I'LL MEET YOU BY ESTER ROCK Fred Dyson - July 18, 2015
It was going to be a lazy first boat trip of year with just the two of us. We were going to anchor up in the first protected cove and have a romantic dinner of steaks and corn on the cob. We got a late start because the boat batteries were down from the winter lay up, so we spent a couple of hours messing with chargers.
It was late evening when we put the hook down and toasted our affection. A call came over the emergency radio channel, “ANY BOAT, ANY BOAT NEAR ESTER ROCK ”. The call was repeated several times with increased urgency. I was six-plus miles from Ester Rock and I hoped someone closer would answer the call. Finally I responded. The call was “apparently coming from a power boat that was out of gasoline in Port Wells north of Ester Rock. The ebbing tide was taking the boat south and then east.
The skipper of the boat wanted to know if I had any gas. I said my boat was diesel but I had a gallon or so of gas for my portable generator. He wanted me to bring that to him. It was getting dark so I told him to keep calling for help and I would pull the anchor and start heading his way but that I was probably more than an hour away. My bride was irritated by the interruption of our romantic time together.
When we rounded Decision Point, I fired up our radar and tried to locate the distressed pilgrim. His description of his location was poor and I finally found him a mile and half from where he apparently thought he was. It was a somewhat shabby thirty-foot cruiser with an inboard. He kept insisting that all he wanted was my gallon and half of gas. That was ridiculous. He said his boat burned thirteen gallons an hour when he had the wick turned up and it escapes me how he planned to make it ten miles to the port fuel dock. It was all kind of silly. I tied him up on our port side and headed back to port in the dark with a three-foot chop building up. When we got five miles from port, he insisted I give him my bit of gasoline and then he took off, up on step and busting through the chop.
We continued toward our anchorage. Twenty minutes later the aforementioned pilgrim came up on the radio to announce that he had run out of fuel (again) and that he had anchored up near the shore. I had seen his anchor line pilled on his foredeck and I knew he did not have enough line to anchor safely in the hundred-foot depth he was in. He said he was fine, but I did not want to leave him there with the wind rising and barge traffic in the area. We tied up to him again, and an hour and a half later we laid him up against the fuel dock. He thanked me profusely and said he would buy me fuel in the morning.
In the morning he was gone!!! He had not gotten fuel at the fuel dock and the harbormaster had no record of him. I motored around the marina and the parking lot and could not find the boat. The whole thing was a mystery. I remember thinking the skipper looked a bit familiar when we tying him to us in the middle of the night and I wondered if he might have been a con man that was running a scam in my hometown and who I ratted out to the police. If so, it must have unnerved him to have me show up as his rescuer in the middle of the night. He probably got his fuel with a siphon hose credit card in the parking lot and headed out for some place far from us.
