Charlotte B

1.2.2013 15:00pm 70F

Once we decided to go to Mexico, one of my primary “tourist” attractions was the N62 that went on the rocks near Mag Bay April of 2006. We had spoken to James Lieshman who has been aboard about a year later and said most everything was intact. Besides a “Dreamer’s curiosity” – I had a few things I’d prefer not to buy from Nordhavn, like a new door handle for the side door, and a missing scupper door – that with the starboard following sea can sound like a sonic boom while napping the the master cabin.

From the image on Google earth (24° 27.444′N 111° 54.535′W) – you can see she’s laying on her side – so with the sat photo and coordinates we were ready.

We anchored just inside Mag Bay on the north tip at 10am. I heard from James that there is no where to land an inflatable – so we went “commando” / wetsuits, fins – and launched our 40hp inflatable for the assult. We were quite a site – since the Yamaha two-stroke is pretty loud – we were wearing our engine room ear muffs, wetsuits, go-pro head mounted camera – we just needed two AK47s.

There was a light offshore wind – with a good size NW swell, with our handheld GPS – we were running about 20k in the inflatable, and the trip was 10 miles. As we approached it was clear the weather had not been kind to Charlotte B. The only remaining “structure” was the lower 1/3 of the aft section of the hull. There was a good size “debris field”. We anchored the zodiac just outside the break, but it was clear this was going to be dangerous. The swell was breaking direclty on-shore – probably 8 foot faces on the larger waves. Christine swam in (she’s the rescue swimmer in the family) – took a look at the break and swam back.

We shot the photos with a 300mm lens, and I’ve studied the debris field for the scupper door – looks like we’ll need to have my scupper door replaced in Mexico – I’m sure somewhere in the next 7000 miles we’ll have starboard quartering seas.