Ok, the story. First, where it unfolded:
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This is a closer winter shot of the rock while I was still doing the work. You can see the cabin just to the upper left of the label. It was a 8x8x8 foot cube made of 2x4's and 3/4" plywood. To get to the cabin, we had to move from our base station at the lighthouse a few kms away to this rock. Mooring a boat at the rock was tricky, I ran a horizontal rope about ten feet above the high tide level across the inlet more or less at the mooring label. The ends of the rope were attached to rebar pitons cemented into cracks. It had a vertical rope hanging down in the middle with a chunk of engine block on the bottom, well below the low tide level, to keep the vertical rope tight. The vertical line was moored to by passing a loop of rope around it attached to the 14 foot inflatable boat at both ends. This would allow the boat to ride up and down with the waves and tide. To get from the mooring to the cabin, we had to climb up a near vertical rock wall about 90 feet high. To get to the shore from the boat I would climb the vertical rope overhand, and then traverse the horizontal rope to the shore. Other than the slightly inclined rock wall we climbed to get to the cabin, the mooring was surrounded by vertical rock walls.
As you can see in the photo, this little mooring slot gets violent. The near death experience was at the mooring. We had been stuck at the lighthouse during weather too rough to get to the rock. After three days or so, I figured things had calmed down enough to at least go check it out, which we did. When we got to the mooring, it was calm in there, but there were clots of foam floating around, which I had never seen before, which I was a bit leery about, so we didn't moor. I just had my assistant hang onto the vertical rope while we kept an eye on things for a bit.
We hung there for about ten minutes being gently swung around the vertical rope by spent waves that got into the slot. No biggie, but I could not figure out the foam, so we didn't moor. Then a bit bigger one came in. It moved us more than earler, pushing the boat inwards as the water moved in, and pulling it toward the outlet as it went out. Still no biggie, and it did increase the splashing along the rocks, so I figured maybe the foam came from that. The next wave was worse. As it came in, it lifted us maybe three feet, likely more, and my assistant had to hand over hand up, while the water went up, and then down as the wave went out. On the way down on this second wave, my assistant almost lost his grip. At one point, he was hanging onto the boat with his toes because he couldn't hand over hand fast enough, and the vertical rope was at a crazy angle because of how hard we were being pulled. At that point, I knew we were in deep shit. When we got to the bottom of the wave, the boat was pointed the wrong way because it got dragged in that direction as the wave descended. We managed to get the boat turned around just as the next wave started coming in. If you look again at the mooring spot on the photo, you will note the narrowing just before the wider mooring spot. We climbed a steep ramp of water under full throttle just before the wave broke where it went through the narrowing bit. When it broke a few feet behind the transom, it sent a five foot wall of white water through the mooring slot. The back of the mooring slot narrowed to a vertical crack maybe a couple feet wide. Had we been a fraction of a a second later, we would have been pounded into that crack. I doubt that anyone would have found a thing by the time we were missed by the lighthouse crew and anyone came looking.
I was asked for a story...
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ppp
