In an earlier post, I described how a shroud on Bluebird had become detached from its chainplate during a sail. On Friday, when I went out to bring Bluebird ashore in advance of Hurricane Sandy, I discovered that the same shroud on the opposite side had become detached. I had checked and tightened that attachment when I found the first shroud flying, so I was puzzled.
Yesterday, I helped dislodge some large logs that had been washed by the flooding river up on the rails on which we launch boats at the Red Dragon Canoe Club. There were a half dozen tree-sized logs tangled between the rails and the steel pier that extends out to the floating docks.
When the work was done, we noticed a landscaping timber lying in the parking lot up where debris marked the high water level from the flood. And then we saw the two bolts, bedded in concrete at the edge of the parking lot bulkhead, from which the landscaping timber had been floated.
The timber had been secured on those bolts by two nuts. Clearly, the nuts would not normally have twisted themselves u[ward off the upright bolts. Gravity, if anything, would have caused the nuts to tend downward on the bolt threads.
So there seems to be a mystery there on the Delaware involving the disengaging of threaded fasteners. I'm not suggesting anything like the Bermuda Triangle. But the sequence of events is troubling to a mariner.