48-foot boat stuck in sand at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront
With storms rolling into town Thursday morning, crews tried to dig out a 48-foot boat that ran aground earlier this week at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront.
“Diplomat II,” a fiberglass-hulled Viking motor yacht from Port Deposit, Maryland, is sitting at the water’s edge on 35th Street with its bow facing north. Workers from Allsbrook Landscaping and TowBoat U.S. will continue to dig a moat around the boat and attempt to pull it out to sea during high tide around 8 p.m., said supervisor Nathan Holder.
The expected rain and high winds tonight are going to make it challenging.
“I don’t think there’s a single thing in our favor right now,” Holder said.
Virginia Beach Public Works employees are on the scene monitoring the progress, said spokesman Drew Lankford.
Caution tape marked off the area around the vessel, but that didn’t stop several onlookers from taking photographs of the scene while a tow boat circled in the ocean.
Virginia Beach has been experiencing rough surf and high winds this week, with red flags flying at the beach.
The boat washed ashore Tuesday, prompting lifeguards to rescue the two passengers on board. The couple had recently picked up the boat from Maryland and were heading south when they lost power, said Tom Gill, chief of the Virginia Beach Life Saving Service.
According to Gill, who spoke with the couple, they started calling for help two hours before landing on the beach, but there was a miscommunication and some marine personnel deployed to Rudee Inlet instead.
On that afternoon, 3 to 6-foot tall shorebreak waves crashed against the side of the vessel.
Gill said a lifeguard on a stand noticed the boat coming toward the shore and prepared for the rescue. A lifeguard supervisor finishing a workout at the fitness park on 36th Street and another supervisor patrolling the beach also joined the initial effort.
One of the supervisors first used a paddleboard to get close to the boat and make contact with the passengers, Gill said.
About 10 lifeguards in all participated in the rescue with one boarding the boat. They used ropes to pull the couple to the shore, Gill said.
“It was as dangerous a place to get these people off the boat as it could be,” said Gill. “We couldn’t have had a better group of people.”
This is a developing story. Check pilotonline.com for updates.
Stacy Parker, 757-222-5125, stacy.parker@pilotonline.com
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