Consulting my personal A.D.D

NOTE:  This was a personal email to Friend Fred Meyers who among many accomplishments wrote and published cruising guides on the Tombigbee, Tennessee, and the Cumberland Rivers.  This personal email during construction morphed into whatever it is now.  I am sorry Fred, but it simply took off, got out of control and took a hard jog to avoided sublime and ensure the ridiculous.  You of all people should understand how this can happen and how it blindly takes us to unknown spaces.

Dear Editor Fred,

How are you my friend? How good to read from you.  You’re right, I have not been writing on the book as diligently as we had previously discussed.

Soon, I hope, writing chapters instead of stuffing the email eggplant with filler will be the order of the morning. You are correct, Baltimore pirating with all the pretty horses is a massive distraction.  Course the Bahamas has its own way of claiming attention.  I now understand and pity the child with Attention Deficit Disorder.

(a few minute pause thinking about how one might get distracted)

I was just consulting my personal A.D.D. inside me where it resides, roams freely and continues to be an acquaintance of mine.  I have concluded there is a positive side of A.D.D. and upon a more intimate review, I discovered some odd yet undeniable facts.   When you spend a little time on it, there may be more good than bad, and have you ever noticed it is only males who are so categorized.   Wow.  I think I’m on to something here.  If a male child cannot stay focused and on task for very long he may be considered having a deficit condition.  If it is a young girl the behavior is defined as a primary learning tool for a lifelong adventure in multi-tasking.  If male and in your sixties and exhibit the same behavior your retired and having way too much fun or as Lynn likes to explain it about me , “…he has simply failed to grow-up…”.  Adult women mask the scourge of flight hither and yon by insisting: “well, someone has to do the work around here”.  How do they get away with that stuff? Oh, yeah, I temporarily lost my senses, women are always right.  How could I have forgotten?

I submit to you that A.D.D. is an excellent development tool that sets up young men to be aggressively curious and causes them to stick their fingers in so many pies that sooner or later they will pull out a plum they find so delicious they decide to mine that fruit for all its worth.

In fact I bet that is how you got to be my editor and I am happy for your opportunity to bake up a sinfully good experience for all to sample.  A collection of musings hot and sweet yet hints of tartness with full-bodied taste on the front end that slims to a fairly light aftertaste drawing you back to the fruit for another taste.  (Barf, I’m gagging)

Because of the delicacy of this half-baked wonder, you could not possibly abuse this fruit by canning it, could you now?

Oh, by the way, did I tell you about the Conch Salad they have here?  Today’s adventure will be searching not for the lost shaker of salt, although that is a continuing theme, but seeking the perfectly shaped full-lipped conch with color shading to a ruddy pink interior.  Fortunately Conch do not, as a rule, have A.D.D.  Can’t you just imagine this huge snail hauling his conch butt across the Sea of Abaco with this big sand trail rooster tailing up behind him or streaking through the sea grass on the bottom with his tail on fire, flames streaming behind him or would it only be steam? 

Soon as we find the conch, mon, we be off seeking the big bug lobster.  Not sure when, but I promise to send you the next chapter real soon.  Hey, look.  Is that a school of snapper hanging under the boat?  Editor Dude, I got to go, there are things that need doing. 

Bones

Getting to the Bahamas

I am sitting here at one of the Abaco Beach Resort & Marina swimming pools.  I am patiently waiting for the bar in the middle of the pool to open.  I don’t think it opens until 0700 hrs.  But I am, as suggested, a patient man when waiting for rum.  I smell the cook house.  It smells good, but I do not smell the rum, so I wait.  In fact there was a party here last night with two-for-one drinks.  The place, of course, was flooded with cruisers.  So many cruisers it took me 20 minutes to get my two expensive rum punches and then I forgot to get Lynn’s wine.  Patience is a virtue and a hell of a lot easier when I have rum punch in each hand.  I went back for her wine, very happy to wait.

