Hazard to Navigation
By Robert Mariner, East Sierra Branch
As my pen name implies, I’ve spent quite a bit of time on the ocean. Several years ago I owned a 35-foot sailboat, and one summer I made a solo passage from San Francisco Bay to Hawai’i, returning via Anchorage, Alaska. Nice cruise, and the following event is one of several that still stand out in my memory.
A week out of Honolulu, heading north across deep water and a warm steady breeze, I was making about 9 knots under full sail, enjoying the day, the clean air, and the freedom of the open ocean. At about 3 in the afternoon, I spotted an odd disturbance in the water perhaps half a mile off my starboard bow. It seemed to be stationary in the water, but I couldn’t make out any details.
Altering course to approach this disturbance, I passed about 100 feet upwind of it. It appeared to be something rectangular, measuring about 8 by 9 feet with fairly square corners, and of a dull greenish color. It wasn’t floating on the surface, but just under it as wave crests passed. So I moved off about a quarter mile, tacked around to approach this object, then steered the boat up dead into the wind so as to come to a stop relative to it and perhaps 10-15 feet away.
The object turned out to be a shipping container floating end-up. Those things are occasionally lost overboard from container ships in rough weather, and can be very heavy, posing extreme danger to any small boat (like mine) that might run into one, for example in the middle of moonless night. Because there was no way my little boat could tow it to any port for retrieval, there was only one sane thing to do: Remove this serious menace.
I kept a stainless-steel semi-automatic rifle on board, along with several magazines of military-surplus ammunition for it sealed in waterproof plastic bags. So I ducked into the main cabin, grabbed one of those bagged magazines and the rifle, and went back up on deck. Unbagging the magazine and inserting it into the rifle, I cycled the action once to chamber a cartridge, and fired one shot at as steep an angle as I could into the nearest part of the exposed end of this container. A stream of bubbles immediately started coming from the resulting hole, so I fired five more shots, the hole made by each one also releasing a stream of bubbles.
Leaving a round in the rifle’s chamber, I set its safety, put it down, and started the boat’s propulsion engine to hold position near the container. In a couple of minutes, it was at least three feet below the surface and sinking faster by the second. I decided that this container could no longer pose a hazard to navigation, so I unloaded the rifle, returned it and the magazine to the cabin for later cleaning, shut down the engine and resumed my briefly interrupted course toward colder waters.