Continued from yesterday… Once Eric climbed aboard, he noticed that things in the cockpit were sliding out under the door. We lost a plastic mat we keep back there, but Eric was able to save the shoes that were back there, bringing them inside. He opened the back door and turned on the light switch. He knew power was still working, since the anchor light and little red LED courtesy lights were on around the outside of the boat. He first noticed the hallway refrigerator had come open and almost every single thing inside it had fallen out and smashed on the floor. Lots of stuff that had been sitting out had been thrown to new places. The good news was that Eric didn’t hear any sounds of the bottom crunching against the rocks. He went into the pilot house and saw both bilge pumps were running. Oh no. Eric turned on the engine, and then ran downstairs. The whole engine room was flooded with about a foot of water. It was now about 2145.

Eric ran back upstairs and showed Louis how to use the manual bilge pump located in the starboard aft locker. Louis pumped away. Eric turned on the navigation electronics, untied the mooring rope (he made no effort to try and save the rope, he just let it go), and gunned the boat at full speed away from the shore at 120 degrees as he had previously planned. He didn’t go out very far, wanting to stay close to shore so that they could easily evacuate should they not be able to get the flooding under control.

Christi was left sitting in the bar with some of Louis’s crew (there were 8 people total on Louis’s sailboat, so there were people on the beach and in the bar). Christi found out that they had already called the coast guard and been told that the coast guard felt that the conditions were too unsafe for them to come and help. Eric called Christi (Eric on the satellite phone, Christi on our cell phone that we normally carry with us all the time) and told her about the flooding, and asked her what she wanted saved should Kosmos sink. Eric kept thinking about different ways he could get some stuff off Kosmos and to shore so that at least everything wouldn’t be lost. He got out another life vest and was getting ready to deploy the liferaft.

Tai had followed Eric to the beach. Remember, Tai’s knees were throbbing with severe pain and he really needed to sit and give his poor knees a rest. This was the second walk he made down the beach in agonizing pain. Tai watched from the shore, figuring that if Eric or Louis got into trouble trying to board Kosmos, he could swim out and save them. Tai watched for a while from shore. It was evident there was something seriously wrong. Eric was doing circles in shallow water, and deviating from the plan of heading straight out to sea could mean a problem. The stabilizers weren’t on either, which Tai took to be a bad sign, since the boat was rocking so violently that the water was coming over both sides of the boat. The same local guy that had been watching Eric and Louis earlier approached to Tai and asked if Tai was with one of the boats in trouble. Tai said yes, and affirmed that he suspected there was a serious problem with Kosmos. The local kindly called the police and the coast guard and acted as translator. Tai had no idea that the sailboat had already made contact with the coast guard. Tai got the same answer. Tai’s new friend also offered a lot of helpful pointers, but since Tai had no way of communicating with Eric, they were moot.

One of Louis’s crew mates had realized that it probably wasn’t smart to leave the dinghy motor lying in the sand, so he kindly hid it for us in a nearby garden. He gave Tai explicit instructions as to where to find it, and then headed back to the bar. Tai headed back to the bar shortly thereafter to tell Christi about the coast guard and to see if she had talked to Eric on the satellite phone. Tai got the low down on the flooding, and immediately went in search of a bilge pump to help keep ahead of the flooding Kosmos.

The police came out a few minutes later to talk to the respective crews at the bar. The officer drove up in a golf cart that could only be distinguished as “police” by the small blue flashie light on top. He was wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt. He was accompanied by two other men in casual clothes who we don’t think were fellow police. None of the three spoke any English. Fortunately, Louis’s girlfriend, Elizabeth, speaks a little Italian. She is by no means fluent, but she could speak enough to effectively communicate. The policeman called the coast guard again and put Christi on the phone with them. Fortunately, the man she spoke with on the phone spoke fluent English and didn’t seem to have a problem comprehending her American accent, as many Europeans do. We found out later that the coast guard had been confused by the two vastly different emergency reports coming in so close together from the same place and had called their English speaking commander, who was off duty, in to deal with the situation himself. Christi explained the situation and had to repeat herself a few time to clarify the fact that there were two boats in trouble, one with two passengers and one empty. This time the coast guard said they would send help and a boat would be there in 40 50 minutes.

Tai had returned to the bar mid phone call and told us that emergency bilge pumps were a technology that had not yet reached Italy. Tai was assured that the coast guard would not have an additional pump on board to give to Eric or Louis. A few minutes later, the coast guard called Christi back and told her they could not reach Eric on the radio. She gave them the satellite phone number. They still had not left yet. Just as an FYI, there was indoor and outdoor seating in the bar. The bar had already closed, but the two crews were still congregated on the tables and chairs in the outdoor area.

