Story of a Bumbling Mariner

May 14, 2007

In the late afternoon I completed the 350-mile drive from Columbus, GA to Hudson, FL with my sailboat in tow. I parked at Hudson Beach Park. Ben drove in from Orlando and helped with raise the mast and slide my boat, sailing vessel Chrissy Burnham (svCB), into the water. I cranked the motor and tried to navigate the boat from the boat ramp to a public dock thirty yards away.

One might reasonably assume that a boater who plans to spend three days sailing in the Gulf of Mexico by himself would be able to drive his sailboat thirty yards from a boat ramp to a nearby dock with the sails down and the engine on. That would be incorrect. Even with the sail furled, the wind caught svCB’s hull and I banged against the rocky shore and nearly crashed into another docked boat before I managed, more or less accidentally, to back into the dock for which I had originally aimed. Some other folks standing near the boat ramp who had watched me careen across the harbor cast skeptical glances in my direction as I hopped onto the dock and tethered sailing vessel Chrissy Burnham to the cleats.

Darkness has since fallen, the crowd has dispersed and now I’m sitting on the dock listening to schools of shad jump twenty or thirty feet away. As bigger fish chase the shad they surge out of the black water in unison like twenty or so knife blades. The yellow lights of the street lamps gleam off their scales. The shad plunge back into the black water, together, with the sound of a fistful of gravel flung into a pond. Sitting here listening to the shad leap for their lives makes me feel closer to the sea, and I worry less about my questionable boating and sailing skills. I figure I’ll get better with practice. Tonight I will camp out on the boat, and in the morning I will hoist sails and head out into the Gulf. I hope my learning curve will be steep. I bet listening to the shad will help.

May 15, 2007

Whenever days turn dour and cynicism rolls in like a meteorological front, it’s helpful to have certain immutable encouraging truths on which one can reflect. Dependable verities that don’t change with circumstance. One such truth, and one that I will remember from now on, is that here in the South the cricket has outdistanced the mosquito.

I’m sitting on an island in the Gulf of Mexico listening to the night sounds. They include small waves lapping against the shore, my sailboat’s mainsail luffing in the breeze, the distant diesels of fishing trawlers, and crickets. I don’t know how crickets made it out to this island, whose sole other terrestrial inhabitants are crabs, salamanders and one boy from Georgia, but I can hear them just like on my porch back home. One difference between this island and my porch back home, however, is that here there are no mosquitoes.

I set sail this morning from Hudson, FL and turned the prow north. The going was not easy. The wind came out of the northeast, and svCB has never been much good at close hauling. The mainsail is old and is missing a batten. The mast lists slightly to stern. The pulley atop the mast isn’t in great shape, and I couldn’t get the sail raised all the way to the top. To the best of my knowledge the hull has never been waxed. The swing keel doesn’t hold a course like a non-trailerable keel would. The forestay is dangerously frayed because it tumbled out of the boat and dragged on the pavement while I was towing the boat down here. And, I don’t really know how to sail. Nevertheless, svCB and I made it about ten miles north of where we started to this little island, where I beached the sailboat and put up my tent.

This little island is one in a row of islands jutting out perpendicularly from the coastline. The first and largest island is only a few hundreds yards from a small and well-lit town that could be Hernando Beach, FL or Bayport, FL – I can’t tell which from the map. The islands continue out seaward, getting smaller the further they get from shore. My island is in the middle of the string. Taken together, the islands resemble the pattern of splotches that would result if one were to fling the contents of a cup of coffee as far as one could across a white tablecloth. They also resemble a pattern that a young boy might create in the snow upon relieving himself. I have decided to call these islands Peeing Boy Archipelago.

The time of evening has arrived at which an aspiring mariner like myself must light his pipe. It is time to sit back, look at the darkness, listen to the crickets and laugh at the mosquitoes that are missing an easy meal.

Sailing vessel Chrissy Burnham
anchored off my island in Peeing Boy Archipelago.

Sunset at Peeing Boy
Archipelago, looking seaward.

May 16, 2007

I just took a wonderful shower. An euphoric shower. I shed the layer of salt, sand and sunscreen that my epidermis had been wearing for the last couple days and, the clean, bare skin feels like dancing. The quality of this shower rivaled some conjugal interludes.

I left the island this afternoon, where the local salamanders were pursuing their own conjugal aspirations. My first sight after climbing out of the tent this morning was of a salamander perched lengthwise on a branch showing off for the ladies. For a few seconds he’s sit stock-still, his lithe brown body held apart from the branch so that his figure cast a silhouette against the sky. Then, deliberately, he inflated the dark red sac under his throat until it protruded from his body by a half inch or so – no small feat for a four-inch salamander. Throughout all of this he maintained a stoic silence. Then he began thrusting his torso to the sky and bringing it back down again, pressing his forlegs to full extension then lowering himself until his stomach lay flat against the branch. His body rose, fell, rose, fell. So far as I could tell, no ladies took the bait, but I advised the salamander that he should be persistent. He must have agreed because he was still on the branch when I left.

