"Hey Charlotte guy" said the grungy sailor from the next dock over. "Yes, you. You own that boat with that other guy Arthur, right?" So begins one of those great decisions in life, one that I knew would affect my future as a sailor and a story teller.

Do I tell this unattractive man the truth, that I owned the boat by myself? I would be technically correct, as I recently bought out my partner Arthur Bierer and therefore had sole ownership of Charlotte. If I told him this half-truth, it would save me hours of work and let me conduct my busy day as planned.

Or do I tell the stranger what he wants to hear, that yes I own the boat he once saved from imminent disaster in the marina, and that I'm ready to pay him back whatever favor he demands.

I sized up the man, with his week old beard, dirty overalls, and grease smeared hat, and I could just tell that he wasn't going to ask for a simple favor like holding a flashlight. I sensed an adventure here so I shouted across the water "Yes, that's me, how can I help you?". He grinned and had a wicked gleam in his eye. Now he had a partner in one of the most unorthodox displays of seamanship I've ever been witness to.

Before Charlotte became a club keelboat, she was owned by club members Arthur Bierer and me. One day Arthur set out on a cruise from Harbor Island Marina where we berthed her, and got into serious trouble. Charlotte's engine was acting up, and it died soon after he backed Charlotte out of her slip. In most marinas this is not much of a problem, but Harbor Island Marina is not most marinas.

The most prominent feature of Harbor Island Marina is that it sits cross ways in the Duwamish River, so there is always a strong current running through it. A disabled boat quickly runs into a dock, another boat, or aground. In Arthur's case, Charlotte quickly drifted on the muddy shore.

This is how Charlie and Charlotte met. Charlie is the aforementioned scruffy sailor who keeps his boat on "B" dock, across from Charlotte on the "A" dock. He noticed Arthur and Charlotte drifting aground next to his dock, and he helped Arthur get Charlotte's engine started and towed to safety. Arthur thanked Charlie, and set out once again on his cruise, only to get into even more serious trouble.

At the entrance to Harbor Island Marina are two 60 foot parallel log booms, sitting ninety degrees to the current. Charlotte's cantankerous engine sputtered to a stop when she was in the middle of these log booms, and Charlotte was quickly swept against the downstream boom. It took Charlie and Arthur the better part of two hours using ropes and kedges to unpin Charlotte from her unauthorized slip assignment.

Arthur thanked Charlie from the bottom of his heart for all the help, but Charlie was no dummy. He knew Arthur (and therefore Charlotte) owed him a big favor, and he just bided his time until he was ready to collect.

I closed up Charlotte, and hefted my sea bag over to "B" dock to say hello to Charlie and find out what business I'd gotten myself into. I hoped it wouldn't take too long, because tonight was the WYC Snooze n Cruise work party, and if I didn't show up to work and pay, I wouldn't be able to attend the cruise.

"Hi, I'm Charlie," he said, "I'm the guy who saved your buddy last year when his engine was acting up."

"I know," I said. "I heard about it. Thanks for saving the boat. What's up?"

"Well, you see, I have this new boat, and it needs a little work, so I'm going to haul her out of the water onto my trailer, and I just need a little help getting her onto the trailer."

This sounded simple enough to me. I've never actually brought a keelboat onto a trailer before, so this was even going to be a learning experience for me. "Great. So where's the boat?" I asked, expecting a shiny new MacGregor 26 or a Catalina 22.

"Over here," said Charlie, and he pointed to his pride and joy, a dinky sailboat as grungy as him, her name "Beautiful Knot" proudly painted on the transom.

Beautiful Knot was an early 1970s 22 foot no name cheap sailboat, built by a manufacturer long since out of business. Her hull had been given all the care and upkeep expected of "maintenance free" fiberglass. There were cracks in the dull and chalky gelcoat and the wooden hand rails were gray and split. The too-short dock lines were equally gray and creaky except where they dangled under water, growing green and supporting an under sea garden I didn't think possible in the superfund waters of the Duwamish. There was moss growing on the mainsail cover.

This was a vessel even the Washington Yacht Club would reject as a free donation.

Charlie began speaking. "Here's the plan - the launch ramp is a couple of miles up the river, just past a bridge. I'll drive my truck and trailer to the ramp, and you follow in your car. You give me a ride back to the marina, and we'll take the boat up river to the ramp. We'll load the boat on the trailer, I'll drive you back here, and we'll be done."

I've observed even the simplest of plans go terribly awry as soon as a boat is introduced into the equation, and Charlie's plan was no different.

We started out fine. We drove both vehicles to the take-out site, just a concrete ramp descending into the murky depths of the Duwamish River from a side street, bordered by a warehouse and a fenced off mobile home which looked oddly out of place in industrial South Seattle. The area around the launch ramp was an abandoned lot covered in dirt, gravel, and used hypodermic needles. Apparently even the South Seattle heroin addicts enjoy a bit of waterfront recreation here.