Aboard Kosmos, the manual bilge pump stopped working, assumedly clogged with something. Eric turned the helm over to Louis, telling him to do circles in shallow water, while he went into the engine room to get some things set up he hoped to never use. It was a spare bilge pump (a 3700 gallon per hour 12 volt unit), a 12 volt portable battery pack, and long hose. The water was slowly rising. Eric wired the pump to the portable battery pack and ran the hose through the living room and out the back door (there is a hatch in the floor of the living room so you can climb in and out of the engine room, which is directly under the living room). The latch that keeps the back door open was not holding the door open in the rough seas, and the door kept trying to slam shut onto the hose. Eric had to tie the door open. Getting the bilge pump rigged with its wires and hose while the boat was violently rocking was tricky to say the least. Thankfully, the emergency bilge pump worked! The water level was going down! Phew! He knew the little battery pack wouldn’t last forever if more water was coming in, so he worked on wiring the pump to the boat’s 12 volt system. He got it working and the water level continued to steadily go down.

He went to the pilothouse to check on things there. Eric noticed the batteries weren’t charging up. Oh no. That meant the alternator was dead. And without power, no bilge pumps. Thankfully Kosmos is designed with two on engine alternators. He flipped the emergency switch to connect the 2nd alternator to the batteries. Much to his relief, the 2nd alternator was working and the batteries started charging. It was now 2345. Oh, and Eric’s legs were cramping up something awful, making the work in the engine room where he was crouched low physically painful. Somewhere in the midst of all the activity, the coast guard had called Kosmos on the satellite phone and let them know they would be arriving in 20 minutes. The coast guard call was about 2315.

This whole time, in between everything else he was doing, Eric had been trying to find the leak. He checked everything he could think of and turned off all the through hulls. He couldn’t find anything. When he went to check the starboard stabilizer, which is located in the bathroom, he saw the bathroom port hole was open and that tons of water was flooding in through it. He checked the other portholes and found the one over the bed in the forward berth was also open, and even more water was getting in through there. With the windows closed and the three bilge pumps running, the water level was steadily going down and the imminent fear of sinking was gone. Relieved, they decided to head to north and east to where it would be calmer. They turned on the stabilizers, praying they had not been damaged by the rocky bottom. They worked. Yes! It was now 0000. They found that away from Scari, conditions got significantly calmer.

At 0030 they found a target on the radar 4 miles out that they thought might be Louis’s boat. The target didn’t seem to be moving, and the charts showed nothing but sea, so it probably was a boat and not a buoy. They used the radar’s ARPA to track it and saw that it was moving at 0.5 knots. It had to be Louis’s boat. They went to retrieve it. Eric asked Louis where the closest place was with suitable marine facilities for fixing the leak, and he said Lipari, another Aeolian Island about 25 miles southwest.

Eric called Christi to give her the update. Eric reported excitedly that the leak seemed to be under control, and that he thought they had found Louis’s boat and that they were going to retrieve it, then go to the nearby island of Lipari. There was no boat yard on Stromboli, and they needed to get to a boat yard ASAP to have both of their damaged boats repaired. Kosmos was holding her own for the time being, but the source of the leak was unknown and it could get worse. We had no idea how badly damaged Louis’s boat might be. Eric was thrilled the coast guard would be helping them in all this. He envisioned the three boats would be going to Lipari together. Christi filled him in on the bad news that the coast guard said their job was to save lives, not boats. The coast guard had clearly told her that they would not make any effort to save the sailboat at all. They planned to board Kosmos, and if it was safe, they would take Kosmos back to Scari. If it wasn’t safe, they’d make Eric and Louis abandon ship. We could see the coast guard’s perspective, but the truth of the matter was the waves in Scari were violent and it was guaranteed that Kosmos would be beaten up even worse, the bilge pumps would eventually burn out, and she would sink. Scari was not an option for Eric he had to get to Lipari. He decided to continue towards Louis’s boat.

Eric left Louis to do watch and continued to search for the source of the leak. He stuck his hand in the bilge water and was zapped with electricity. Oh no! This meant he couldn’t easily look for the leak in the most likely of places. It also meant that he couldn’t fix either of the other two installed bilge pumps should they die. The rubber gloves he had were probably not going to long enough either.

