Sinking Boat

Sunday 28^th November

While I was washing the decks this morning, John from the sailboat Entrada, walked down the dock and stopped alongside Batavia the boat on the T-Dock in front of us.  I carried on with what I was doing, but John stood there for quite a while, eventually he looked up and said “Good Morning”, I smiled and replied, then he said “this boat’s sinking”.  I looked across at Bataviaa and couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed she was going down.  I jumped off Daisy and went over to where John was standing, and sure enough she was slowly sinking, the cockpit was almost full of water.

There was nobody on the boat, it has apparently been left there for some time, no one remembered seeing the owners.  I said we should do something, so John went across to Pier’s boat.  Pier is one of the owners of the boatyard. Bob came over and climbed into Batavia’s cockpit, he peered through the window, and saw that the cabin was completely full of water.

A few minutes later Pier came over and brought a pump, he broke the lock off the door to access the inside of Batavia, and started pumping out the water.  It took over an hour to empty all the water.  Pier left a pump aboard that would automatically switch on should more water get into the cabin.

It scared me to see how fast she was sinking, if John hadn’t spotted it when he did, I am sure she would be on the ocean bed right now…