(Photo by John Griswold)
People have been saying they would have liked to go on this trip, or wish we would pick them up in Charleston, or they tell me good-naturedly they are jealous, etc. Believe me, I understand. It is an opportunity of a lifetime, and it is my great good fortune to know Chris, who may be the most generous person I know and invited me to ride along. But the trip cannot possibly be what most of those people imagine it to be.
Years ago Chris and his wife were motoring The Ditch in one of half a dozen boats they have owned over time, and she asked to just try the open sea. Thirty minutes later they came back in, and she never made that mistake again.
My friend Crazy Larry, whose idea of a good time is bakeries, asked if I was getting much writing done on the trip. I laughed and told him that cruising along at 20 knots, 15 miles offshore, was like riding in a dump truck doing 80 down a gravel road. The flying bridge, the only place I will not get sick for long periods, is open to the wind, the roar of two big engines, the constant splash of bow wave and rooster-tail, and the thump of the hull. The air rushes through at high speed, except in a strong following wind; then there is hardly a breeze and it stinks of diesel exhaust. It is hot, and the sun is intense before it has risen high enough to be blocked by the roof. The slime of sweat and sunscreen soaks everything.
Chris paid a lot of money for the boat. It was the trip he wanted to take, a way of life. So far, over several weeks of hard work, first high and dry in a boatyard in a Florida summer, then on this “shakedown cruise,” he has gotten everything coming to him. On Jekyll Island, as I said in my last post, he worked in the cramped lazarette (engine room) in temperatures well over 120 degrees for hours, trying to fix a reluctant generator and to diagnose why shore power did not have the amperage to run our air conditioner. Finally, exhausted, he said he did not want food and would sleep in the open air on the boat. I got us a cheap hotel room instead, and we waited 90 minutes for a ride in the dark and biting bugs.
Tony, our Uber driver, was on his own trip. He was in his 70s, and after 28 years in New York and St. Simons Island, he was retiring back to Jamaica at last to be a Pentecostal preacher without a church. His Cadillac van was so cool and comfortable that Chris recovered and we went to Waffle House at 10:30 pm.
The next morning, Monday, we left for Hilton Head. Chris is an excellent boat pilot and mechanic, but he keeps saying no one else would have gone to do The Ditch, let alone to sea, with a boat that has problems like this one; those people were all afraid and needed to turn some wrenches and bust their knuckles to understand, he said. This was news I might have used four days ago.
That day we did 169 miles offshore, a longer day and nowhere as smooth as the one before. There were also more things to watch for—a sudden buoy to mark restricted waters for Right Whales, a cruiser coming at us fast as we advanced. Chris is an airplane pilot too and had told me he used his flight app to check the weather. We were really lucky, he said, that it would be clear all day. I pointed out thunderheads; he said those were cumulonimbus clouds, not thunderheads, and explained for a while the difference. Late in the day he let drop that there were actually “monster” storms chasing us, but they were still onshore. He also chose to go lay out on the tanning beds on the foredeck as a container ship bigger than some skyscrapers approached from miles away. I was at the helm but would be damned if I turned before he told me to. Well-tanned, he watched it until it was quite close then moseyed to the bridge and calmly said we were on a collision course.
We should have followed the channel where the container ship had come from to get to Hilton Head, but Chris ignored the approaching storms and decided to try a different route further up the coast. The seas were following, so it was getting rough but was still fine. But he changed his mind again, so we had to beat our way back to the channel against the wind, rollers, and spray erupting from 20 feet below. My chair in the bridge—eight inches lower than the captain’s chair—was broken. It slid back and forth in the swells and slammed to a stop in each direction. I complained, and Chris said that it did not move at all before he had fixed it.
I was going to kill him, it would have been easy, but knew he was my only hope for reaching shore.
And yet. That night after tying up and cleaning up, we took the boat’s tender a few hundred yards down the river, docked it at a restaurant, and had a very fine seafood dinner.
Today we ran offshore again, only 111 miles, and the weather (if not the water) was better. We docked at the Leland Oil Company on Jeremy Creek in McLellanville, South Carolina. McLellanville is a wonderfully picturesque village, and I walked down to where the shrimp fleet is docked and bought a couple of pounds of raw shrimp, a small bag of frozen deviled crabs, and some crab dip. The cashier told me she was afraid to go out on a boat, and I said the only thing I had to be afraid of was the guy I was with. Three locals waiting their turn in the small space liked that a lot and repeated it. She gave me a bag of Captain’s Wafers for free.
I cannot describe how pleasant it is at their dock as the night comes on. We ate the shrimp and a salad sitting on the fantail in folding chairs. The sun set, and the moon emerged from the clouds. Chris was able to relax without more hard labor, and I began to fully understand the draw of a trip by cruiser. Around us were a few smaller boats and a dredger. Homes in the low-country grass across the creek had their lights on. Vaughn, owner of the Miss Daisy, which was tied up below us, brought over a big clear plastic sack of Brunswick stew he had made. He and his wife, Vicky, take their older boat to Key West, a slow trip on a single engine. He said she makes 12 knots but is more comfortable at eight. They like it that way. What’s the hurry?
They were fishing off the back of their boat as we sat there. A guy who had been drinking walked out to talk to them. He left, and Vicky caught something, worked the taut fishing line, worked it, worked it. The rod bent one too many times, and the line snapped.
“Shiht fahr!” she yelled, and we all laughed. There are many trips; this is a good one.
