The entrance of Green Harbor in Marshfield typically gets very shallow every few years and needs to be deepened by dredging. This is usually done in the late winter and early spring. Some dredges can be very large ships that stay in place by use of a very large anchor with a three-inch cable and by “spuds”. Spuds are steel posts bigger than telephone poles that are lowered vertically from the stern of the ship to keep it in place.
On one particular winter, a dredge had lost a spud and I was hired to go underwater to find it. Scuba diving to find a very large steel pole sounds easy, but conditions were exceptionally poor. With a strong southeast wind coming directly into the harbor, seas were five to six feet and underwater visibility was six to twelve inches. I slowly inched my way forward and expected to stumble on the spud.
At one point, I just had a “feeling” and stopped my forward progress. There was no reason for this feeling. Some would have called it intuition, but I know that sometimes God taps you on the shoulder and you need to heed the tap of His hand.
I stayed in place and just breathed for a while. As I stared at the bottom I thought I could see something. Less than a foot in front of me, a three-inch cable was going up out of sight then slamming down in the sand. This dredge weighed hundreds of tons and needed to stay in place. They put a huge anchor with long cable hundreds of feet in front of the vessel. As the boat rose with the sea, the cable would rise off the sea floor. As the boat came down, the cable slammed the sea floor with hundreds of tons of force. It would have cut me in half and not even slowed down.
I thank God for His guiding hand and pray that I might always be aware that He is with me.
He reached down from on high and took hold of me; he drew me out of deep waters. Psalms 18:16
Jeff – Marshfield MA – Late Winter 1990
