The Green Submarine

So I'm chatting with a friend online last Friday night, and I get this phone call from Jeremy:

"I sunk my boat," he says, rather calmly for a person who's standing on a sandbar in the river watching his boat sink in freezing cold, foggy, dark conditions.

"What!" I exclaim, panicking, for I believe this would be the normal response to learning your husband's boat was sinking.

"Yeah, I sunk my boat," he says again very calmly, "I'm just standing here watching it fill up with water."

"How did you do that! Are you okay!" Of course, I'm still panicking. Admittedly, I was somewhat (he doesn't need to know this) concerned for his safety. Not only is he stuck out in the cold in the river, but also there are a ton of alligators, snakes, bears. . . Considering how calm he was, I figured he was okay. My next concern was the fact that he absolutely loves this boat and fishing on the river (the Ocmulgee is only about 5 miles from our house). Now, to begin with, this was far from any luxury liner. It was the ugliest, green fiberglass boat imagineable, made sometime around the turn of the century (okay, sometime around 1970). So on the one hand, it was probably very lucky it hadn't sunk already. But on the other hand, it is probably his favorite thing that he owns. So, I'm sitting there wondering if he actually is calm or if I needed to prepare for a grieving process later. I have no idea how I'm supposed to react at all, so I respond with a very generic, "Oh dear!" hoping this covers all the bases.

"Oh, look, there goes my wallet." I groan as he snags the wallet out of the river. "Can you get me the number for the bait shop?" he asks. A friend of his owns a bait shop down the road from us and has a boat. So I run to get the number, feeling somewhat relieved that Rich can now deal with this situation. Like I have any clue whatsoever what to do about a husband stuck on a sandbar. I give him the number and hang up.

Meanwhile, I'm relaying this story to my friend, who is rolling with laughter. I'm still not sure how to respond, but it is pretty funny. Especially since he'd been calling me intermitently all night to tell me how cold it was and how nothing was biting. Maybe it's just me, as a woman, but if I'm cold and miserable, I would have quit whatever it was that was making me cold and miserable. It only seems logical, right?

A few minutes later, Jeremy calls back.

"Well, they're (Rich and Kevin) coming to get me," he says. "Wow, the boat's filling really fast." To me, this seemed like a very obvious statement--what else would a boat with a hole in the bottom do? According to him, this was a very important statement because at that point, he realized just how big the hole was.

"What happened," I asked, not sure if I wanted to know the answer. Did he finally decide that, yes, it was cold and miserable and that he should come in for the night? No. Instead, he had decided to head FURTHER down the river to a different spot. As he was headed downstream, he hit a tree limb under the water, and down the boat went. Fortunately, he was't very far from the landing. In fact, he could see the cars passing on the highway. Unfortunately, he was on the opposite bank of the river from the landing, with no way to get across. He at least still had his little chargeable lantern, so he did have some light. He decides, at this point, that he should probably hang up and save the cell phone battery. I then relay the latest developments in the story to my friend, who is just dying.

A few minutes later, he calls back again. There's a "snag." First, Rich showed up without his boat. Since Jeremy woke him up, it didn't register that Jeremy was actually on the opposite bank of the river. So, they had a lovely conversation shouting at each other across the water. That was when Jeremy discovered Rich's boat battery is nearly dead, and Rich has to figure out how to get over to pick Jeremy up. As we're talking, he suddenly says, "Crap, the handle just came off the lantern!" The lantern has dropped into the water and died. Now he's a cold, wet man standing in the dark and fog on a sandbar.

It was at least half an hour later before Rich finally returned with his boat, still with not much of a charge on the battery. In order to get to Jeremy, Rich had to use his trolling moter and putt down the river. Once he got to where Jeremy was, they spent the next 45 minutes trying to start the big engine (I have no idea why they didn't just use the trolling moter again--I'm sure there's some logical reason that Jeremy will inform me of later; I hope). Finally, they reached under water and pulled the battery of Jeremy's boat. Somehow, it still worked, and they finally headed back to the landing. Two hours after he first called me, Jeremy was finally rescued. At one a.m., in he comes. I had fallen asleep by then, so I think all I managed was, "Oh, you're home."


Jeremy gets up the next day, and now has to figure out how to get the boat out of the water. First he calls DNR to report the boat. There's also a dam up the river that is opened every other weekend, so he needs to find out if that's going to happen. If so, bye-bye boat. The DNR lady tells him the dam isn't scheduled to be opened this weekend (lucky for him!), and that as long as the boat is not worth more than $2000, he doesn't have to file an accident report.

With that done, he sets off to the bait shop. Time to rescue the fiberglass monstrosity. As he's headed there, he sees ambulances, fire trucks and police cars speeding down the road. About an hour after he gets to the baitshop, everyone's ready to head out (time is never of the essence in the south). They get to the boat landing, and there are the ambulances, fire trucks, police and DNR. Apparently, someone had reported an overturned boat in the river, and the DNR office had not relayed Jeremy's earlier call to anyone, much less the local DNR. So, he spent an hour answering questions and trying to explain that yes, he had called the boat in.

They're finally ready to head out and rescue the boat. They have two leaky little john boats (one has pin-sized holes all over the bottom and the other's plug is, well, plugged with a cork), Rich's Bass Tracker, and four people crammed in the Bass Tracker. The two john boats are loaded inside one another, so they only have to pull "one" boat down the river. On top of the the john boats are two 16-foot 2x4s. As Jeremy calls it, they did a bit of redneck engineering once they got to his boat (and yes, he is very proud of this feat). Putting the two john boats in the river as pontoons and placing the 2x4s across them, they lift Jeremy's boat up (still full of water), strapping it to the boards with wratchet ties. They next have to figure out a way to rig the boat so they can haul it back to the landing. They can't tie the rig to the Bass Tracker because if the rig goes down, so does the Bass Tracker. In the end, Rich ends up steering the boat, while the other three hang onto the rope tied to Jeremy's boat and tug it down the river. In the meantime, the two john boats are rapidly filling with water. Somehow, they managed to make it back to the landing, but by the time they did, both john boats were about 1/3 full of water and on the verge of sinking! After slowly cranking the boats out of the water, draining them, they finally get them loaded. Once they got Jeremy's boat out of the water, they also discovered that the bottom section of the boat where the limb hit was actually rotted, so it actually wasn't his fault.

In the end, Jeremy finally arrived home at 3 in the afternoon, after starting out at 9 a.m. Needlesss to say, once he got home, he immediately went to bed. This was after telling me how much fun it was getting the boat out of the river.

FUN? We definitely have two very different ideas of what fun is.