Dragger ‘Very, Very Far Off Course’
A 55-foot dragger that ran aground at sunrise Sunday on Navy Beach in Montauk was still stranded on the sands off Fort Pond Bay yesterday afternoon, tilted toward its portside with a hole in the hull. The 1,200 gallons of fuel oil that were in its tanks when it grounded were pumped out into a tanker truck on Tuesday.
According to Lt. William Stewart of the Coast Guard’s Marine Safety Detachment, based in Coram, work on the vessel, home-ported in New London, Conn., was canceled yesterday because of bad weather predictions from the south. The rains are expected to have passed by this morning, and a salvage company was scheduled to be brought in at dawn. “There is a 10-by-6-inch hole portside,” Lieutenant Stewart said, “more forward than aft.”
The steel-hulled dragger, the Miss Scarlett, is expected to be towed off the sand and back in New London by tomorrow, provided the hole is successfully patched. The extra day is needed, the lieutenant said, to make sure the boat stays afloat. Also, the Coast Guard does not want the towing operation to take place in the dark.
If the patch does not take, the removal effort will have to be reconsidered.
“Why is it here, right? That is the question,” Rob Morsch, a partner in Consolidated Marine, the company that owns the craft, asked rhetorically on Tuesday morning as he assessed the damage. The Miss Scarlett had left New London around midnight Saturday. “The boat was very, very far off course,” he said. Asked where it was heading, he said, “Maybe Montauk Point. New London is there.” He pointed across the Sound. “They should have gone there,” he added, pointing east. “There is a 20-mile error. It makes me think that there was. . . .” He trailed off, before wondering, more to himself than any bystander, whether any member of the crew was awake at the helm when the boat went up on the sand.
“There is an ongoing investigation into the cause,” Lieutenant Stewart said yesterday. Right now, he said, all signs point to the men being asleep at the time of the accident.
“We had to hire people to guard the boat because people want to steal,” Mr. Morsch said of the stranded vessel. “True colors come out. They know who I am and that I grew up as a fisherman. I lived here. I ran Kevin McGuire’s boat for seven years. I moved away about five years ago.”
The Miss Scarlett is named for his daughter, he said.
Patching the hole in the hull had been impossible before today, because the boat listed onto the side the hole is on. “You really need to get under it,” Mr. Morsch said. They had attempted to patch from the inside. “We tried to use two pieces of wood because of some pipe in the way. We were down there with a torch, cutting out, but we still couldn’t get in there.” Tugboats will not touch a craft to right it if it is taking on water, he said. “They’re afraid of getting sued.”
The company appeared to be in a catch-22 situation on Tuesday, unable, without a tugboat, to right the Miss Scarlett in order to repair the hull, but with no tugboat willing to help.
Yesterday, however, Lieutenant Stewart said enough sand had been cleared to allow a patch to be slid into place and secured from inside the vessel.
Are there more holes? “It is not an exact science. We do the assessment the best we can,” the lieutenant said. At one point, he said, a diver was able to patch the hole temporarily, and as the water was pumped out of the vessel it seemed inclined to float. That did not last, however. If another hole appears after the obvious one is patched, the reassessment will begin.
The Coast Guard had officers on hand Tuesday, watching as Miller Environmental Services pumped out the oil after placing a boom around the boat. By the end of the day, the oil was gone but the Miss Scarlett remained. There were no signs that oil had leaked into Fort Pond Bay.
The winds were blowing from the northwest at nearly 20 knots when the boat went aground. There were no injuries reported, and the crew was removed from the craft around noon on Sunday.
The 38-year-old Miss Scarlett was purchased by Consolidated Marine within the past couple of years and rechristened. It had done service for many years out of Montauk, Mr. Morsch said, along with two other boats owned by the partnership.