The first set of waves boiled in at around 7 a.m., jostling boats against their moorings. Then, Alan Mello says, “the harbor completely emptied.” His boat, the Amanda B, settled into the mud. So did every other boat. A few rolled over onto their sides.
Minutes later, when the sea surged back into the harbor, the violently churning water began to disintegrate the docks. Boats smashed into each other. The boat next to Mello’s sank, and its self-deploying life raft popped open, inflated — and got stuck on the bow of the Amanda B. The news images from Japan began creeping to the front of Mello’s mind. “It was not good,” he says.
Suddenly, Mello decided to go with Plan B. He ran down the ramp to the Amanda B, yelled to a friend to untie the boat, and hoped like hell that the engine would start on the first try. “It was a mad dash,” he says. “I ran in the wheelhouse and hit the key, and boom!” — the engine roared to life.
If Mello was going to keep the Amanda B in one piece, he had to time things right to make it out of the boat basin before the water receded again. “I realized I had one shot,” he says. “I had about 60 seconds.”
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