This week I have been fearful of just about everything.  Nervous about our crossings of Okeechobee, the Gulf Stream, Little Abaco Bank and crossing from island to island in the Sea of Abaco in our dinghy and concerned about anchoring and the mooring ball and afraid of getting lost again in the dinghy in the night after several Sundowners, a rum drink.  Never mind that I got lost at Green Turtle Cay between Settlement Point and Black Sound entrance, a matter of a 100 yards or so in a straight line.  Few would understand that challenge unless they had several Sundowners also, which is why Lynn didn’t even know we were lost I suspect. 

I have been frightened of everything except my morning coffee.  Then the day before we left for the Bahamas the darn cup full of coffee took a running jump at my computer and did a cannonball in the middle of the keyboard.  I sat transfixed as the coffee, in slow motion, wobbled to the edge of the cup then concentrated all its energy back to the middle of the cup and exploded up and outward in a starburst of smoothness that then descended on to the keyboard several feet to starboard. Every key, except “Esc” and “Control”, held an opaque, golden tan pool of former goodness.  It is odd that those keys were spared, since I couldn’t escape and had no control of anything.   If I could drown in a cup of water (I haven’t yet, which is why avoid water and stick to rum), I guess it is reasonable to understand the demise of my computer in a partial cup of coffee.  Father Phil of Curmugeon, a computer security pro, is currently performing the post-mortem.  So, now I even fear my coffee.

It started last Monday.  (Oh crap, a coconut just landed next to me and scared it out of me.  Hmm, I should put lime in da coconut ‘n shake it all up.  I’m beginning to like this place).  As I was saying, last Monday 0’ dark thirty, we were in Stuart, Florida staged and ready to depart for the Bahamas.  The day before we had scouted the pass from the ICW to the St. Lucie outer marker.  Piece of cake. 

We were up at 0330 and underweigh using our computer cookie trails from the day before to help guide us out channel across the ICW and out the pass.  To be candid it was a darn sight easier the day before in the daylight.  As we departed Manatee Pocket, I suddenly switched into panic attack function (OMG), where up is down and down is sideways and radar is wrong and the course line doesn’t stay under the little ship-like cursor of my charting system.  Lynn sensed my disoriented state and stepped up or perhaps sidestepped into her Zen mode as she stood outside with million candle power beam seeking out our next mark, secure in her ability, and confidently, in a calm knowing voice, guided me ever so nicely out of the channel and on to a mud flat.  But at least she did it with panache and it was skillfully accomplished.  I was very impressed.  We got to the outer marker at about the same time we would have if we had left at first light, but who cares. Really, it is the adventure that counts.  Yeah, right.

Now for those of you that have made this crossing you know all the feelings and the wonders it provides so you may want to move on to another person’s blog, but for those who have not done this or simply want the visual of my green pants turning brown stick around.  I can only revert to one of my pirate crews’ text expressions: OMG,or Oh..MY…GOD….  In my case it is often interchangeable with OS or Oh, Sh-t!

As we cleared the St Lucie outer marker we turned 45 degrees south for a 16 mile jaunt down and out to the Gulf Stream rather then head due east to the stream only 10 miles off-shore.  We do this because, as our boating friends know, the Gulf Stream runs 2-4 knots north and, hence, rather than fight it the whole way across we can go south before we get to it then point straight east and end up in the right spot due to the current pushing us north as we motor east across the stream. (Deedra forget it.  Its not that important.)

Being a Nervous Nelly and knowing the fickleness of the Stream and the capricious weather of the Florida Strait we choose weather like elves choose cookies.  Both must be uncommonly good.  For us a crossing, any crossing (except crossing a Street to a bar) forecast, must be 2’ or less for the seas and under 10 kts for the wind, and, oh yes, it must be out of the south for this crossing to prevent beating against the standing waves created from wind blowing against current.  We like this very conservative forecast because, most of the time, just when you get to depend on a forecast being accurate, it is OMG/OS much worse and you die or at least wish you had.  This day we were lucky, the seas are as forecasted and the sun spun up once again and turned the calmish seas the color of a peeled blood orange after the first bite.

