The 27-foot sailboat was David Ward's new toy. He had bought it only hours earlier from a man in Middle River and on Sunday was sailing it, with four friends as crew, to its new berth in a Fells Point marina.
Then things started to go wrong. The boat's tiller snapped in the choppy waters of the Chesapeake Bay, and Ward cut the engine while he replaced the broken part. But when he tried to restart the motor, the battery was almost flat — useless. Drifting near the Patapsco River about a mile north of Fort Howard, Ward pulled out his cellphone and dialed the number of a towing company, just as any motorist on firm ground might do.
The man who got the call was Capt. Dale Plummer, owner of Baltimore Marine Recovery, a private company that operates four fire-engine-red response vessels under the TowBoatUS banner in the waters of the bay and its tributaries, from the Magothy River north to the Bush River. On holiday weekends and all through the summer, when boaters take to the water in droves and mishaps occur, Plummer and his fellow captains have their hands full.
"It's almost too busy right now," Plummer had said earlier, as three calls for service came in almost simultaneously. "We're going to get backed up."
As often happens, the coordinates for Ward's location were given incorrectly, and it took Plummer almost an hour to find the sailboat, bobbing on the waves near a sandbank under a relentless sun. "There he is!" Plummer said. He approached, slowed down, threw Ward a line and told him to fasten it to a cleat on the bow.
"Pull your anchor in!" Plummer shouted, and then waited as Ward and his friend, Christopher Deen, hunched on the lurching bow, struggled to free the anchor from a crabbing line. Eventually, Plummer suggested that Ward cut the tangled rope. Once that was done, he used hand motions to instruct all five boaters to sit in the stern. It was only then that the 32-foot towboat — equipped long ago with a gun turret and used by the Navy to patrol rivers in Vietnam — began pulling the sailboat on its 14-mile journey to Fells Point.
"That whole thing could have gone nasty real quick," Plummer said during the trip. "None of them had lifejackets on. They're bouncing up and down on the waves, all those lines tangled. If he'd fallen over, he'd have been hanging from the lines. It was too choppy to pull alongside and try to jump-start the engine. And I couldn't start pulling them until they'd sat down."
What Ward had in his favor, though, was an account with TowBoatUS, a national organization with more than 600 towboats operating from roughly 300 ports and waterways. For an annual fee of $149, Ward and his fellow members get unlimited towing services. Had Ward not been in the program, Sunday's mishap would have cost him roughly $1,000, Plummer said, calculating a $250-an-hour fee multiplied by the four hours that transpired between the call for service and Plummer's eventual return to his base at Anchor Bay East Marina on Dundalk's Bear Creek.
"He would have paid more than I paid for my boat," Deen said after arriving at Fells Point. Nonmembers pay an average of about $600 for a tow.
And yet, Plummer said, many boaters figure a passer-by or a friend will lend a hand if they have a cranky engine or run aground on a sandbar. The Coast Guard stopped towing recreational vessels about two decades ago, he said, and marine patrols and other law enforcement agencies tend to handle only life-threatening emergencies.
Plummer, 45 years old and the father of two boys, said he grew up "on the water" along the Magothy, fishing, crabbing and boating. Then, after spending 30 years in what he calls the "corporate world," he wanted to return to his true love, the sea. Five years ago, Plummer began working for Baltimore Marine Recovery, and in March bought the company and its license to operate as a TowBoatUS entity.
"This guy's amazing," Ward said after the tow had been completed. "He was like a guardian angel."