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This week marked my first pre-dawn wakeup call of the season. When the weather is not ideal and the phone rings at 0245 on a Wednesday morning, you know it going to be bad, and it was. All I had to go on from our dispatcher, Nick LeBlanc, was a USCG report of a vessel hitting a nav aid somewhere off Quonset Point and sinking.
Capt. Phil and I got underway as quickly as we could and were on scene at the Electric Boat gantry crane and dock by around 0310 or so. As you can see from the first photo, the scene was pretty ugly.
When a high speed boat comes to a screeching halt, bodies fly and have collisions of their own, as you can see from the blood-spattered console and seats. Thankfully, there appears to have been no permanent damage to the occupants.
As you can see, the same can't be said for the boat, which was heavily damaged. The buoy in question, the red #6 directly off Quonset held up better that the boat, but still showed some signs of the force of the collision. Notice in particular, the 'X' shaped steel angle iron that is bowed inward from the impact, and the pronounced cant of the electronics box in the center of the buoy.
Judging from the damage discovered after the casualty was hauled out, the boat hit the buoy very squarely and then went over the top of it, as there was fiberglass damage along the full length of the bottom, and the port outboard was missing its skeg.
I'll leave the details of the operation to Capt. Phil, whose salvage blog will be starting up next week. Everything went as planned and we had the casualty hauled out at Pleasant Street Wharf around 0915 Wednesday morning.
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