My second sight this morning was of svCB washed into shore. High tide had come in the night, and apparently my sailboat decided to ride the tide ashore. The boat declined, however, to follow the tide back out to sea, such that Chrissy Burnham was stuck in the sand on the very beach where I waded ashore yesterday. No big deal, I figured, I might as well stay another night on Peeing Boy Archipelago. Just to be safe, however, I decided to push svCB out into the water when high tide rolled back around in the early afternoon so that I’d be free to go if I changed my mind.

When the tide reached its peak the boat popped afloat, and I waded into the water to push svCB further out to sea. But the wind was blowing toward shore, and that was a problem. I had left the mainsail up because raising and lowering it singlehandedly is so difficult, with the result that I had to lean my shoulder into the hull and push as hard as I could to move the boat seaward. Even then, several times when the wind gusted the boat spun around me and accelerated toward shore. I had to start over two or three times. I felt like Sisyphus, the Greek who had to roll a boulder up a hill every day only to see it tumble back down again. At length, however, I got svCB out where I wanted her and leapt aboard. Tossing the anchor would have done no good because svCB’s anchor won’t grip on grassy bottoms, so I loosed the boat’s swing keel. The lead-weighted keel dropped to the seafloor and held the boat twenty yards or so offshore.

I jumped off, waded ashore, stood in the sun, and tried to decide whether to spend another night on the island or to shove off. I was still deciding when some Yankees showed up. I knew they were Yankees before they opened their mouths because they motored up directly to the little cove where svCB had just been grounded without so much as waving at me or acknowledging that I was obviously camped there. There were plenty of vacant islands in Peeing Boy Archipelago, but the Yankees drove their runabout directly to mine and anchored about ten feet offshore. They let out a dog that swam around a bit, then splashed ashore and started sniffing my gear. The Yankees jumped out of the boat and headed toward the beach. All of this before they said hello. I stood with my arms crossed.

“How are yall doing?” I asked.

There was a middle aged man, a teenage boy and a teenage girl. None of them responded to me. The middle aged man dove underwater, then surfaced and waded toward me.

“How ya doing’?” he asked after taking several steps.

“Just fine,” I said. I waited for some sort of explanatory comment, like “I hope we’re not intruding,” or a “we’ll just be here a second,” but none was forthcoming. The man just stood in the shallows with his hands on his hips, water coursing through his chest hair like outflow from an algae-covered pipe.

“Well,” I said, “what are yall up to this afternoon?”

“Taking the dog for a swim. She gets ornery if she doesn’t have her swim.” The dog continued to peruse my camping gear. I looked pointedly at it.

He called the dog back into the water where he, the dog and the two younger folks splashed and played. I walked back to my campsite and started striking my tent. I put the tent in its bag, rolled up my sleeping bad, zipped up my clothes duffel, and leaned my BB gun against the tent bag. I started folding up the groundcloth, putting the lantern in its case, and making other preparations for departure. Before long I glanced over my shoulder and saw the Yankees getting ready to leave. Before they could crank their engine I walked over toward their boat.

“I’ve got a question I meant to ask yall before you left. What town is that on the shore?”

“Hernando Beach,” the middle aged man said. Then they started giving me directions on how to get there, and told me what I might find. They were being very helpful. It occurred to me that they might have seen my BB gun, which looks like a centerfire rifle from a distance. I glanced over my shoulder and saw it lying in view.

“So just get in the channel there and follow it straight into town,” the man was telling me. “One side will branch off to the right, but just keep going straight.” He paused, as if waiting to see if I had any more questions.

“Thanks a lot,” I said, and waved goodbye. I smiled. Yankees are wary of Southerners with guns. And for good reason.

- - - - -

Having already started departure preparations, I decided to leave the island. I figured I’d try my luck in Hernando Beach, but first I’d do some cruising. And it was a wonderful day for cruising. Sailing is easy if you don’t care where you’re going. I set a course to tack into the wind, and in the course of angling into the breeze, I perfected the autopilot system I started working on yesterday. Mastery of this complex system, pictured below, allowed me to accomplish other important tasks while sailing, such as drinking beer and peeing off the stern. Chrissy Burnham and I were really in a rhythm; we were even able to tack a couple miles into the wind and get some 3½ miles from shore before I turned and headed for Hernando Beach with the wind blowing at my back.

Autopilot.

Once in Hernando Beach, I asked another boater for directions to the marina. He checked his GPS and gave me directions to what he described as four marinas – down the canal to the right, then when the canal deadends, take another right. I thanked him and embarked on a journey through the winding canals of Hernando Beach, which was made difficult because the throttle control handle broke off my motor yesterday. Now, instead of twisting the handle to rev up the motor, I have to stick a ballpoint pen down in the plastic housing where the handle used to be. This makes it hard to turn the motor, which makes it hard to steer. After some time and effort, however, I reached the end of the canal and took a right. Unfortunately, there were not four marinas. There was one marina and it housed only commercial shrimp trawlers. Finding no room for a bright yellow sailboat, I motored down to the canal’s terminus and tied up to a dock labeled “private pier” in front of some condominiums. I got out to walk around the town.

