(Photo by John Griswold)
“I didn’t think I’d learn so much,” my friend Chris said. We had been in the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) all day, headed from Southport, North Carolina, toward Belhaven Marina, up the Pungo River in North Carolina. Our first four days up the East Coast from Florida had been offshore. This was our third day in the ICW, which they call The Ditch. Now we were on the Pamlico Sound, nearing what should have been the end of our travel day.
The nature of the ICW varies wildly. Some of it is canals, as straight and true as the Army Corps could cut them; sometimes it is a narrow river through low-country grasses; elsewhere, it is a channel through a massive bay or sound, indistinguishable from the ocean but for the shorter intervals of breaking waves. The Pamlico Sound was rough due to high wind and an approaching storm front. Still, it was not the open sea. I have begun to fear the water off Hatteras; I think the Frying Pan Shoals may want to kill me. I was happy not to be out past the barrier islands, but we were still hoping to get off the sound before the storm reached us.
Chris said he thought the average boat of this size (62 feet total length) probably did not get used more than 100 miles per season. We will have done more than a thousand this week, a decade’s experience in 10 days. Chris often says cheerily that you learn about your boat by things breaking down. The previous owner barely used it, so Chris is learning a lot.
Earlier this day, for instance, just as we were about to pass under a bascule bridge that we had asked to open, the starboard engine died and would not re-start. We were forced to miss the opening and tie up in the current to a dock, where Chris learned that a spring on the engine’s governor had snapped. In fact, the engine was still running, at idle, but its control gauges on the bridge had also died for separate reasons, faking its death. Chris rigged the spring to work. I learned my bed is a lid over the boat’s giant batteries, and the headboard a switching panel and breaker box with about a mile of hot wiring behind the faux leather.
Chris asked me what I had learned so far on the trip. I paused, as it is hard to sum up, to frame, to begin story by being brief. He probably thought I was hedging or could not recall and, being helpful, told me to just to say whatever came to mind first. The first thing, I said, is the clearing the mind of its dissociation from the world: learning to re-establish basic understandings of time, distance, physical force, water, depth, sun, rain, and wind, which modern life often obscures. Beyond that, I said, the details big and small of running and docking a boat, from how to pump diesel into its tanks to moving around in its spaces. The low ceiling in my stateroom has several divots in it the shape of my forehead. Luckily I was hit in the head or I might have been injured.
I have learned more about how culture interacts with the physical landscape. The ICW through much of South Carolina is narrow and heavily-lined with homes, docks, and tied-up boats. The government puts out No Wake Zone signs where essential, but homeowners put their own out plentifully but perhaps unrealistically. If you bought a place there on The Ditch because you love the view, but you do not have the money for a fixed dock instead of a floating one, or a boat lift, then you might expect your stuff to rock up and down as some very large boats move through—slowly, but with enough throttle to maintain steerage.
Oh, the terrible things they said to Chris, and sometimes to me, even when I was not the one driving the boat. Credit card captain, go back to New York, go back to Florida, etc. with all-manner of expressive gestures and scatological references, some of which I found interesting because I had never heard them before.
We learned in the backwaters of Camp Lejeune that having signs up everywhere about unexploded ordnance does not deter families in small center-console boats from tying up at tiny beaches, putting out their lawn chairs and coolers, and having a nice day in the sun.
We learned what it feels like to run aground, doing 21 knots, at the mouth of the Bay River. It feels like rapid slowing and a definitive stop amid a lot of noise and belabored engines and rocking around. Chris was grabbing at the controls as we both tried not to be thrown against the panel, and I was suddenly aware that time had passed and I had little memory of the details. Our brains do not fire as quickly as some things happen, which should be comforting with regard to real disasters.
This was just a “soft grounding” in mud, as opposed to rocks, but we were in good. The hull was probably fine, as it is three inches-thick fiberglass. Whether the screws and rudder were unaffected remained to be seen. Chris’s favorite saying these days in, “It’s Boating 101,” and he says groundings are part of that. This was his fifth. He had bought the insurance so he called TowBoatUS from his cell, in that unlikely place off a deserted headland.
Am I supposed to be more upset? he said, laughing, standing on the foredeck.
An hour and ten minutes later a man appeared in a surprisingly small boat that was essentially a bollard with a frame built around it and a large engine.
The man made a circuit of Chris’s boat and was going to give up because the water was too shallow even for his own boat in the wind and chop, but Chris got him to try a second time. There was a lot of shouting over wind and engine noise, and the man was calling his boss and spinning his wheel and working the throttle and taking the slack as he pulled Castaway back and forth by the stern cleats. The only time he got really mad was when his hat blew off his head. Clouds of mud bloomed in the water for a hundred yards. It took almost two hours of constant pulling, the tow lines steaming with friction, to get her free. She was operational, maybe even fine.
We headed up the Bay River and Gale Creek and the wide Pamlico River and got to the mouth of the Pungo before we ran into the line of thunderstorms we had been trying to beat. Visibility was zero, and the wind high enough that we had to retreat from the Pungo to wait it out. During a break in the cells we made a run for the marina and tied up in Belhaven on Pantego Creek in the rain at dark and ate all the leftovers on the boat.
Hunger may be the best sauce, but finding yourself safe makes the meal.