The coast guard called again just as Kosmos got to Louis’s boat, at about 0130. They were in a little inflatable rib about a mile away. It had to be wet and cold and miserably rocky in that little vessel. We found out later that they sent their fastest boat rather than a slower, enclosed boat because they were so worried about Kosmos sinking. On the VHF radio Eric could hear them just fine, but they could not hear Eric, so they called on the satellite phone. They wanted Kosmos to turn around and go to them. Eric was hesitant, knowing that if they turned around, Louis’s boat would be lost for good. They decided to get Louis’s boat first, since it was only 10 minutes away at this point.

Remember, it is windy, raining lightly and pitch black outside from the cloud cover. Louis’s boat didn’t have a single light on not even the anchor light. It was very hard to see on such a dark night and they would have never found it without the radar. As they neared, Eric shined the spotlight where the radar said the target was located. It really was Louis’s boat! Yes! The boat was swinging wildly from side to side, so Eric couldn’t get too close to it for fear of being whacked by the mast. Eric got as close as he dared. Louis was about to jump in when Eric remembered the key. Louis would be really bummed if he swam out there only to find he had left the key with Eric. Louis jumped in and swam to his boat and boarded it. At least this time Louis had a life vest on. Eric kept the spotlight on the boat so Louis could see it, and a kept flashlight trained on Louis to monitor his progress and make sure he was OK. By 0145 Louis was safely on board. After a quick inspection, it looked like the boat was completely unharmed, the most damage being a few bucketfuls of water in the bilge. Even though they thought she may have hit rocks when she was close to the shore, she had managed to miss the rocks and was floating happily along.

Eric gave Christi a quick call with the status update, and then he and Louis both went to meet the coast guard vessel. The coast guard was confused about two boats showing up rather than just one, and straightening out the confusion took a few minutes. Louis didn’t have a satellite phone and the coast guard’s radio wasn’t working, so the coast guard shouted to Eric and Louis to follow them to the “safe place”. Neither had any idea where the coast guard was taking them. Christi had told Eric it would be Scari, but in Eric’s mind Scari wasn’t a “safe place” and he was hopeful they were going somewhere else. Eric was exhausted. He spotted a couple cokes in the wreckage on the living room floor and drank them for a quick caffeine boost. Sadly one of the cans had sprung a leak and was only half full. While following the coast guard, Eric did see a couple eruptions from the Stromboli volcano. They were big explosions of glowing orange spray and it was pretty spectacular. It was too bad he couldn’t relax and enjoy the show.

It wasn’t until 0245 that they realized that they really were going back to Scari. The waves got bigger and more violent the closer they got. Eric was unhappy about it but unsure what to do. Louis decided to take the advice the helpful local on the beach had given him earlier to go to an anchorage on the west side of the island where the seas were calmer. He broke away from the coast guard and went on his own. Since Louis’s boat was unharmed, he didn’t need to get to Lipari. As Kosmos and the coast guard vessel neared Scari, Eric asked where the coast guard would be anchoring. They replied that it was too rough to anchor. They were just going to see that Eric got off the boat onto the pier, then go on their merry way. When Eric explained that he couldn’t stay in Scari and had to get to Lipari, they basically told him to do whatever he wanted. They wouldn’t escort him to Lipari, but they would keep in touch in case Eric needed them to come out again, and they told him exactly where the boat yard was on Lipari. The water level in the engine room was now low enough that the third bilge pump no longer needed to pump, but the other two were going non-stop. The water level wasn’t going up, nor was it going down, so there was definitely a significant leak. Eric decided to go for it and turned around.

Back at the bar, the police came by and said one of the boats was coming in. When Tai and Christi had last spoke to Eric, Eric had said both vessels were coming in. Tai and Christi were hoping that meant Eric had defied the coast guard and gone to Lipari anyway, though they were terrified about whether he would make it before the leak got worse. Christi, Tai, and Elizabeth went down to the pier to wait, wondering which vessel would be coming in. The waves were crashing violently over the top of the pier. They were all dreading the boat’s arrival, knowing that the boat would likely be destroyed by the powerful waves. Later the police came back and said neither vessel was coming in. The threeof them were relieved, but thoroughly confused. They called Eric and got a status update. Eric told Tai and Christi to get on the first ferry to Lipari.

To be continued tomorrow”¦ and it only gets crazier”¦

And the photo gallery:

Our poor refrigerator was beaten up

And it all fell on the floor

Here is the emergency bilge pump after it was wired into the 12 volt system. You can see the hose leading towards the hatch.

Here is the hose going up through the hatch. You can also see the battery pack that the emergency bilge pump was initially wired up to.

And the hose coming up through the hatch and out the back door to the cockpit. You can’t tell in this picture, but Eric actually had tied the hose by the window next to the door to keep the hose from falling back into the engine room.