PORT ANGELES — A 39-foot sloop was pulled and pushed to safety Sunday after it ran aground in the crook of Ediz Hook near the Nippon Paper Industries USA mill.
Three people on board the boat were uninjured.
A spokesman for Coast Guard Group/Air Station Port Angeles said the boat — part of a regatta sailing in the harbor — sailed into a 35-foot gap between a pier and a log boom into shallow water.
A Coast Guard small boat stood by and offered to remove the sailors, but they refused help, the Coast Guard said.
Anyway, they could have jumped from the sloop to safety on the land, the spokesman said.
Onlookers pushed and pulled the sloop with ropes, heeling it over and freeing its keel, the Coast Guard said, and the boat returned to navigable water.
The spokesman could identify neither the sailors nor their vessel, and a call to regatta officials went unanswered.