Charlie parked his rig, and quickly slipped into my car. I locked the doors, and we drove back to the relative safety of Harbor Island Marina.

Charlie started the outboard on Beautiful Knot, while I had a look around this floating piece of glass and plastic that would soon be the sole piece of hardware keeping me out of the polluted waters of the Duwamish. I was getting worried.

In addition to some deep cracks in the hull near the motor mount and the base of the mast, I was pretty sure we were not carrying any of the coast guard required equipment necessary for a voyage. I slipped back to Charlotte for some safety supplies like flares, life jackets, and a chart of the area.

I untied the dock lines on Beautiful Knot (I was obviously the first person to do this since northern Oregon Territory was renamed to Washington State), Charlie backed us out of the slip, and we motored out of the marina, and headed up stream. This was new territory for me - Elliott Bay and Puget Sound were downstream of the marina and I'd never really explored up river. While Charlie's motor slowly fought the river current, he told me his story.

He'd been interested in boats for a long time. He'd even lived on a 32 foot boat in Harbor Island for six months, with his wife. She was a marketing manager at Microsoft, and as far as I could tell she was not really interested in living in a small beat up boat moored next to a noisy dusty cement factory. His wife and her dad conspired to sell that boat and they moved into a proper apartment, but Charlie was still hopelessly addicted to boating. This new purchase, Beautiful Knot, was now his only connection to the water he loved so much.

Soon we motored under a low bridge and were at the take out site. Remember, unlike Kirkland, there is no marina or waiting dock here. Just a road that descends into the murky Duwamish, sending unaware drunk drivers and mafia hit victims to a watery grave.

Charlie's plan was to raise the keel (Beautiful Knot has a swing keel, similar to the retractable dagger board on a Laser), motor right up to the shore, hop off the boat, and tie her off to the shore. For you keelboat readers out there, this plan is not as crazy as it sounds. I have seen this technique performed successfully before both on the beaches of Blake Island and in northern Puget Sound. Unfortunately, "successfully" is a word rarely associated with Charlie or his plans.

I cranked on the keel winch to raise the keel, and soon the hull was drawing mere inches, perfect for a shore approach. We motored full steam ahead into the shore, and long before it would have been necessary to reduce speed, the boat came to a stop with a sickening "Crunch, Split, Snap" sound. I lost my balance and almost fell off of the bow.

The sound didn't seem to come from the front of the boat, where I'd expect it to, and the boat didn't seem to be filling up with water, so I looked back to skipper Charlie to find out what happened.

"Oh geez. Oh geez oh geez." he said, quite flustered. "I forgot about the rudder!" He flapped the now resistance free tiller back and forth. Apparently, just like a Laser, the rudder on Beautiful Knot descends for several feet below the hull, and we had just rammed it into the launch ramp, where it split and even ripped a gudgeon off of the hull. Apparently Charlie has his first new item for his boat's "to-do" list.

Charlie unclipped the damaged rudder and brought it's shattered form aboard. Luckily we still had the outboard motor, so we could both steer and maneuver under power. We moved in closer to shore, and stopped the engine. Charlie grabbed an anchor line and an anchor almost as big as my fist, and we hopped to land, where Charlie tied the anchor and rode around some nearby rocks. Beautiful Knot was now safely tied to land, swishing quietly in the river current.

We walked over to Charlie's truck, and backed the rickety boat trailer into the water. Using warps we maneuvered Beautiful Knot onto the trailer, and hopped into the truck. We only got the trailer and boat about half way out of the water when the truck stopped moving forward. Gunning the engine was of no use. The truck tires squealed and smoked against the concrete, but we could not escape the mighty clutches of the Duwamish.

We got out of the truck to see what was the matter, and found a problem. When the boat trailer was empty, its tires could support its own weight easily. But when the trailer was put under load, one of the tires exhibited a definite lack of air. The deflated trailer tire was jamming its axle, preventing all forward motion. Unless Charlie wanted to drag and scrape his boat home, he was going to need an air pump. I realized I was probably going to be a little late for the SNC work party.

"Hey buddy, you need some air?" asked a deep, quiet voice from behind us. We turned around and saw a stocky black man standing inside a chain link fence, which enclosed a lawn full of an odd assortment of engines, wooden crates, and a trailer home.

Charlie and I looked at each other in disbelief - the last thing we expected to see in the heavy industrial section of south Seattle was a man, his house, and an offer of air for our flat tire.

"I see you've run into some trouble, and I have an air compressor in here" the man said. "The name is Ben."

