True rescue story

[egreen024]

This Happen to me in the year 2001 while boating on the Hudson river in NY. At the time I owned a 1999 bayliner ciera 2355 cabin cruiser with a 210 mercruiser engine, this is a pretty heavy boat with just enought power, minimum power this boat was available with, I bought it brand new and at the time all I did was cruising and striper bass fishing. On this day the weather was pretty bad, water was rought and only a few boats were out, I was fishing at Croton point when me and my friend decided that water was to rought to do any fishing at all. As we were preparing to leave back to marina, this was Vicking marina in Verplank a good 45 to 1 hour ride with that boat my VHS radio was tranmitting a distress call, on that boat I used to monitor channel 16 and 9. By the way waves were about 4 footers, and this is pretty scary on this river, Croton point is like a peninsula that stretches into the river, river on the north side is very wide and then it narrows and opens up again, causing water to be very dangerous with current, on south side there's also a creek that causes dangerous sand bars that actually change location due to heavy water flow from river. I was fishing this sand bar when Coast guard answer the call and said it would take about 45 minutes to get to location, that said they call all boats in vacinety to see who could help. I was only 5 minutes to scene so I pronpt to assist the other boat. This other boat was a 19 footer caddy cabin, the problem was he could not start engine and the two ancors were dragging bottom and he was beeing pushed closer to piles of stone protecting shore from erosion. When I arrived I saw a problem, this boat was ancored from the transom with two ancors, boats should never be ancor from the transom, I was told that this can cause water to go up into carburator cause of wave action,(not sure if it is true) Got there checked with guy if everyone was ok, the people on board was : guy in low 40's wife maybe high 30's daughter 5 and baby about 1 1/2, I wanted to get this people into my boat but waves were trowing boats up and down so we quit this, everyone at this point was crying except the guy, I threw a tow rope to him so I could tow him into safety, but we left both encore lines down untill I could make some progress into river, well My boat could not turn and face other boat into the wind, so after a few attempts I told him it was not working and we needed to do something quick, told him to cut one ancor line and gave it another try still no good, at this point I told him only way I could help was by him cutting the second ancor line and let his boat swing around while mine was already facing wind and ready to tow, we are now in about five feet of water and getting shollow for my boat, he didn't wanted to do it, but wife yelled at him and made him do it, it worked as planned his boat swand around and after a little stroggle I was back into deep water heading to closest marina, His comment was that it was not his marina, I told him to stay there until weather calmed down and get boat later, his wife was very thankfull for what we did, him he complained that he lost two ancors and line, myself, I only had 3 years of experience and was never involve in situations like this, don't know if it was the right way to do this rescue but it sure was what made more sence at the time, and if it was today I probably would do the same given the conditions. This could be a much sadder story, actually it could be a statistic, not only his boat my mine was also at risk. Oh yeah, about 400 yards was a 41 footer cruiser ancored, guess he didn't have his radio on, certanly hope he didn't ignored the call since it could end up with the loss of life and not one but two boats. Sorry for the long story but I felt the description of the area would help those that don't know the area understand and dangerous this place is specially when you don't follow basic rules, like ancoring from the bow all the time.