3/19/19 leaving georgetown

Thoughts like these rolled around my head the day Pete and I boarded Sea Tiger, fired up the diesels, and prepared to leave Harbourtown. Pete maneuvered our new-to-us boat off the dock. I took in her six lines as the dockhand passed them up. My pulse literally quickened.

We waved good-bye to the Colonial Era waterfront and the giant shrimp sculpture in the waterfront park as my boat-driving husband turned us down Winyah Bay. I sat at the forward bench and patted Sea Tiger’s windshield. “Say aloha!” A stiff wind took away my words and Georgetown’s rotting paper mill odor.

We were heading east to head south 850 statute miles toward St. Petersburg and home. Rule of thumb is one hour of car traveling equals one day of boat cruising. Pete was expected at work there in three weeks. We should be fine.

We would take the Intracoastal Waterway to South Florida, west across the Okeechobee Waterway — a river-lake-canal-river route that skirts the Everglades and connects Florida’s Atlantic and Gulf Coasts between Stuart and Fort Myers — then north to St. Pete.

The Intracoastal – ICW – is a ribbon of tidal rivers, canals, inlets, and bays that snakes 3000 miles from Norfolk Virginia, to Brownsville, Texas. It carries vessels mostly inside the barrier islands protecting the Southeastern U.S. coast from the ocean proper. I had been across ICW drawbridges countless times, often getting stuck as a boat sailed through the open draw. Always impatient because I didn’t want to be slowed on my way to the beach, to work, or home while sun-tanned boaters leisurely waved cold drinks toward the backed-up traffic.

Until now, I hadn’t been on the boat side of the equation.

Indeed, most of my time on the water had been spent on large ships. Constitutionally, I was sailor to Pete’s boatman. A sailor plies the high seas under power – or sail. Boatmen use smaller, lighter craft that stick close to shore. Pete has plenty of time on large cutters, too, and we’ve both sail-sailed, as in boats powered by the wind. But yeah, I was a sailor to his boatman.

Pete turned the helm over to me halfway down Winyah Bay, a long reach of the Atlantic that connects Georgetown with the sea. With his help, I sorted the channel markers and turned into the ICW at the correct time. But suddenly, the fast-running ebb tide swung the stern toward the opposite bank – a swung sharpened by the now crosswise wind that caught the bridge canvas like a giant sail.

He barked. I yelled back, overcorrected then overcorrected the other way. Finally straightened Sea Tiger out. Ahead of us, the ICW was a desolate, narrow ditch that low tide had left visibly shoaled on either side. A sailboat motored down the channel in front of us – without a radio, I quickly discovered. I lost maneuverability in the area’s no-wake slow zone.

*****

That first big course change I made happened in seconds, maybe a minute from the time I spun the wheel until we were steadied up and I was calling the sailboat to arrange passage (to no avail). In those moments, my romantic human experience/ DNA/ bloodline theories of maritime knowledge and desire evaporated. What did I know, really? What did I know? What did I not know?

I did know how to use engines and rudders to maneuver a vessel. I did not know how to balance those forces without a bow thruster.

I did know how the wind and tide can drag a boat off its intended course, how rapidly a boat can ground, and how difficult it can be to maneuver at the slow speeds dictated by a narrow channel and other traffic. I did not know how quickly and dangerously that could happen in a narrow, shallow channel on a lightweight boat with limited power and small rudders.

I did know that red aids to navigation pass down a vessel’s starboard (right) side when returning from sea or southbound in the Intracoastal Waterway; that green aids mark the opposite side. That ICW aids carry yellow marks to distinguish that channel from others.

I did not know how difficult it can be to find your course when those same red/ green/ with/ without yellow/ harbor/ ICW buoys and lights converge as they mark intersecting, crisscrossing, poorly defined channels.

I did know the International Rules of the Road and how to arrange passage with another vessel by radio. I did not know that many small boaters do not own or regularly turn on their VHF-FM sets.

And so much more. You don’t know what you don’t know. For me, that first day was a dawning, not the measure of my knowledge or lack thereof.

We traveled 66 miles to Charleston, arriving around sunset. I’d imagined celebrating St. Patrick’s Day under the fat, full moon that rose as we moored at the City Marina’s new mega-dock. But we were both too tired to do more than grab dinner at the restaurant at the end of the seemingly mile-long city dock.

****

Two or three times that day, Pete had edged us carefully through shoaled Low Country channels the full-moon tide had nearly emptied. I would not have dared. He’d motored us past a red buoy (with yellow square) lying on its side on a mid-channel island, left high and dry in the ebb. My heart was in my throat.

He drove us across Charleston Harbor’s windy expanse as I tried to track bustling Saturday afternoon boat traffic at the same time I figured out which buoy was which, which set of markers would carry us across the harbor, or back into the ICW, or up the Cooper River, or toward Fort Sumter, or into the Ashley River where we wanted to go.

I was sobered though didn’t yet feel the weight of the coming six years. I photographed the moonrise and thought about how cool it was to have our own boat, to be on it, to be going where we wanted to go instead of sent off on some or another mission.

I thought about my fourth-grade artwork, which Dad had recently returned to me. There, in my Palmer Method cursive I had copied Richard Hovey’s The Sea Gypsy. The lined schoolgirl paper is glued to a drawing I made over and over as a kid: a clipper ship, a dock, a sun. A silhouette figure, which can only represent me, standing close enough to touch the bowsprit.

Maybe it is in my DNA. Not the knowledge, of course, which only comes with experience and work – but the desire. How else would a girl from Orrville, Ohio, know from day one exactly where she wanted to go?

The Sea Gypsy
by Richard Hovey

I am fevered with the sunset
I am fretful with the bay
For the wander that is in me
And my soul is in Cathay.

There’s a schooner in the offing
With her topsails shot with fire,
And my heart has gone aboard her
For the Islands of Desire.

I must forth again tomorrow!
With the sunset I must be
Hull down on the trail of rapture
In the wonder of the sea.