Charlie ignored Ben and struggled with the trailer a few more times, trying to prop up the axle and squealing his truck tires some more against the pavement. I figure he took a good five hundred miles off of his tires that day. "Maybe we should take Ben up on his offer" I quietly suggested. Charlie agreed, but with much reluctance. He parked the truck on the ramp, and we wandered across the street to Ben's fence.

"Hey there, it looks like we do need some air," said Charlie, trying to get Ben's attention. "Our tire is flat. It's going to take me a while to get the boat off the trailer, and then the wheel off of the trailer though."

"No need to do that" said helpful Ben, "I've got some hoses for my compressor too."

It was going to take a mighty long hose to reach from Ben's compressor, across the street, down the launch ramp, and into the river to inflate our flat trailer tire. But damned if Ben didn't have not one but two extra long air compressor hoses which he connected together, and sure enough they were long enough to reach the tire. This seemed too good to be true.

Ben flipped the switch on the compressor in his yard, and our end of the hose gave us a snaky hissss. Charlie felt around under water for the valve stem on his tire, and affixed the bubbly hose end to the stem. The noise from the air compressor dropped half an octave, and some really big bubbles started popping up from underneath the trailer. But the tire remained as flat as a pancake. It turns out the tire wasn't merely flat, it was holed. Obviously this tire was no good and needed to be replaced.

We gave the hose back to the mysterious Ben, thanked him, and formed a plan "B". Charlie knew of a tire dealer nearby, so we backed the boat and trailer into the water, retied Beautiful Knot's anchor rode to the nearby rocks on shore, and drove to the tire store. Beautiful Knot bobbed happily in the river current, her bow pointing up stream.

At the tire store I learned that Charlie's social skills were about as well developed as his boating skills. He removed the tire from his trailer, and with tire in hand wandered into the shop section of the Les Schwab dealer, and started pestering busy shop employees about getting a repair or replacement. This is the social equivalent of wandering past the receptionist in a dentist's clinic and interrupting busy dentists about a loose tooth.

The Les Schwab shop employees carefully guided this strange yet insistent intruder to the front desk where Charlie could fill out forms, wait in line, and pay like everybody else. In about a half an hour Charlie was poorer, but he had a lovely new and inflated tire for his boat trailer. He reattached the tire and we zipped back to the boat launch area to collect the boat. Maybe I'd only be an hour late to the SNC work party.

We got to the boat launch, and Beautiful Knot was gone!

This certainly put a crimp in our plans. Was the boat stolen? Did Charlie's anchor drag off of the rocks where we set it? Did it sink?

We wandered over to the rock pile where Charlie last set the anchor, and the tiny lump of metal was still firmly attached to the rocks. Next we followed the anchor rode away from the boat launch, over a bank of rocks, and around a bend in the river, and there was Beautiful Knot, swishing in the current, her bow pointed upstream towards us.

For those readers not familiar with tidal rivers, here is a short explanation. The Duwamish river normally flows down stream from South Seattle into the south side of Elliott Bay, entering somewhat near West Seattle and Alki Beach.

But Elliott Bay is in Puget Sound, and therefore tidal. Depending on the positions of the sun and moon, the Elliott Bay water level can rise and fall over sixteen feet in a day. When the Seattle tides are low, the Duwamish rages into the bay, and it can be difficult to motor upriver to Harbor Island Marina. When Seattle tides are high, the water level of the bay can sometimes rise above the water level of the river. When this happens, water still naturally flows down hill, which is now up river. The direction of the Duwamish River reverses, and a lot of Puget Sound salt water rushes up the Duwamish. This lasts until the next low tide, when the Duwamish reverses and water once again flows into Elliott Bay.

Apparently we got our trailer tire repaired near a transition, and while we were gone the river reversed itself and now Beautiful Knot floated away in the new downstream direction, several hundred feet closer to Tacoma than when we left her.

Sheepishly, Charlie and I warped Beautiful Knot against the current, back to the truck and trailer. Ben reappeared too, behind his protective fence. He didn't say anything, but he had a look in his eye that said "boy, are those two idiots, or what?"

Getting a boat to sit properly on a trailer, especially when the boat is in a river current, is not an easy task. We first tried to position the boat by hand and tie her to the trailer, but we couldn't get the boat in far enough. Boats are very heavy when they are partially or fully out of the water, so boat trailers usually come equipped with a small winch to assist in lifting the boat. Charlie's trailer was no different. Boat trailers usually have strong healthy rope on the winch, capable of dragging heavy boats into position. In this regard, Charlie's trailer was way, way different.

Charlie's winch rope was the cheap yellow polypropylene type that people use for such demanding tasks as tying a Christmas tree to the roof of their car. Charlie's winch rope was so old it was almost gray instead of yellow, and it was fuzzy and frayed in many places. I attached the winch rope and its carabiner to Beautiful Knot's bow, cranked on the winch a couple of times, and heard a loud POP as the rope snapped and whizzed past my arm. This got helpful Ben's attention, and he wandered out of his cage and down to the boat trailer to observe us more closely.

