CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN: FROM PORPOISE ACCESS TO MILITARY EXCESS

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN: FROM PORPOISE ACCESS TO MILITARY EXCESS

Big yawn – not! Just another incredible day on the intracoastal waterway. You guessed it – a porpoise came to race with Slow Motion, at a speed of nearly 10 miles an hour, almost as fast as the Boston Marathon winners. This porpoise was huge, very strong and definitely an endurance swimmer. Eat your heart out, Diana Nyad. I took several videos of this natural athlete, as he/she swam to the starboard side of the bowsprit, coming toward the center to rise up out of the water and show off his/her rippling swim muscles. Every time he/she surfaced, I screamed in a high-pitched voice, hoping to emulate dolphin-speak. The porpoise turned sideways once near the surface to get a good look at me, then kept on racing. He/she was determined to beat Slow Motion to St. Augustine. I know a lot of places in Key Largo advertise that you can pay them to swim with the dolphins, but on Slow Motion, for no charge at all, you can race with the dolphins. It’s reason enough to visit and cruise with the Admiral and me. In a word, it’s exhilarating.

From the exhilarating to the exasperating: Just when the Admiral thinks he has seen the dumbest maneuver another boater can make, a new boater (or boaters) comes along and does something even dumber. Today, for example, as we approached the Crescent Beach bridge, which is listed in the Waterway Guide as having a vertical clearance of 25 feet, we saw not one, but two boats – a sailboat and a sailing catamaran – ANCHORED IN THE CHANNEL IN FRONT OF THE BRIDGE. I put this in caps, as it bears emphasizing. I mean, their anchors and anchor lines were firmly planted on the bottom of the channel, their anchor chains were extended out in the channel and their boat hulls were IN THE CHANNEL. They had set up camp in the middle of the channel. This is so stupid in so many ways, and so wrong in so many ways. It’s a crash waiting to happen with the next boat that comes along in the channel, expecting that no boaters would be dumb enough to plant themselves in the middle of it. As we approached the bridge carefully, gauging whether there was enough room left in the channel for us to get past Dumb and Dumber safely, we heard the Coast Guard announce that this particular bridge was closed “indefinitely” for maintenance. That explained why the boaters had stopped right in front of the bridge – both of their vessels had masts that were much higher than the bridge clearance of 25 feet. And to a certain extent, it explained their bonehead maneuver of parking themselves in the middle of the channel – kind of a two year old mentality that says: “If I can’t get through, then nobody will get through!”

Well, we squeaked past them without being hit by either boat and we passed easily under the bridge, since our highest point, without antenna raised, is 19 feet. Then the Admiral got on the phone and called just about every federal and state bureaucracy that has anything to do with Intracoastal Waterway regulation enforcement. Talk about buck-passing! Each agency said another agency was responsible for enforcement in this situation. Never mind that it was a dangerous situation that needed a remedy as soon as possible. The Admiral just got bumped from one official to another without getting anyone who claimed to have any authority to tell the illegally anchored boaters to move out of the channel. Some of the bureaucrats appeared to be helpful. One guy gave the Admiral the number for the local marine patrol. The Admiral called and the number was disconnected. Yes, a desk jockey can be that out of touch with the waterway, even a Coast Guard or a Fish and Wildlife Commission desk jockey. After his flurry of phone calls – at least 6 – every agency that SHOULD be involved in keeping the waterway channel safe was duly notified of the hazard. We did not hear any reports of a collision next to Crescent Beach Bridge on Channel 16, so maybe all those who said they could not do anything actually did something. Fortunately, the bridge was opened the next day. Here’s hoping the petulant “anchor-in” of the two selfish boaters did not harm any other boaters while the bridge was closed.

Eight times out of ten the boaters you meet are law-abiding, courteous, adventuresome folks. Today the trawler “Widget” made a slow pass on the portside, after radioing us his intentions and getting permission. That’s the way it’s supposed to work, not like yesterday when this huge boat came flying by us, within 10 feet of our portside – no advanced notice whatsoever, no slowing down during the pass. This is usually the M.O. of a “Paladin” captain – hired gun to transport a boat from Port A to Port B. It’s all about making time, not making friends, not even enjoying the trip – just getting the boat to its destination as quickly as possible and moving on to the next job. For fun they probably drive monster trucks over mounds of dirt at rodeo grounds on the weekends. Or they go someplace where they can crash large vehicles into other large vehicles. I’m trying to think of one instance in the past two years of boat travel when we were “waked” by a woman captain ferrying a fast boat on the waterway. And I can’t. I do not subscribe (any more) to the notion that all women are morally superior to all men. But in my experience when a woman is captaining a motor vessel or a sailboat or a catamaran, she is courteous and knows the rules of the waterway. There are exceptions, like that neophyte who flew past us, but came to a screeching halt moments later when she grounded her vessel, then waited 40 minutes for the tide to rise and flew by us again an hour or two later. All she had to say for herself as she passed us the second time was: “I’m new at this. Can you tell that I don’t know what I’m doing?” Her remark was somewhat disarming, but when you’re trying to protect your 19 ton boat from other heavyweight vessels on the waterway, “disarming” doesn’t cut it. Competency is the minimum basic requirement – in steering, navigating, going the proper speed for the circumstances and making slow passes with prior notice. Oh, and for all of you boaters who hog the center of the channel as another boat approaches from the other direction, would you please consider moving over a scoche, just a little bit closer to your starboard day marker, as we pass on our respective port sides? You will still be in the channel, and you won’t be forcing your fellow boater to go outside the channel. As you know, often the water outside a channel is very skimpy. God, I hope just one center channel hugger reads this and changes his/her behavior.

