Summer Adventures: Sunken Ships off West Arichat Island

Twas late afternoon, I could hear the call of the gulls lost somewhere in the fog above my head. Staring out into the small Bay of West Arichat, I saw my two old friends...and I mean OLD.

Last time we came to Arichat my brother and I "Adopted" two, half-sunk, fishing boats as our own. The locals say that the owner, being angry at the Arichat government, stripped the boats and skipped town, leaving them to rot in the water, and in turn, making the island look trashy. But to us, it was as good as finding a treasure chest...

Two silent hulls sit low in the watery mist.

Jon and I, along with our cousins and Aunt Cari, took a little reunion tour the night we arrived

the hallway at high-ish tide: half underwater.

At high tide...there isn't much room to wander around. you had to find "stepping stones" to make your way across the boats.

The next day, high tide again...maybe we'll come back at low tide..

...Ahhh...that's more like it! Now we can explore!


All sorts of cool stuff

Remember that hallway that was underwater? Yeah...this is the same one at low tide.

Poor guy couldn't make it out before the water went down.

"sooo...think we can get it running?"

"Duuude! Look at this!"

We spent a good ten minutes pulling this thing off the side of the boat with a bucket tied to an old rope. Biggest Starfish I have EVER seen.

"It's sucking out my brains!!!"

Man the guns!

"You know...I bet we could make a zipline from this tower to the front of the boat"

So that's what we did!

rigging up the rope

Tying it off

Tadah!

Now, this falls under that category of "Things that look fun, but can kill you dead." No one was willing to bet their life that an old rope that had been soaking in salt water for a few years could safely carry them over all the dangerous metal objects strewn on the deck. So we used this huge cannon ball thing tied to a pulley...it worked BEAUTIFULLY! I was pretty proud of our work. We were just about to forcefully tie my cousin to the pulley when some locals told us that if the Powers That Be found us here...we would be fined $2,000. Even though we could have made a killing (pun intended) charging $50 a person to ride the Zip-Line of Death...we decided it wasn't worth the black marks on our records...so that was the end of our Sunken Boat Adventure.

As we were leaving...we finally noticed this...doh!