Monday, July 29, 2024
Chapter Seventeen/ Forty Years on a Hook by Peter Romanowsky and Piracy on San Francisco Bay
One sunny day if I recall One sunny day if I recall I noticed a marker buoy attached to an anchor on Richardson Bay off of Sausalito, where I was anchored also and had no idea whose marker buoy it was and obviously marking and anchor and I watched that simple float made out of a floating boat fender or something of that nature and not a professional looking water buoy and one day eventually, after watching it carefully. The buoy wasn't there anymore and I assumed from previous experience of my dragging for anchors to salvage, that I had hooked on to the anchor line before and left it, because it was still attached to to an anchor and a second lesser anchor and if I recall was attached to it and eventually the bouy marker disappeared and I assumed it broke off because it was tied on with a thin line, if I recall that was attached to the main anchor line and so I assume that the anchor was still there and the buoy had just broken off and when you don't have a hunch or know of who's Mooring our anchorout buoy it is.Then it is fair game to remove a potential nautical hazard and or something puncturing somebody's boat at low tide for instance, for the tide it's very low and boats and their keels can sit in the mud and at a minus tide and you never want to one's boat to settle over and abandon Mooring or an anchor and risky even anchoring in such shallow water and one must stay diligent and prayerful that their own boat doesn't sit on their own anchof, at a minus tide and puncture one's own boat and so I grappled for the anchor and could not pull it up for it was too deeply stuck in the mud and so I paid a friend of mine a small sum of money who had a small motor boat to help power or motor the submerged anchor from the mud and it turned out to be a beautiful and expensive plow anchor and so I stowed it away and not too long afterwards a man called Gunney who was anchored on the bay also called me over and or asked me if I had an anchor for sale for him and I told him I did and it was exactly the size anchor that he was looking for and I showed it to him and he exploded and started calling me a thief and that I had stolen that anchor and he had a fair looking lady on his sailboat yacht and it looked like he was trying to impress her by being a real rough and tough guy and he didn't even stop to offer me a finder's fee and pulled out a piece of braided line and matched it with a piece of trip line on the anchor for easily pulling out an anchor from the mud in Reverse of which the trip line was mostly gone and they seem to match and but they didn't seem the same size and thickness and yet had the same blue color braiding and before it was a braided line of which I care not much for braided lines as anchor lines by the way for the only line that's ever broken on me was a braided line and that's another story from my experience of increasing out on debate for decades and so I yelled back at him after accusing me of being a thief and even though it was the exact same anchor from its size and weight and style, I was put off by the way he reacted and calling me a thief right off the bat, of which all of us anchor outs are sensitive about being called such things. Plus I had paid someone to pull the anchor out of the mud on top of that and again he offered no finders fee and just wanted to impress his teacher lady friend as he introduced her and I have never seen her on the water since and apparently she took a hint that this guy was a rude sort of character and she vanished after the incident and things backfired on him apparently and so he being No Doubt wounded and brooding and Begin stalking me and taunting me and acting threatening, relentlessly and even from a second Story of a building he was doing carpentry or electrical work on next to the landing area for our Skiffs to get to our boats anchored out and was relentless in this taunts and insults and I held fast after being initially insulted by him and accused of being a thief. Instead of a legitimate salvager and this went on relentlessly for a long period of time and days and months and it seemed like over a year and in the meanwhile his boat had drug his anchor a couple of times during the storms and drifted for away and re-anchored and then he would recover his boat and it happened a couple of times and I'm sure he's getting madder and more angry and could have had the anchor to prevent that if he had been cordial and nice to me and no doubt his brooding kept going on and on for over a year at least and it seemed like or felt like 2 years and then one night after I had a little to drink after a long day playing my guitar for tips at the Sausalito Ferry boat landing pure of which all told looking back I have done for over 17 years with two dogs at two different times as part of my guitar playing and dog therapy Act for visiting International tourist in the town where Otis Redding wrote his most famous song in collaboration called sitting on the Dock of the Bay and I felt like I was sitting in the best spot to play the guitar and Busk for a living, after injuring my back over 17 years of salvaging and recycling and dragging for anchors and chain and line and not using a winch and but the tides going up and down and cinching my anchor lines to let the tide pool anchors up out of the Bay and meanwhile also using my back of which eventually I was diagnosed with arthritis in my lower back and something called spinal spars and something else of which I can't remember it this time and so I had to quit that type of heavy lifting and hard work and salvaging and recycling and buying and selling used boats gifts and outboard motors and other boats that I had on and off in my possession to buy sell and trade with and had become a full-time entertainer and ministering to the local and to the international tourist visiting Sausalito from San Francisco and then again one evening while I was exhausted and came home from work and had a little and enough to drink to pass out and fall asleep on my floating home converted from a proximately 50 ft Ferro cement sailboat hole that was turned into a floating home and I found myself awaken to a light shining through a window on my boat and at first I thought it was the Coast Guard in the middle of the night checking on me and I thought it was their spotlight and when I got up to look I found it I had been Unchained from my anchor in the middle of the night, by this man gunny who boarded my boat in my sleep and went to the giant trouble of unchaining my vote and him thinking I had enough to drink that I wouldn't wake up while he's walking on the deck of my boat in my sleep and he cut a salvaged motorboat without an engine that I had salvaged and was tied to the back of my boat and I had drifted into somebody's back porch on the island of Belvidere close by and it was somebody's porch light that I was looking at and not the Coast Guard and so it was a dead quiet still night with no end and apparently at a full and slack tied and I was miraculously able to nudge the boat away from someone's backyard porch built over the water and I had a black line tied to my skiff and two or three horse British seagull motor of which he apparently could not find the line because it was black and it was night, to cut that also and I was able to motor my 48 ft concrete and steel and plywood floating home back to where I was anchored and then I went over to his boat and woke him up around dawn and told him what a rotten thing that was that he did to a man in his sleep and he looked very contrite and couldn't believe that I had gotten the boat back so soon the same night and said that it was a miracle and I called the Coast Guard to file a complaint and they didn't come out and said to come to the office to file the complaint and I never had or took the time and just let it go and this all made a great impression upon him no doubt for he was very contrite about what he did and him being caught red-handed so to speak and this time went on and I hadn't heard much from him since the incident and it was getting their Christmas time and I had salvaged a plow anchor similar to the one that he apparently lost and that I had found and it wasn't the same size it was smaller and so I decided to make peace with him by offering this anchor to him and leaving it on the deck of his boat around Christmas time and he was so amazed by my act after having my boat set adrift and all the harassment and taunting that I've had to endure for over a year at least that he came over with some hot coffee and offered me some hot coffee and thanked me and we became friends after the peace offering that I gave him and a funny if not interesting footnote to my experience with this former helicopter door gunner from what she got his name gunny from Vietnam and a local female anchor out, had boarded his boat and looking for possible missing property of hers found her computer on his boat and the place was filled with Starbucks coffee packages of which she believed was stolen by gunny from the Starbucks in Sausalito where he also and apparently and briefly worked and the sailboat yacht was also filled with apparently other stolen property and if that is not the kettle calling the pot black and even though it was not confirmed for me that Gunney was a thief and a pirate and eventually he just disappeared from the anchoration waterfront on San Francisco Bay off sausalito's shores and heard he had moved on with his boat to elsewhere? The moral of this story is if you have an unforgiving enemy and if you have forgiveness in your heart and do a kind act for that unforgiving person one might be surprised of the reaction and in making a friends of ones enemies, by giving them a gift and or a peace offering.
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