Good morning crew,

[Ok, folks, one more sailing column from the archives. This
one is from May 11, 2007. This all happened during our grand
adventure when we dragged the sailboat down to the Florida
Keys.]

So this will give you an idea of what it’s like when Murphy
becomes a backseat driver on your road trip. I already
mentioned yesterday how we discovered that the license plate
had fallen off the trailer somewhere between Jacksonville
and Daytona Beach. Of course, this kind of thing happens.
We had the registration in the truck anyway, so we weren’t
too worried. But then we discovered, when we were leaving
Daytona Beach, that the trailer lights were malfunctioning.
Only one side of the trailer would light up. So as long as
we only made right-hand turns we would be okay.

Since we had a schedule to keep we weren’t about to blow a
day in Daytona Beach to have the lights looked into, so we
pushed on to Islamorada. We almost made it, too. It was on
Tavernier that we got pulled over by Johnnie Law. He read
us the riot act but let us go with a promise that we would
have the trailer lights repaired as soon as humanly possible.

Even with these little delays we still managed to make it to
the resort and marina on Islamorada around three o’clock,
only an hour behind schedule. We got our room and slip ass-
ignments and got about setting up the boat.

It was then we discovered that a bolt and nut that keeps one
of the stays attached to the deck had vibrated loose during
the trip and was now probably a part of the great Georgia
landscape. Unfortunately, without this bolt and nut, it is
impossible to even begin setting the boat up. So with Mason
sitting in the parking lot next to the boat and sipping on
a beer, I went in search of a hardware store and a replace-
ment.

A little bit of luck found me a suitable replacement and in
about 45-minutes we were back in business.

The whole setup takes maybe two hours, and we were working
fast because we were now rapidly falling behind our very
tight schedule. When we finally had everything all set up
it was time to back the trailer down the ramp and into the
water and launch the boat.

We had just about gotten to the ramp, me driving and Mason
walking behind the boat and giving me directions, when I
heard a loud and urgent, “Hey! Whoa! Hey!” I hit the brakes
and looked around and sure enough, there was a small knot
of men standing by the dock who were frantically waving at
me.

I stuck my head out of the window and they pointed over the
truck and called out, “If you back your boat into those
power lines you’re going to light yourself up!”

I looked behind and above me and sure enough, there was a
thick bundle of black power and phone lines running about
eighteen feet right over the boat ramp. The mast on the boat
is about thirty-two feet.

It’s hard to describe the feeling of misery when you’ve just
put in a full day of driving, topped off by over two hours
of hard, physical labor, and then you realize, when the end
is almost in sight, that you have to do the last two hours
all over again.

Of course, there was no other choice. It was approaching six
o’clock in the evening. There was no time left to go driving
around Islamorada looking for another marina to launch from.
We had to take the jib down, the boom down, the mast down,
launch the boat and then put everything back up again once
the boat was in the water.

Suffice it to say that when we finally got the thing squared
away I would have almost rather have gotten electrocuted.

Our first day in the Keys was turning into quite an ordeal.
By the time we actually got the boat rigged and in the water
we were pushing a fifteen hour day.

It was after seven-thirty in the evening and getting dusk,
and like people who are feeling the effects of exhaustion
we started to make stupid decisions, to wit, taking the boat
out of the marina for a quick lap under power just to see
what it was going to be like out there.

What it was going to be like was dark! The sun set
surprisingly fast and in a very few minutes we found our-
selves motoring around in the failing light desperately
looking for channel markers.

What you have to understand about the Keys is that they are
a string of hundreds of little islands hanging off the tip
of Florida in a hundred-mile stretch, and much of what is
between these hundreds of little islands are extremely
shallow sand bars. To mark the channels deep enough to be
navigable through this maze of shallows and sand bars are
pylons driven into the sea bottom known as ‘channel markers.’

You can imagine that if you don’t want to be stranded all
night on a sand bar you’re going to want to stay in between
those channel markers!

We, of course, lost sight of them in fifteen minutes.

Motoring a half mile or so off shore we could see the friendly
lights of the marina twinkling in the darkness. All we had to
do was find a channel about twenty feet wide hiding somewhere
in that blackness between us and the marina. There was nothing
to do but try. We missed it completely.

Fortunately, the little Hunter barely draws two and a half
feet of water and we were lucky enough not to hit any sand
bars that were much shallower than that. Nothing old Mason
couldn’t climb overboard and push us off of, anyway.

When we finally sat down to dinner at nine-thirty that night
(after changing out of our wet clothes) it was a much less
optimistic crew than started out sixteen hours earlier. And
all we had to do to get back on schedule was find someplace
to repair the trailer lights, shop for groceries and supplies
for the boat, drop the truck off at a long term parking lot
on Tavernier, grab a taxi back to Islamorada and be on the
water by eight o’clock a.m.

Needless to say we had to tweak our plans a bit.

Laugh it up,

Joe

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*——————– Guaranteed to Roll Your Eyes ———————*

At the school where my mother worked, the two first-grade
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END OF CLEAN LAFFS
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