For the past week, the Admiral and I have been wearing long pants and sweatshirts, and in my case, my warm rain gear and gloves. The temps dropped to the mid-sixties, and we were no longer acclimated to such “cold” weather. Call us wusses; you’re right. But the winds rarely went below 20 miles an hour, and they added immensely to the feeling of coldness. It also rained most of the time, and the sun did not appear until the end of the day. However, the past two days, April 22 and 23, have been sunny and the wind is dying down. This morning the water was a sheet of glass at the Amelia Island Yacht Basin. I’m back to shorts, still wearing a long-sleeved T, just in case. We reached the docks at Jekyll Island marina before noon today, and the temps just kept climbing. It’s 84 degrees. The sun is blasting the galley with heat rays. The Admiral is below in the stateroom with the fan running. Shorts weather is back! Tomorrow we’re set to go out on the ocean. It may be another day like the Sunday we left Key Largo. At first the prediction was intermittent fog as well as two foot waves. Now the fog alert is gone, but the waves are still at two feet. We’ll just strap everything down, eat very light, and gird ourselves for an arcade ride – up and down or sideways roller coaster. If the waves are less than two feet, hooray! If more, we can always turn around and go the inland waterway route through Little Mud River and Hell Gate – or maybe not. The tides are not favorable for us to try to skim through Little Mud River’s shallow waters or to maneuver around the ever-growing shoal areas at Hell Gate. So, hello Atlantic Ocean, we’re coming your way. Please be gentle with us. Show us how “pacific” you can be.

For all you dolphin lovers, this has been a magical trip so far. Every day the porpoises show themselves to us and more often than not, they race to the front of Slow Motion to guide us along the waterway for a mile or so. This is so much fun for us, and it must be cool for them too. It’s not anything I ever expected in my wildest dreams. These mammals know how to engage you at the funnest level. They are so gregarious. And they always do something we have never seen before. Yesterday, after two porpoises raced with Slow Motion for a time, they went over to the shoreline and both of them were flying through the waters, one chasing the other. The Admiral thought it was part of a mating rite. It surely looked like both of them were enjoying the chase. I have never seen dolphins move as fast as they were going. They looked like flying fish, with most of their bodies on top of the water, as they sped along the shoreline. Porpoises rule!

As we head up the Intracoastal Waterway for our third time, we are constantly reminded of the military strength of the United States of America. Today our reminder was the naval submarine base at Kings Bay on the border of Georgia and Florida. We saw a submarine painted black, with a black “cocoon” resting on top of it. The Admiral said this is a vehicle that a Seal team uses when the team is doing a “special op” from the submarine. Given the color of the sub, it’s relatively small size, and the Seal vehicle on top, the sub was definitely designed for some sort of stealthy spying or recon operation. Most of the subs at this base carry Trident missiles, so there are huge warehouse like buildings where the Tridents are loaded on to the subs. And the security around this base is rather impressive. We had our own “escort”, a military police boat, traveling our speed parallel to us the entire length of the Kings Bay station. Then when we were beyond their boundary, the military police boat went back to do the same tracking with the next trawler or sailboat. For your information the Trident missile is “a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) with independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRV).” (Source: Wikipedia). According to this same source, Trident missiles are carried by fourteen active US Navy Ohio-class submarines, with US warheads, and four Royal Navy Vanguard-class submarines, with British warhead. Lockheed got the lucrative government contract to develop and build these missiles. The first Trident missile was deployed in 1979. Are you ready for the cost of these weapons? According to Wikipedia, the total cost of the Trident program “thus far” came to $39.546 billion in 2011, with a cost of $70 million per missile. Is anyone else creeped out by the fact that the amount went to the thousandth decimal? How about “more than 39 and ½ billion dollars”? Representative Paul Ryan, hello? You can cut food stamps until you’re blue in the face, and you can hurt a lot of people that way, but still not make much headway in reducing the deficit. Why not make a few cuts in the Trident missile program instead? You can watch the national debt shrink before your very eyes, without causing pain and suffering to thousands of hungry children.

Let’s end on this positive note: The Giants beat the Rockies in 12 innings – grand salami by Sanchez – so they can now skulk out of Denver with one win and two losses. Torture!  I said it was a positive note, not a happy one. Cain is still looking for his first win of the year. I love/hate this game of baseball – Go Giants!