Castaway reaches her new home in northern Maryland, July 2024. (Photo by John Griswold)
Often we think that the paths we choose are straight—northerly from Florida to Maryland, in the case of the transit of my friend’s boat, Castaway—but in reality our lives are made of arcs, loops, and retracings. Chris and I often veered off course, lengthening the trip significantly, to get fuel, reach the nightly marina, or take a different route out through some barrier islands than we took in.
The Intracoastal Waterway—The Ditch, as it is called—does cut straight through the mud in stretches but at other times follows twisting rivers or the curve of a bay. This creates various states of mind, just as in everyday life.
One of the twists of the trip was a mechanical problem eventually revealed, at a boatyard in Hampton, Virginia, to be caused by contaminated fuel. That day alone cost Chris thousands of dollars in repairs he had not expected, in addition to the $1,400 of diesel he bought for the last push up the Chesapeake to Havre de Grace.
He was cheerful about it all, just as he had been when we ran aground or had no air conditioning in Horsefly, Georgia. After all, he had chosen the path, starting with buying a used boat, and would bear the consequences either way. In military diving, where we met, there was an old saying: If you’re not bitching, you’re not happy. That is always an option, but what would have been the point? In fact, as we motored north and Chris overcame each new challenge to getting his boat home, he grew more confident and relaxed.
That was not the case for the captain of Retriever, a smaller boat we encountered several times on the trip. I will always remember the man as he stood on the fuel dock next to Castaway on our last morning of the trip, before the all-day run to Maryland.
I wondered if he had come for conflict. Days earlier we had passed him on an ICW canal, and he shared complaints on the radio about our small wake with the hired pilot of a nearby superyacht. Retriever had not moved over adequately, and that was where Castaway struck a prop on something at the edge of the channel, which Chris thought caused our slow running for two days.
But her captain was not angry. I am not sure he remembered us from that incident or from when we had berthed near his boat at two marinas. He seemed lost but could only phrase it as a question: Did we know which marina would be the easiest and best to tie-up in as he headed north up the bay? His level of concern and need to talk about it showed distress. The weather was good, and the Chesapeake Bay is one of the most-traveled bodies of water in the world.
Besides, it turned out he was almost home. He and his wife were nearing the end of their transit of The Great Loop, the route along The Ditch on the eastern seaboard, through the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi River, across the Gulf of Mexico, and back to where they had started in Virginia.
But he was 76 and his wife 72, and they had been motoring three years. It might seem he had earned every right to confidence from their long journey, and that they should have been able to finish the run home in style and pride in accomplishment. Instead, he seemed broken. I asked if we could help, and he either did not hear or ignored me.
His wife was not with him on the dock, and later I wondered if she was sick, or if he was, or if he feared finishing for the same reason PhD candidates sometimes cannot finish their dissertations: meeting the goal would leave them without daily purpose. The man wandered away as we cast off the last line. It worried me, but what could be done?
Our day went without incident, hours at top speed, and Castaway made it to her new home up north. Chris achieved this by vision, lots of money, hard work, knowledge, and daring. We were lucky too that the gods of the arabesque had left us some swagger at the end.
