On the rocks

This small sailboat partially keeled over in the running tide brought to mind Longfellow's poem The Wreck of the Hesperus about a sea captain who takes his small daughter on a coastal voyage, ignores a weather warning and freezes to death after tying the child to the mast.

Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,
With his face turned to the skies,
The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow
On his fixed and glassy eyes.

His daughter also perishes when the schooner is wrecked in the storm.

At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,
A fisherman stood aghast,
To see the form of a maiden fair,
Lashed close to a drifting mast.

The salt sea was frozen on her breast,
The salt tears in her eyes;
And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed,
On the billows fall and rise.

Longfellow was inspired by the Great Blizzard of 1839 in which scores of ships foundered off the east coast of North America, and the location, Norman's Woe, a reef on the coast of Massachusetts, was the site of an actual wreck where a drowned woman was found attached to a mast.

The poem's quite long but you can listen to a one-minute version by Roger McGough here - with sound effects! Don't expect to catch all the words though.

(I went to the beachside restaurant to enquire about the plight of the boat and was informed by the owner, rather testily, that it was fine, just waiting for the next high tide.)