We took a cruise up to Port Townsend last weekend, and it was decided that my younger daughter and I would stay out at Fort Worden State Park, tied up to one of the mooring buoys. These mooring buoys have a reputation for being less than comfortable due to their exposed location just inside Point Wilson.  See, Point Wilson is one of the pinch-points of the Admiralty Inlet bottleneck that all shipping traffic to or from Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia must negotiate, so you can get some nasty vessel wakes through here. Plus the weather and tide can kick up the water something fierce, in addition to whatever residual swell is coming in off the Pacific and down the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

But the weather report was favorable, and there was a big fishing derby going on, which was going to make the wharf near the boat ramp a madhouse at about sunrise, so we decided to tie up to a mooring buoy and stay out of the way. Specifically, we decided to tie up to the buoy farthest from the wharf.

We made up to the mooring buoy just fine at about 21:30 Saturday evening. Low tide, a -1.1, had been at 18:15. This is important, because at 02:30 Sunday morning, when I awoke to take a look around, the mooring buoy was gone!

Except that we weren’t drifting. We were still securely tied to something, just off the beach, in line with the other mooring buoys, which were visible in the moonlight.

In my half-asleep mental fog, I finally figured it out. We were still tied to the buoy, but it had been submerged by the tide. Its chain is probably fouled on something on the seabed, making it too short to accommodate the full tidal range.

After satisfying myself, in the midst of the general nocturnal spookiness and vaguely sinister visual image of my mooring line leading down below the dark surface of the water, that the tide was NOT going to continue to rise and just suck my whole boat into the abyss, I went back to sleep.

Well, I went back to my bunk, anyway, at least until high tide had passed at 03:10. THEN I went to sleep.

The 06:59 low tide was pretty high, a 7.5, and the buoy was still submerged. I was not able to untie my mooring line, which I had made up directly to the mooring buoy with a round turn and two half-hitches, secured with an additional stopper.

Why? Because I wanted to leave more line between the boat and the buoy, and I was using a 25-foot dock line. OK, so lesson learned, and I don’t mind making a fool of myself telling the whole world about it here. Loop your line through the ring on the mooring buoy and bring the line back to a cleat on the boat. Got it?

Anyhoo, it came time to leave, and in the daylight I could SEE the knot tied to the ring on the mooring buoy, about 18 inches beneath the surface. I just couldn’t REACH it without taking a swim. That is not a reasonable option in Admiralty Inlet in February. It’s probably not a good option in August, either. It’s just too risky for a $25 dock line. So I cut it, as far down the line into the water as I could reach. I lost about three feet of line.

The point of this whole story is that this is EXACTLY the sort of thing a cruising wiki could assist with. This fouled mooring buoy is a genuine hazard, and of course it isn’t documented anywhere. If you approach while the buoy is submerged, you might drive right over it and damaged your prop. Potentially, this could put you on the beach. Worst case, you could lose your boat because of this thing.

By the time it is documented in any of the conventional ways (such as in a cruising guide or on a NOAA chart), it will probably have been fixed. The two best ways for skippers to help each other in this kind of situation are to (1) report it to the park authorities so it gets fixed (which I’ve done), and (2) report it to fellow boaters.

If only there existed some sort of maintained-by-boaters, edited-in-realtime "bulletin board" where we could all exchange reports of this kind. You know, like maybe a WIKI.

So this morning, I tried to report it on the four cruising wikis of which I’m aware. Here are my results:

• ActiveCaptain: success. Currently, ActiveCaptain remains the best of the bunch. They’ve got some momentum with the content, but I think they could really pull ahead with some interface tweaks.
• MyCruisingLog.com: success. This was the easiest to edit, because it uses the familiar Wikipedia wiki engine. Actually, all but ActiveCaptain use this software, but MyCruisingLog was the only one that both had a place appropriate for my warning, and allowed me to edit and save it.
• CaptainWiki: failure. I found an entry for Port Townsend, I made my change, and I saved it. Only it didn’t save, because "A database query syntax error has occurred."
• CruiserLog.com: failure. There wasn’t any entry on Port Townsend or even Admiralty Inlet or the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and I didn’t feel like writing a whole article from scratch. I just wanted to add a quick note about a temporary hazard to navigation.
• And what about Rose Point’s CoastalExplorer.net? I was unable to test it, because I’m not participating in the beta. Yet!

So there you have it. What have we learned? Nothing definitive, really. I expect the cruising wiki landscape to change a lot over the next couple of years. In months to come, we’ll continue to test and report on the available cruising wikis.