DeeAnn, our hostess, has been prodding at rob and I to let her take us out on her boat this week. After Hurricane Alex passed quietly in the night, we figured we would go out today.
It’s been years since I have been on a boat that was not moored in a harbor. The last boat deck I stood on was the USS Constellation, when I was covering the story about the nuclear sub seamen coming to learn to tie rigging on a ship that predated their vessel by a century. It was so hot that day on the deck I had to politely find water in a hurry without losing my journalistic demeanor, ie: without letting them know I was about the pass out on their ship covering my second story. That boat was sitting still in the water.
I was on the Lady Maryland for a fifth-grade field trip where we did cute little science experiments and I was glad to find I did not suffer from sea sickness. I remember they let us help with the sails, and it was so much harder and heavier than it looked.
And I might have been in a canoe or a fishing boat a little later in my life, but I really don’t remember it. Nothing stellar.
DeeAnn has a little speedboat, and I watched with great interest as she backed her car into the public dock and lowered the trailer with the boat on it into the Cape Fear River. She had me hold the rope attached to it and guide the boat to the part of the dock that we could walk onto and get into it from above. It is always so amazing to me the way I could never move a boat like that on land, but with a tiny bit of rope in the water, I could pull it back and forth pretty easily. I felt like an astronaut pushing things in space.
We got in and she started taking us out into the water. It was amazing watching her navigate the wakes of passing boats, which would throw the boat around like a water rapids ride at an amusement park, or surf us right on the edge if she caught the wake just right. And she was so sure at the wheel that I was calm about it, even when the boat seemed to leap right out of the water.
And pelicans were diving for the fish in the water all around us, and egrets were hunting the shallows. And people were out fishing with their boats, or joyriding or what have you. And it was amazing and sunny and the water felt good and the air smelled strongly of salt.
And she pointed here and there and told us where she and her friends had seen the shark, and the moored battleship with it’s rusting bottom and how these two alligators lived there and would come out if you called them by name. And she showed us how some of the crab traps, marked by floating buoyees in the water, moved pretty fast because something underwater had probably gotten hold of it. And how there was this one layer of sediment that was all ballust (?) because ships coming from elsewhere to pick up cargo here would weigh themselves down for the trip here, but then needed to get rid of it for the trip back, and so an entire layer of the soil was this discarded weight.
She took us down the Cape Fear River to Carolina Beach and Wrightsville Beach, and we docked at a restaraunt, walked up to the deck and had a little something to eat. I delighted in this to no end, having never done something so cool as roll up in a boat to a restaurant. 🙂
I walked back down to the dock and watched the schools of little fish in the water, and saw that attached to the underside of the dock were the strangest sea creatures I’d ever seen. I figured they were some kind of plant or barnacle or something. They were these green tubular things all crowded together. If I was braver, I would have touched one with a finger, but I figured I would start with a stick. And when I touched one of the openings of the tubes, it shrunk back and closed up!
Apparently they are called sea squirts, because, as I thankfully found out by looking at one a ways from me, they spit water. Still don’t know whether this is flora or fauna. So strange. They look like something that would live on the walls of the labrynth.
We got back in the boat, and she took us all over, through all these small islands in the ocean, through inlets and harbors. She showed us where she used to rent a sea-side house and talked about how Walter Kronkite used to dock his boat there, and how she’d always see him, wearing his driving cap, and he would wave to her whenever she passed by.
Then she took us to this one quiet inlet and she got out to swim and dropped us off on a nearby island. Rob and I both were a little wary of swimming in water that we couldn’t see into. When we came up to the island, a crowd of fiddler crabs, before invisible, went running up the beach away from our approach. The beach was littered with these little black things that I assumed were some kind of bird or turtle droppings, so I never bothered to inspect them closer. But rob did, and it turned out that the beach, almost black with the things, was covered with snails in their black shells.
We stayed on the beach of fiddler crabs and snails for a long time chasing them around and picking them up. In moments like this, it’s so easy to put yourself there in that life forever. The idea of running away and becoming a fisherman (woman), spending your days (and of course all of them would be sunny and just like this one) on the water waving to the other fisherman. Working your body into tanness and leaness. Hunting for seashells. You imagine yourself the Prince(cess) of Tides, one of those river children who has grown up on water and knows everything about it. Or you’re a jaded northerner come to abandon everything and start over a hermit in the south. All these dumb romantic idealized notions seem possible when you stand on that beach in the sunlight, boat docked just ahead of you.
We ran aground once when the tide dropped off and DeeAnn got out to push the boat back into deeper water. She had to get one of us to come out and help her, and when I looked at rob’s panicked face, I knew it was going to be me. Rob is not good with open water, or water he can’t see into. He’s afraid of monsters. You think I’m kidding.
I wasn’t too thrilled about it either, but eventually rob had to get out and help, too, and we got the boat going before anyone got too upset.
And we joked about how the Cape Fear River was far too beautiful and placid to live up to it’s name.
And then we saw the storm.
We were 10 minutes down the river from the public dock and we saw the wall of rain coming for us out of nowhere. Patches of sun were still interspersed with it, and it didn’t look bad, but it was dark, and I’d certainly never been out in open water in a storm before. I had no idea what to expect, or whether I should be afraid. But DeeAnn didn’t seem to be.
The water hit us so cold, and the noise was so different from storms on land, because it was hitting the water all around us. It was cold. DeeAnn cut the engine and took out an umbrella. We waited out the worst of it, eventually picking up speed and shielding our eyes and faces from the raindrops, which stung from the velocity.
And we lived.
And I loved it. Hair tangled beyond recognition with sand and salt, a little red from the sun. It was wonderful.
A great adventure.