Isabel Holmes Bridge over the Northeast Cape Fear River, Wilmington, North Carolina. (Courtesy Zach Rudisin, Creative Commons)
A friend texted recently to say he had bought a new yacht.
Ok, I said.
He asked if I would like to help him transit it from Fort Pierce, Florida, to his home port of Havre de Grace, Maryland, a trip of about a thousand miles up the East Coast, in the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) and offshore.
“I can probably do that,” I said, spilling my coffee to get online and cancel my plans to see the Beach Boys in an amphitheater in the Ozarks. “I mean, I guess.”
We leave Saturday morning.
“The Ditch” is the portion of the ICW that runs from Key West to Norfolk, Virginia. It is used by both commercial shipping and recreational boaters and is busier in fall and spring as boaters move with the seasons and need shelter from weather and waves. Much of the route was first proposed by the feds in 1808, and there is still political drama in its upkeep.
The ICW is the bigger, 3,000-mile waterway that runs from Massachusetts south to the tip of Florida, back up into the Gulf of Mexico, and around the coast to Brownsville, Texas. Boats can sail and motor through bays, sounds, canals, rivers, and behind barrier islands without being exposed to the open sea.
The ICW is in turn a portion of The Great Loop, which allows boaters to circumnavigate the eastern U.S. and a portion of Canada, using the Atlantic and Gulf portions of the ICW, the Mississippi River, Great Lakes, Erie Canal, Hudson River, and other waterways. This route is a bucket-list adventure of some 6,000 miles, and boaters often choose to do it in legs, to include The Ditch, over time. My friend first brought that idea up a year ago, and I have kept it in mind.
He also reminded me it has been almost exactly forty years since he and I met in the same class at the Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center in Panama City, Florida. Yikes, I said. Back in those days my friend used to turn to me during self-created moments of disaster and laugh—heh-heh-heh—a clenched, Clark Gable laugh. I seem to remember zeppelin crashes, a steam train with a stuck throttle, women at the port looking from the windows of houses. I guess it has been a while.
We have not seen each other much in the intervening decades, and I had to ask some questions about preparation, seaworthiness, and running at night to make sure he is not still sometimes the guy who laughs as the locals bear down with torches. But a lot has happened, as with most people lucky enough to make it this far. We are different people than we used to be but also still mysteriously the same, mostly in the best ways, I think, and one of the real reasons I have agreed to the trip is to see what that means on a long stretch of water.