So the Gulf Stream is really a river in the ocean which doesn’t make a lot of sense until you get to there, because that is exactly what you see - a river in the ocean.  We got to the edge of the Gulf Stream and it was as if we were standing on the shore at the river’s edge.  OMG.  There was a line of color change, but more so a distinct change in the water shape.  The wind blowing out of the south was going with the stream and this day the water in the Gulf Stream river was flat and so where a few yards before it was rougher and ruffled from the 5 mph breeze it was calm and flat in the river and the color, the color I have never seen before in nature.  It was a rich, creamy, cobalt blue with endlessness to the colors depth that said,  “I am deep, I am strong, I am the Gulf Stream”. 

The Stream itself only takes us about six hours to cross from Florida to the Little Bahamas Bank.  We knew that when we crossed onto the Bank we would have a depth change from 2,000 ft depth to 13-foot depth.  OMG, we didn’t know it was going to happen in about one boat length.  As we approached the bank we could see it by the color change about a mile away.  As we crossed on to the bank the depth went so very quickly from 2,000 to 300 ft and then it seems like in one boat length we went from the color of deep space Cobalt blue to the sharpest, brightest, purist Arizona turquoise that we have ever seen.  It was brilliant, almost blinding, as we skittered across into 13 foot of water of the White Sand Ridge onto the Bank.

We trudged on across the bank for 25 miles and as the earth churned the sun into a hot buttery set we dropped anchor and enjoyed the solitude and the quiet  contrast of sunset and darkening azure six inch seas—in the middle of the Little Bahama Bank--aka nowhere.  Nowhere was the perfect anchorage this evening as a full moon towed by the sun on a long leash shed its grace on Skinwalker.   We have arrived in Paradise—now where are those 72 virgins we have heard about so much lately?

Being a master of a pirate ship

Friends,

Many people do not understand why I enjoy being the Master of the FEARLESS the Urban Pirate Ship in Baltimore.  I don't truly understand it myself, therefore one day I held a "focus group" of natives in a one on one and group meetings to help me come up with the hard answers.

Bones

 

Loving my life: Music, manatees, and phosphorescence

To the sounds of a DJ playing spinning 60’s tunes the sun is steadily tugging cover of night from the east over the SKINWALKER.  There is a seriously overweight manatee floating in peaceful slumber 50 foot from the boat bobbing like a gray cork in the Manatee Cove Marina basin.  Once every few minutes it slow raises its ugly head exposing his nose to breath and more frequently raises its tail to pass gas.  Have you ever in your life encountered a worse scent than a manatee fart?  Three tight body soldiers, female, tight jeans, tight shirts, head for the tiki bar to pick up a man for the night or perhaps longer.  An unknown group is covering “I can’t help falling in love”, while two airmen attempt to sing along.  An enlisted Mom in uniform escorts her two kids along the dock.  Two staff Sergeants un-tip two plastic pipe chairs and pull them up to the plastic table to the threads of a Hawaiian slide guitar piece while the wind complains moderately overhead.  The manatee farts again and the very slight current slowly draws the sleepy creature closer to our boat.  It is 76.6 degrees and the low puffy clouds explain the barometer is rising.  The slide guitar morphs into a quick island tune with the steel drums attempting to keep up with the fast paced vocals of a Jam’ mon.  Forest fatigues flood the tiki hut and a girl with huge breast and a tight knit V tee draws their attention as she walks up—with a guy.  I can almost hear the disappointed groans wrenched from the fatigues of whom most will not get laid tonight.  The DJ sits stoic, bored with his sloppy and ill-prepared set of ancient music nobody really cares much about except those already drunk. Big breasts and her beau come by and chat up Lynn, who is sitting on the back deck, as the band in the box sputters out a medley of old Christian tunes promising this Little Light of Mine, Swing Lo Sweet Chariot, The River is Deep and Wide and others.  The DJ’s play list is eclectic if nothing else.

