Dog Overboard.

I was a bad girl.

The day we went sailing out to Coupeville to see the tall ships, it started off as a great sail, the weather was hot, the winds were decent and everyone was in a good mood. Halfway through our trip, we had just completed a tack and I sat down after squaring off all the lines and saw Penelope perched precariously, right at the tip of the starboard ama bow. As I reached for the camera to take her picture, I started to call to her to be careful, no sooner had the first syllable left my mouth when she jumped off the boat! Not fell, but jumped!

Everything happened very fast then, I can't remember exactly what happened all I remember is yelling, "The dog is gone! The dog is gone!" I scrambled up forward to grab the boat hook, trying to keep her in my sight, but the idiot dog was paddling away from us, by the time I got the hook she was too far gone. 

I was sure she was gone for good then, we were moving at 4 knots and the dog swimming the opposite direction from us, I just remember I kept shouting, telling Mark to get in the dinghy. When I turned around I discovered he already was and had the engine started. I frantically yelled "Go, go, get her!" Trying to be heard over Aislinn who had flipped her lid and was just standing there screaming at the top of her lungs, over Mac who was hollering at us that no one was steering the boat, it took me a second to realize that Mark was also yelling at me to untie the dinghy from the boat so he could go. 

Finally I realized what he needed and I untied him and he took off, that is Mark in the dinghy going to get her, Penelope is in the picture but you can't see her, she drifted so far so fast, Mark couldn't see her and I pointed to where I just barely saw the red speck of her life jacket off behind us.

 Even zoomed in you can't see her in the water.

Once I saw Mark was headed in the right direction I ran back up front, tripping over lines as I hurriedly tried to drop sail so we wouldn't get too far apart, of course the main sail snagged on a mast step that hadn't been folded and would only come part way down. I assured Mac it was fine that no one was steering and told Ash that daddy would get Penelope, (praying in my head that he really would), Finn never even took his eyes off his DVD player, I guess his way to handle stressful situations is to ignore it.

Once I got the sails down or at least mostly down, I ran back to the stern and saw Mark had the dog in the boat and was heading back.

Ash and Penelope consoling each other after this harrowing experience.

We raised sails and were off again. As bad it sounded and as chaotic and stressful as it was the whole episode only took two minutes and the dog spent less than one minute in the water, not bad really and we at least know now that we can work fast even if everyone has seemed to have lost their heads but it would have been nicer to have practiced our first man overboard on a fender or something, I think I lost about five years of my life there. 

We learned a lot from this experience and are so thankful that things turned out as they did, things could have gone really wrong. 

Firstly, we know to always take our dinghy with us, we had contemplated not bringing it that time.

Second, the dog must always wear her life jacket and now be tied in the cockpit or stay down below while underway, we were so grateful she was wearing her jacket, without that bright red we might never had spotted her.

Thirdly, we discovered we need to invest in homing beacons for everyone's vests, if I hadn't had just happened to see her when she jumped off the boat and she had been gone without us knowing it, by the time we discovered her missing there would have been no way we could have found her.

And lastly we have agreed upon a sequence of events in a man overboard situation, If it is involving a person and not a crazy dog swimming in the opposite direction from us, we deploy the life sling first. The childrens job is to find the person/object overboard and keep it in their sights and point at it with the boat hook until it is retrieved. It's important to get Mark off in the dinghy before I go and drop the sails to stop the boat.

At least now we know what needs to happen if/when this happens again and it is comforting to know we all know what to do, just thankful this learning experience wasn't too costly and Penelope is safe and sound on Sweets again.