A sailboat on its way from Maine to North Carolina was shipwrecked on Napeague under a clear midnight sky Oct. 22, as Vanessa Wyman and Mareson Yates attempted to navigate the local waters.
"We were starting to hug the coast, because we were going to go into an inlet for a marina to refuel," Ms. Wyman said, "and on the chart plotter, it wasn't showing the shoals that were there, and we hit it. We were going into low tide, so the waves were pushing us back and rolling us from side to side, which created a crack in the hull."
The waves pushed the boat onto the beach near Dolphin Drive, police reports indicate. Because of the crack, the boat could not be towed, and the couple planned to scrap it. It was one of only 150 models of that make, Ms. Wyman said.
The couple had been living on the Vagabond 47 sailboat for a year and a half with their two cats, Scooter and Disco, she said, and had planned to spend the winter months in North Carolina. Instead, they spent the night in a hotel and traveled back to Maine in a U-Haul truck.