Tonight the water will sparkle with phosphorescence as I urinate into it or a mullet jumps or the manatee farts sending up a mass of bubbles that excite the creatures that glow.  I sneer in disgust, yet happy for the manatee in that its flatulence excites something.  Red, Red Wine accompanies the slow sensuous bootie rhythm as a woman moves it gently back up against a sergeant that pretends to ignore her.  Jimmy Buffet laments his lost shaker of salt followed by Eilene Quinn doing an unorthodox version of What do You do With a Drunken Sailor.

Hot damn, I love my life,

Bones

No see’ ums in the heart of lowcountry

Beaufort South Carolina, heart of the Lowcountry

There is a softness to the ambient glow of sunlight in the Lowcountry. One senses, but cannot see, a hint of amber that comforts in the slightest of visual caresses. It’s the same feeling one gets from tanned skin on an attractively dress person. It is the sense of a perfect homemade loaf of bread. It’s the wonder of a tide washed beach that glistens warmly. It is the elusive light one cannot easily capture in photos, but yet it is there and affects every view. The light compliments life like an amber ale does a warm lazy afternoon. I often wonder if it is the soft glow of light that encourages southerners slower speech and the penchant for enjoying a laidback lifestyle.

The light entrances me. I love its hypnotic effect on the endless flow and ebb of tidal waters. I find contentment in the early sun grazing the top of marsh grass. The light is majestic as it holds court in the tops of the full, strong oak tops and dances under them, weak and with modesty.

It is not just the light of course; it is the people, their attitude toward life founded on a comfortable blend of tidal bays and creeks complimented by islands of forested green melded together with the grandeur of the lowcountry marsh. It is the blend of creatures and croplands that allowed for a simple peaceful existence with plentiful living, but one not easily acquired.

But no paradise can take full measure of itself unless it has a standard against which to measure. For every ying there is a yang.

No see’ ums. They are those little flying jaws of full bred evil. Annoying little bastards. Off-spring, no doubt, of frivolous mosquitoes and biting black flies; and more of them than grains of sand on the beach, more than leaves of marsh grass, more than raindrops in a thunderstorm. They cloud the sky, they get in your hair, they enter your mouth, they climb in your ears. These flying piranhas are the great equalizer. You get used to them or you don’t and that makes the difference between loving Beaufort or failing to see the light.

So in late afternoon the snapping hordes of jaws gather and we adjourn from our afternoon tea on the aft deck, spray all the screens and sequester ourselves with beverage and book or congenial talk about the man eating bugs coating the boat windows. The buggy population will largely decrease in volume with the setting sun and we can turn our thoughts to the restaurant up the hill with scent of beans baking on a tray under the ribs cooking and dripping goodness of the flavored juices and small pieces of meat joining with the beans. What is on your plate for dinner?

Tribute to MV AVALON

This log is for Joanne & Mark aboard the MV AVALON. We had the honor of sharing a couple of days with these seasoned cruisers who have not previously experienced the Atlantic Intra-Coastal Waterway.

The doe was alone. Dipping her head to lap up water, raising it to measure SKINWALKERS intent, lowering to the water once again. She lives in the Waccamaw River plain where land and water often seem never to be one or the other; where there are no edges to define the threshold of either . It seems a mystical place where common creatures of the earth might feel the presence of a unicorn without wonder. Man is invading and with him corruption of the natural wonders to fit his image of what nature and creature comfort should be, but that is digression.

