The Pike Pole

  The Pike Pole 

Besides being a fine woodworker, my son Keith is a shipwright, a small boat builder, a sailor, and sailboat racer. For over twenty-five years, he has built, helped build, or repaired many types of boats on both coasts, from eight-foot sailing dinghies to two-hundred foot megayachts. I mention these things because I want you to understand that Keith knows his way around boats, how to build them, and how to sail them. And his skills served him well several years ago on an overcast day on swirling San Francisco Bay. 

The day started the way it usually does in the Bay area, foggy. It always seems to be foggy there. The Spaniards were the first Europeans to sail the coast of what is now California, and did so as early as the mid-1500’s, but never discovered the narrow entrance to San Francisco Bay, now called the Golden Gate, until the late-1700’s.  It went undiscovered for so long because the Golden Gate is shrouded in fog more often than not. Why I mention the Golden Gate is that it is not only a funnel for fog which overspreads San Francisco and its namesake Bay, but also is a conduit for wind and tide into the Bay, and through a nearby channel within the Bay known as Racoon Straight.

Keith needed to move his sailboat from a Richmond marina southwest across San Francisco Bay, and through Racoon Straight, to the boatyard in Sausalito where he was employed. There he intended to fit it out and use it for day sailing.  This boat was one of a long succession of boats, all of which people gave him. That’s right, gave him. It goes something like this. Keith, being a sailor, likes to hang out at marinas, and trade yarns with the owners of boats docked there. Some have owned their boats for years, no longer wish to sail them, and end up giving them to the lad. It’s likely they see Keith as a lover of boats, and, with Keith as the recipient, they feel assured that they are giving their boats to a good home. This has happened so often that it has become the stuff of family legend. He currently has received seven of them with an eighth on the way. If, after reading this story, you want to give him a boat, thanks, but you will have to wait in line.

So there he was with his latest free boat, a thirty-three foot, Spalding sloop, built in Sausalito in 1965, a popular day sailor and racer in its day, and once owned by the Golden Gate Yacht Club Commodore. Keith named her Mia Tane, a reference to Herman Melville’s mythical contact with cannibals in the South Pacific. As the story goes, Melville, most famous for his epic novel “Moby Dick,” used a language he devised to make a connection with the cannibals. In “Melvillese” Mia Tane means “Good People.” It worked for Melville, and the Mia Tane thing seems to work for Keith, too, as people wherever he goes continue to find him to be “good people”.

On that windy day in July - the windiest month on the Bay - Keith left Richmond mid-morning bound for Sausalito, a distance of just eight miles - and a number of missed heart beats - away.  He planned to motor across as the gusty winds were contrary, and, under sail, would require many tacks and another crewman to work the jib in order to reach his destination. His course took him across busy shipping and ferryboat lanes while headed towards the narrow Racoon Straight between Angel Island and Tiburon on the mainland. Just as he left the shipping lanes and approached, as he called it, “the three-story rock” of Angel Island, the engine stalled. With both the tide and the wind against him, he began to be blown back out in the Bay. He tried quickly to re-start the stalled engine to no avail, and then contacted the Coast Guard, and apprised them of the situation. He heard from them that he should keep in contact, but that they would respond only if the boat was in danger of sinking or running aground. Until that time, he was pretty much on his own. Being only a quarter mile off that three-story rock, and with the winds blowing the boat ever closer, he quickly set the mainsail, so that he would have some ability to tack his way up the narrow Straight, and away from that looming headland. As both the incoming tide and the whistling wind were running against him, it was a long, slow slog back and forth in the straight that took two hours to go the last quarter mile. Each time he made headway up the channel, he was quickly beat back by wind and tide. It became apparent to Keith that reaching Sausalito was impossible without an engine, so he determined wisely that making for Angel Bay on Angel Island was his only option. Finally on the last tack, he was able to reach the relative calm of this bay, just missing an outward bound ferry by a few feet, and navigating through a maze of moored boats. Then, very close to running aground on the island, Keith had one chance, and one chance only, to stop the boat. With his left hand at the tiller, he spied, as he was passing it, the tiny eyelet at the top of a mooring buoy, grabbed his eight-foot pike pole, reached out over the gunwale and across ten feet of water, snagged the eyelet, stopping the momentum of the 6500 pound boat with his good right arm, and quickly brought the boat up and tied her off.  Meanwhile a couple sat on a boat moored nearby smiling and waving sociably without the least bit of concern, as if this wasn’t the most incredible maneuver ever, both of gymnastics and of sailing and mooring a disabled boat. Maybe they were the Angels of Angel Island watching over him. In any event, when Keith and his family moved back to Wisconsin a couple years ago, they left behind much material stuff, but never will he part with his trusty pike pole, a metaphor for something he also brings with him, his saving grace.