Boating, the Humphrey Bogart way

There is a boat in my driveway, on a trailer.  Both are a little unusual, which is entirely my fault: I built the boat, and modified the trailer to fit it.  The boat is inelegantly constructed of plywood and 2x4s, held together with hundreds of drywall screws and sealed with two hundred dollars’ worth of spar urethane varnish.  Its propulsion system is two oars and one thirty-four year old astronomer.  It laughs at the wakes of ferryboats and ski-boats: it is so wide and high-sided that it won’t capsize or swamp in anything less than a major storm.  On the other hand, wind and tidal currents laugh at it.  It has a top speed of about 2 mph, when I’m rowing for all I’m worth.  It also leaks about one half-gallon per hour: a rate slow enough to be irrelevant as regards safety, but fast enough to be annoying as regards shoes, lunches, and other things one might want to keep dry.

Yesterday was the boat’s fourth voyage, and likely its last before winter.  I and my friend Mark took it out with my three oldest children, ages 9, 7, and 3 (my wife and our youngest wisely stayed home).  We fought our way up the harbor into the teeth of a 10-15 mph wind, until we came to a standstill with Mark and me both rowing as hard as we could.  Plan B was working our way along the harborside, very close to shore in the lee of the forest.  But it seems the forest doesn’t have any lee with the wind coming from that direction.  It was time for Plan C.

In the 1951 movie, The African Queen, Humphrey Bogart and Catherine Hepburn accomplish a heroic navigation of a treacherous jungle river, only to find themselves entangled in a pathless, reed-choked delta.  Having exhausted all other options, Bogart climbs overboard and tries to pull their boat (the African Queen, of course) through the reeds, wading up to his neck in the leech-infested marsh.

Thankfully, though Port Jefferson Harbor does have reeds, they apparently come without leeches.  However, if you are considering getting out of a boat to wade through the shallows towing it, you should remove your cell phone from your pocket some minutes before making the attempt, rather than not finding time to do so as the boat blows swiftly toward a dangerous-looking submerged projection in the shallow water.  I jumped out and saved the boat at the cost of the cell phone: the right decision in terms of relative value, but still an idiotically preventable loss.  Then I took the bow-rope and towed the boat for several hundred yards: very satisfying to defeat the ever-moving wind and water by wading with one’s feet on solid ground.  I did find that shallows, even those full of reeds, are not always as shallow as could be wished.  But the children loved riding over the reeds.

We turned out of the main harbor and into a long, curving inlet fed by a small creek.  I waded a little more, but soon both the wind and the tidal current dropped enough that our oars were useful again.  The inlet was idyllic.  A wide diversity of boats, none ostentatious, rested at their moorings.  Lovely homes backed up against the water, which in places was lined with tall reeds – very different from the grass I had pulled us through – waving elegant-looking tassels in the wind.  The sun was warm, and hawks high overhead showed off their effortless mastery of aerodynamics. 

 

We rowed up the creek until it would no longer accommodate the boat, at which point we were within a fifty yards of a main road and a deli legendary for the quality of its sandwiches.  I considered tying up the boat and having us all troop up to the deli for a snack, but then pictured how our shoes would look plastered with the mud of the creek bank.  We turned around and rowed back, with the wind and current now blessedly in our favor.  Nine-year old Petra bailed diligently with a cracked plastic cup from a years-ago dinner at the Olive Garden.  The shadows grew long and the red sunset-light caught the trees on the east side of the harbor.  Mark delighted the children with a fairy story, complete with hilarious voices for a pet dragon and an evil witch who met her demise by being irreversibly transformed into a frog.  Comfortably before nightfall, we loaded the boat onto the trailer, bailed her out a little more, and headed home.