following seas, though, have a way of creating the illusion that one is not moving at all.  I tried to fight the panic that was setting in.  Both of us started to believe the illusion that we were not moving.  Minutes seemed like hours. I completely lost feeling below my naval.  Holding my self on Linda’s boat was starting to become difficult.  At some point the illusion that we were not moving convinced Linda she should turn around 180 degrees and paddle backwards.  I did not understand what she was doing and, twisting at the waist, tried to keep the bow pointing west. 

The shore still looked impossibly far away, when we heard some voices from astern.  A couple in a pair of kayaks was approaching. A man paddled up to Linda’s bow and tied on a towline.  The woman came along side Linda, creating a catamaran out of the two boats. This allowed me to get several more inches out of the water without risking capsizing either boat. With three people paddling the best they could our flotilla started to make noticeable progress. 

With the help of our new friends, Natoscha and Michael, we approached the shore through some rocky shallows.  I warned the group that I didn’t think I would be able to walk when we got into wadeable water.  I never even felt the bottom when it came up from below.  With a person supporting me from either side, I stumbled through about 30 yards of rocky shallows to the tall dry grass on the shoreline.  I was laid down in the grass and what felt like a hundred arms began striping wet clothing off my shivering body. Before I knew it, I was wearing someone’s warm dry shirt and was covered with a pile of gear, clothing, kayak skirts etc. 

At some point an ambulance pulled up into the field a few yards away.  There came stretchers, chemical heat packs, and an I.V. drip. Linda was offered a ride in the ambulance.  We agreed that she should stay with the people who had helped us to begin recovering the gear and vehicles. I remember that during the 15-minute ride to St. Joseph ’s hospital in Polson, feeling came back into my lower body.  My legs ached. A check under the blanket showed that my legs were bruised black and blue over most of their surface.

At the hospital my body temperature was still a few degrees bellow normal, so they put an inflatable plastic blanket over my body.  The blanket was fed a constant stream of warm air by a vacuum cleaner –looking machine.  The warm air flowed out tiny holes that perforated the underside of the blanket flooding me in warmth.  My shivering instantly stopped.

Two hours later Linda showed up and I was released from the hospital.  We drove back up to Elmo Bay to check on Bonnie Dune.  She was still turtled and about a quarter mile from the west shore.  We talked with some of the lakeside residents, one of whom turned out to be Carl, a county sheriff and our neighbor from Missoula .  He was the one that called 911 when he saw the drama unfold on the lake.  He introduced us to his lake home neighbor, a man everyone called Swede. I later found out Swede was known far and wide for his helpful efforts on behalf of those in, on, or around Flathead Lake .  He was ready to launch his motorboat and attempt to recover Bonnie Dune, but the water level was still low in the lake and the nearby boat ramp did not provide safe access (Linda and I had to carry the Dune to the water that morning). Swede offered to keep an eye on the boat, which he could see easily from his patio.  Linda and I decided to drive back to Polson and get some dinner allowing the boat time to drift in.

When we returned, we found Swede and a group of his friends, family, and neighbors were down at the west shore.  They had already recovered the dry bags and rigging and were loading Bonnie Dune into a pickup truck.  As we approached Swede’s house he was arriving with the Dune in the back of his truck.  Linda and I thanked everyone profusely and got the boat packed up on our trailer.  I was still feeling exhausted from the day's events and was incredibly thankful for the help in recovering the boat.  I wasn’t sure how I was going to face wading back into that cold lake and manhandling the boat out and on to the trailer.

With one exception, it appeared all the damage was cosmetic. Bonnie Dune washed in on her side in the rocky shallows and had quite a lot of scrapes and scars.  In one location it appeared she had been lifted and set down by the wave action on a rock.  There were numerous identical dents from a rock in a small area on the starboard shear panel.  The inboard veneer of the plywood at this location was cracked indicating that the plywood had been damaged through its full thickness.  My Shaw and Tenney oars were lost along with several incidental items.  Our digital camera never recovered from water damage.  The adjustable footboard I had built for rowing washed away.  All in all, it was an expensive lesson.  Thanks to several people’s selfless acts, however,  I did not have to pay the ultimate price.

Postscript:

Bonnie Dune was put back into seaworthy condition after about two weeks of intense effort.  The cracked plywood was reinforced with a fiberglass patch on the inside of the hull.  The scrapes and gouges on the hull’s exterior were filled and painted.  The starboard gunwale on which the boat rested on her side in the rocks when it washed ashore was restored with plenty of epoxy peanut butter mix and still awaits some more coats of varnish.  The top of the mast, which was drug across the bottom when the turtled boat was washed in, was cut off.  The mast was a bit taller than necessary for the new sail anyway.  The sheet management system was redesigned to be even easier to release.  At the time I am writing this I have had her out twice since the wreck, and I am starting to gain back a level trust in her and in myself.   I would like to point out that all of the factors that contributed to this accident are traceable back to decisions that I made.  The Skerry design never failed to perform as it was designed and as I should have been easily able to predict that it would.  Its survival of the rough beaching has taught me what a tough boat it really is. 

Natoscha and Michael’s Story:

Michael and Natoscha live near the Walsted launch area on the south shore of Big Arm Bay .  They had loaded their kayaks onto a vehicle and were driving around to the north end of the Bay looking for decent launch conditions just as Linda and I had been.  Near the Elmo area were we had launched they had decided that the lake looked too rough and were planning to go get something to eat while watching for any moderation in the weather.  Just then, they saw a white object floating far out on the lake.  They witnessed my several attempts to right Bonnie Dune.  Realizing that it was a small sailboat in distress, they decided to launch and try to assist. By the time they had launched, Linda and picked me up and we were headed for the west shore.  Natoscha and Michael were aware that it would be difficult for Linda to get me to shore and out of the 38 degree water by herself.  They made chase and caught up to us just as we were becoming disoriented and demoralized by our slow progress.  I owe a big thank you to these two, and all of the other people that assisted us.  And of course, I am grateful that Linda found it worthwhile to risk her life to keep me around a little longer after a morning in which I demonstrated my unquestionable eligibility for a Darwin award.