The Waccamaw, with ancient talents, holds its own, maintaining a syrupy beauty. The adaptation of flora and fauna to the infirmity of the land and the thickness of the water is unique. To me the area between Socaste Swing Bridge and the high rise bridge before Georgetown, SC is a delicious cornucopia of natural delights. The silence of the night is enriched by the occasional owl call, a soft trill of another bird, a small fish breaking into the air and quiet rustling in the reeds of unknown origin—perhaps the Unicorn. Perhaps during the day you will enjoy the purple haze of the now wild rice growing at the edges and the hand dug ditches some lined with wood and poles and the eagles posted high as if a sentinel offering safe passage for each passing cruiser.

The Waccamaw is the northern end of South Carolina’s Coastal plains speckled heavily with wooded islands and areas of marsh grass that are islands at low tide and shallows at high tide. This is the Lowcountry with its thick muck that is, in fact, older then dirt. It’s the home of gentle people and exquisite foods, where cooked beans can be a delicacy and pulled pork a treasure.

I think you’re going to like South Carolina as you come along the waterway.

Bones

Freezing my butt off

The bitter darkness outside lacks sunlight and warmth. The darkness inside reeks of something mean and sharp edged, heartless. You can sense its power to rend jagged holes in your psyche by creeping across your skin and through your bones. It slices at my sense of adventure while taunting and molesting my sensibility. It is what I dislike and run from at every opportunity—It is cold weather.

I am frigging freezing my butt off, friends.

We skittered out of Baltimore like a blowing leaf in autumn and landed first in Solomons then juked down the bay to Portsmouth attempting to clear the Chesapeake before the winds stuffed us into a hidey hole. Instead we traveled in the protection of the Dismal Swamp to Elizabeth City to take refuge only to find a week of projected winds and cold so we took a chance on the sometimes treacherous crossing of the Albemarle Sound in 15 knots of wind chasing us with 2 ft seas combined with a 2-3 ft swell on our beam which produced a snotty corkscrewed roll for two hours and finally hit the Pungo Canal where we now lie in the Pungo River safe, tired and FRIGGING COLD.

I don’t like being cold and swathed in three and four layers of clothes. I don’t like the ripping hard-bladed wind cutting at my face and hands. People are not designed to be cold. They are built to be naked and comfy warm. (no visuals, please)

My world is bitter cold and gray. The sky flint colored with mean short stubs of layered clouds, the water an oily gray and the nights dark and windy. My world is presently Bleak. Desolute. Colorless. Misery loves company and we have a buddy boat, AVALON with Mark & Joanne to share our whining and wine. But they are from Maine and not all that sympathetic with our plight. Never-the-less good company.

But do not cry for me. I can whine for myself easily enough. Besides, soon enough I will be basking in the sunny goodness of a Bahamian beach front bar while many of my friends will continue to sulk in the cold north wind.

Extremes are the way of cruising, one day of indescribable light and goodness another day one whining about living in a scene from Cormac McCarthy’s dreadful imagination. Wonder if its above freezing in Oriental, NC our stop tonight.

Door on Baltimore is closing

There’s an empty barge being pushed toward the inner harbor no doubt heading for the dry dock. The forward lookout, hands jammed into his pockets, hunches into the unseasonable sharp edged breeze.

Two trawlers with southing in mind chug their way toward the Key Bridge. Each captain is allowing hope for calm seas to overwhelm the reality of the weather forecast. The adrenaline rush of getting underway has clouded their judgment as it does even experienced cruisers. They might get their ass kicked, but will find a gentle anchorage and sit it out having completed the task of getting underway.

The chilling air fosters a stirring within. It brings a rush of mental checks that winds through a pre-departure list of things to do, culling, sorting, and deleting items now less important to the goal of leaving. The urgent mental lists vaporize and reform like puffy white clouds into an emotional yearning. The yearning flows out of my soul and, in transit, evolves as a physical desire in my feet to move on. My feet are itching. The door on Baltimore is closing even as the sun breaks the horizon. The piratical urges to be aboard the FEARLESS are dwindling rapidly.

My feet are feeling the sands of the Bahamas. I want that tee shirt.

Capt. Bones

USS FEARLESS

AKA Wayne & Lynn Flatt

MV SKINWALKER