Tides, currents and ledges teamed up to humble me with two recent groundings.

Last year, within an hour of my first trip of the season I found myself sitting in my Pearson 30, Courage & Hope, hard aground on the ledges of the upper Piscataqua River near Dover Point in New Hampshire.

I had just departed Great Bay Marina in Newington, passed under the Route 4 bridge, rounded C13, and headed downstream. Even at low throttle Courage & Hope was pushing 7 knots on the GPS, thanks to a hefty 3-knot tidal flow. I passed N12, leaving it to port, and then engaged the automatic pilot, setting a course to leave R10, a half mile downriver, to starboard. I made a few adjustments of 10 degrees each to starboard since the current was sweeping the boat to port.

	Photo courtesy Irv Patton
	Irv Paton's Pearson 30, Courage & Hope, hard around in the Piscataqua River. It's not unusual to run aground. It is unusual to talk publicly about the experience. But that's just what we got some of our readers to do. In the story at the left and the others below, we hear the tales from people who've gone where we hope we never go (or go again). For an experienced sailor, a humbling experience In a rocky, foggy world, a digital miscalculation There's a little saying... We're well worth our salt Wake up - we're aground Grounding spots to watch for

Suddenly, Courage & Hope bounced over a ledge, then hit another, and in a moment came to a full stop. She healed over about 10 degrees, there to sit as a curiosity to bypassers, including the Coast Guard, a local police boat, and the Portsmouth harbormaster, for the next eight hours.

At high tide I barely made it off the ledges. Once free, I began taking inventory of what went wrong and how I could prevent it in the future. I came up with four points.

1. Familiarity: I'd done this river many times before, and, although I had once seen a power boat sunk in this very spot, I was thinking that I couldn't get in trouble if I just followed the buoys.

2. Currents can push sideways, not just fore and aft. I should have realized this and been on the other side of the river to compensate for the sideways motion.

3. Slow speed relative to the water is bad in high-current situations. The slower you go, the more you are pushed off course.

4. One should look aft as well as forward. After the grounding, I could see that I was a little to the port side of the imaginary line between the two buoys. By just looking ahead I didn't get the sensation of being pushed to port.

Familiarity may also have played a part in my next grounding in one of my favorite spots, the harbor at Damariscove Island near Boothbay Harbor. I like to nestle the boat against the eastern shore of the inner harbor, which I've done several times before. This requires bow and stern anchors to hold the boat off the shore. At 0610 on July 13 of this year my brother, Ken, and I were sleeping aboard Courage & Hope at this great spot when we awoke to a clunk.

I could immediately sense that the stern was lifted several inches out of the water. Upon inspection, I saw that the spade rudder had slid up on the lip of a submerged protruding ledge. Ken and I tried in vain to coax the boat off the rock, but within a couple hours the tide had reached its low of a foot below normal and Courage & Hope's stern was lifted more than two feet out of the water.

A little wave action by the local lobster boats created a nasty looking 20-degree bend in the rudderpost. When the tide returned we floated free and found that we could still turn the wheel, though with much effort. Once underway, I noticed some water dripping in around the rudder shaft stuffing box and decided to find a dry spot for the boat.

On the advice of some friendly fishermen we called both the Bittersweet and Gamage boat yards in South Bristol. We chose Gamage since it was a little closer and they could get us out of the water more quickly.

We motored between Damariscove and Pumpkin Islands and up the Damariscotta River to the Gamage Shipyard. Courage & Hope was on the hard before noon.

So what went wrong this time? For one thing, I never realized the potential for such a problem with the spade rudder. I had expected the keel to bump first if there was a problem. But the spade rudder is vulnerable due to its location and fragility.

I also anchored too close to the rocks and let the anchor rodes get too much slack at low.

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