I looked at Charlie, and he rummaged around for a replacement rope. He found one in his anchor locker, a three strand polypro rope just as old as the rope we broke, but at least this new rope was thicker and looked stronger.

I wound the new rope around the trailer winch, and led the bitter end to the carabiner we were using. I attached the rope to the 'biner with a bowline knot. It isn't a very strong knot, especially when tied in polypro line, but I figured it would get the job done.

This was too much for Ben, who finally started to speak. "No, you don't want a bowline in there" he said, pronouncing it "boe-lin" like all sailors do. "You want something stronger, and more permanent. Something that won't slip out in that polypro." He extended his big hands to take the line and hook.

I'm sure Charlie, in all his social ineptitude, would have rebuffed poor Ben. After all, who did Ben think he was, a land lubber living in a dinky trailer in the middle of an industrial zone with junk piled high in his fenced off yard, giving advice to a couple of experienced sailormen like me and Charlie? But I suspected that Ben knew a thing or two about boats despite his appearances, and so I handed him my project.

Ben took the line and the carabiner, and with a gentle fatherly voice started to talk. "Yeah, see here, this rope is too slippery for a bowline." He started to unravel the three strands of the line. "It's also a knot that reduces the strength of the line a lot, and it looks like you will need all the strength you can get." He bent the line back on itself and started pushing the strands, individually, back into the standing end of the rope. "Yeah, what you want, you see, is an eye splice, like this." and he handed me back the polypro line, with a beautiful eye splice at the end, and all the strands neatly tucked. This took him, maybe, thirty seconds.

This was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen. I've read books about tying eye splice knots - the diagrams always looked complicated and a bit scary. I knew West Marine taught seminars on how to do eye splices. I also knew that if I paid West Marine enough, they would splice an eye into the end of a rope for me. West Marine sells pre spliced dock lines for people like me. It's been my experience that the only people who can tie an eye splice are old sailors and glider pilots. And most of them still require a book of diagrams and a lot of swear words. I was truly in awe of this man Ben.

With Ben's help we winched the boat up onto the trailer. Near the end we didn't have enough strength to pull on the winch handle, so Ben found us a length of pipe to extend it. We actually bent his pipe about 15 degrees tugging on the winch, but Ben's eye splice held strong and Beautiful Knot finally nestled into the bed of the trailer for new adventures with her less than competent owner.

While Charlie lowered the mast on Beautiful Knot for the ride home, I started talking to Ben to find out his story. He oversees a brand new private marina just up the river, owned and used by the Duwamish Indian tribe fishermen. He used to live in Florida, where he drank a lot, dealt drugs and got into a lot of trouble. He moved up here to Seattle, away from his old friends and old life, living clean, "Just living day to day" he kept saying.

In Florida he worked for a marina for a while, and learned a lot about boats, boat handling, and idiot boat owners that treated him and his offers of help with complete disrespect. He was used to folks like Charlie.

I took Ben aside, and asked him how we could ever repay him. He really saved our butts several times that day. He wouldn't accept money, of course, but did allow as how he had one weakness for cigarettes, so maybe I could help him out. Since I do not smoke, I really couldn't help him out right then and there, so we shook hands and agreed to meet again someday, which he really didn't expect.

Charlie dropped me off back at Harbor Island Marina, and I waved good bye and good riddance to a man and his dream of fixing up a beat up boat. I drove over to the Washington Yacht Club's Snooze n Cruise workparty, showing up really late. Rebecca was the SNC chairperson, and she was really disappointed that somebody like me would show up at work party after all the work was done, just to pay and leave.

I tried to explain to her that I unexpectedly had to spend the afternoon knee deep in the Duwamish River while it was flowing backwards, chasing boats and changing tires and learning eye splices from a Florida drug dealer. She gave me one of those "oh whatever" looks that said she didn't really believe a word I was saying. I guess I don't really blame her.

I eventually did visit Ben again, bringing with me a whole variety of cigarettes, including a pack of Salems with a picture of a sailboat on them. He invited me into his trailer home where I learned lots about marina management, Indian fishing, and I even took home a fresh Indian caught salmon, literally "just off the boat". But that's another story.

The End

I've enjoyed volunteering my time and my skills to the Washington Yacht Club, but it is time to move on and let somebody else learn and contribute to the club. My wife Heather and I have purchased a large sailboat on the Atlantic coast of the US and will have moved there by the time you read this. You can follow us and our continuing adventures on our personal web site, http://www.geocities.com/peljack

Now go learn to sail the keelboats and share cruising adventures of your own!