I walked into town and found single-story pink building out of which the proprietor operated a combination motel, marina and beauty salon. I walked into the office, waited behind a woman who was paying for her hairdo, and asked if the hotel rooms came with boat slips. Upon hearing that they did, I rented a room for the night. I walked back to svCB, cranked the motor, inserted my ballpoint pen, worked my way out of the shrimp trawlers’ canal and steered into the canal that ran past the motel, marina and beauty salon. I tied svCB up in my slip. I was moving gear from the boat to the motel room when the owner of the motel, marina and hair salon strolled by. He looked over my boat. He took in the crooked mast, broken motor, aged sail and the rest. He grinned. “That is a custom boat,” he said.

I smiled back and said, “It’s definitely a unique rig.” He paused for a second, looked at his shoes, then continued his stroll.

I went inside to take my blessed shower, and now I’m sitting outside on a patio overlooking the canal. Chrissy Burnham bobs gently in the dark, placid waters of the canal. The yellow of her hull stays bright even as the sun sinks and other colors dim. As I remember the owner’s voice, I think I recall a trace of envy in his well-intentioned ribbing. As though he wished he could get away with such daring paint and slapdash maintenance. But as an older man, with roots and stature in the community, he probably feels pressure to keep his boats, his property and his hair in good-looking order.

I will turn 25 tomorrow, and this seems an appropriate time to reflect on the beauty of rootless youth.

Low tide at Peeing Boy Archipelago.

The hotel, marina and hair salon in Hernando Beach, FL.

May 17, 2007

Today I had to make it back to the boat ramp. Winds were from the northwest. I had about ten miles to sail from Hernando Beach, and I knew I’d be sailing through low tide, so for the first few hours I put distance between myself and the shore. I pointed svCB just south of west – about 60° into the wind – and close hauled the sails. I made a steady 2 mph until I was about 4 miles from the shore, then I turned south and let out the sail. The sail popped when it filled with wind and Chrissy Burnham took off. Even without the jib we cruised along at over 5 mph for most of the day. I leaned back against a life jacket, propped my feet up and alternated between Nalgenes of water and cans of Natural Light for most of the afternoon. It was a delightful day in the Gulf, and I wish I could have stayed in open water for longer.

But within a couple hours I reached the red and green channel markers that would guide me into Hudson, FL, where Ben and I had put svCB into the Gulf. The channel is only about thirty yards wide, but the wooden posts that mark its boundaries extend a couple miles out to sea. Because the channel is relatively narrow, and boats frequently pass one another going in opposite directions, most sailboats lower their sails and switch to engine power when they’re following a channel.

But the sound of the wind in my sail was too charming. Instead of stopping to crank the engine I swung the bow toward the channel, let the boom swing over my head and slam into place on the other side of the boat, then sailed between the markers. I kept the red markers to my right and the green markers to my left – “red on right when returning from the sea,” as the boating instructors say – and cruised into my final destination, sunglasses on and sail up, in what I considered inimitable style. I ran aground as soon as I reached the harbor, of course, but no matter – swing keels are easy to raise, and I was soon underway again. Style and passing competence are about all a part-time sailor can hope for anyway.

Several hours later, as the sun set over the Gulf, I stood Hudson Beach Park looking out over the channel with a cup of water I’d gotten at from nearby bar. I had just enlisted the help of several bystanders at the boat ramp to pull svCB out of the water and lower the mast, and now the boat lay strapped to my trailer, ready for the 350 mile trip back to Georgia. I felt happy with the boat, happy with my trip and happy with the people of Hudson. I looked out at the red- and green-flagged posts that marked the channel. Some of their barnacled bases were now exposed at low tide, and I noted with satisfaction that the markers led almost as far out into the Gulf as I could see. At the horizon, just beyond the channel’s end, the sky turned orange as though the sea were burning. I had been there.

“Excuse me,” a man said at my elbow. “Are you a boater?”

I turned to him. He was a gray haired and paunchy man with a camera and an eager expression. Tourist, I thought. I looked at his clean shirt and round face. I thought for a minute about how I might look to him. Standing alone, gazing vacantly out into the ocean, wearing a dirty tee shirt with sunglasses hanging from its stretched-out neck. My face was sunburned and I hadn’t shaved in three days. I reflected with considerable vanity that I probably smelled like the ocean. I looked at him with what I hoped would be glittering eyes.

“Sort of,” I said.

“What are do those posts mean?” he asked, pointing to the channel markers. “And why is the sand wet so far in from the water?”

With relish, style and passing competence, I explained to him the ways of the channels, the tides and the sea. He thanked me and passed by. I glanced once more toward the darkening Gulf. The waves were calming as evening progressed and the most distant channel markers were getting harder to see. Silhouetted seagulls pirouetted over the surf. My trip was over. I finished my cup of water and walked back to my truck.