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It is cold and windless here in Southern British Columbia and it is raining big, hard, splats of water on top of my sunburned head and I have been rowing this, "Call it anything you want," half-full-of-air inflatable for the last two hours. With each tug of a pair of oars that were designed for a three foot tall, six year old kid, the boat bends in the middle a little more. It bends because I have been unable to find the leak that has driven me to near exhaustion. Also because of the engine clamped defiantly and silently on the transom. A motor made somewhere in Japan at a design cost of about eight million dollars. Yet in spite of superb Japanese engineering and robot driven manufacturing methodology it still won't run without gasoline in its sixteen ounce tank. It will, however, run just long enough on that sixteen ounce tank of gas to get you far enough away from your boat so you can get in a lot of trouble when you don't know your way around like I don't. My wife Laurie and I had set out from our twenty foot Pursuit, to look for eagles we could photograph, on what started as a clear cloudless afternoon. The two knot flood tide had turned to a three knot ebb tide as I was sweating, swearing, rowing and crabbing my way across the Malispinia Inlet. Off in the distance we could make out our twenty-foot, convertible top luxury yacht that we had already driven almost a hundred and fifty miles in the last four days. Unfortunately, the yacht was getting smaller and smaller until I finally managed to get out of the ebb tide and row along close to shore. Now all I had to do was fight my way through the seaweed and go ashore and try and blow up the automatic folding inflatable. Dumb luck for us that the foot pump was in the boat, so now I got to exercise my right leg so it could get as tired as my rowing arms.
Fortunately the leak was in a place that Laurie could hold her finger over while I rowed another hour and a half to reach the sanctuary of the Pursuit.
However, our one hour filming excursion had turned into about a five and a half hour marathon. In the process the tide had been dropping rapidly and steadily so our anchorage had lost most of its water. The last 500 hundred feet to the Pursuit I had to give up rowing and walked on slime covered rocks while I dragged the leaking inflatable with Laurie still sitting in it. Once aboard the grounded boat I surveyed the tide table, compared it with our high and dry position and calculated that it would be almost four hours before the boat would float again. So I took one of the anchors and staggered back out into waist deep water and wedged the anchor between two rocks. Being careful to place it so that when we finally sailed away from this now swamp it could be pulled free from the other direction. I have raced sailboats for twenty years so I always carry an old pair of Harken mainsheet blocks in my duffle bag. I staggered back to the boat and rigged a six part purchase, hooked one end of the blocks to the boat and the other to the anchor line with a carrick bend and slowly kedged the Pursuit, six feet at a time into water deep enough so it would float. But not before I had put three fourths of our gear into the inflatable to lighten the load in our miniature yacht. An hour later the fifty degree water had turned my body blue and created a colorful contrast to the green slime that was all over my clothes. Not to worry. I just climbed up onto the transom of the Pursuit and stood in the rain and with salt water soap I lathered up in the continuing downpour. It is a given that whenever you get all lathered up in a rainstorm with salt water soap the rain automatically stops. It did. So I stood there, naked as a jaybird, coated with salt water lather and wondering what to do next, when a fifty three foot charter yacht glided by on the still outgoing tide. Unfortunately it was loaded with Japanese tourists and they all had cameras at the ready. They, of course, where very happy because a naked soap covered American wasn't included in their tour brochure. I didn't want to track soap all through our small yacht and the bay was too shallow to dive into so I just stood there with soap on my face and waved back. Once they had gone around the bend Laurie came out of hiding and brought me two quarts of water from our six gallon Gatorade thermos and I was able to rinse off. Getting out of jams like this in a small boat are a lot easier than getting out of jams in a big boat. Of course in a big boat you can take a hot shower after the mess. In a big boat you can watch from the salon while your skipper and deck hand get it out of the mess you got it into. No one has said that power boating resembles the brochures or the videos that sell the sport: "Steve Stunning and Grace Goodenough with their 2.5 darling children in darling clothes, with the wind blowing their just right hairdos that are partially glued down with hair spray." They wouldn't last 2.5 minutes in the real world of small boat adventure, in spite of sixteen ounce gas tanks on miniature outboard motors designed to drive inflatables at the speed of a slow moving San Juan Island slug. When I first met my wife she was afraid I wouldn't like it up in the Northwest and after this ordeal/adventure she was the one that whimped out and started talking about her three foot fever. Perhaps a twenty three foot something or other with a stand up shower and a sit down toilet that flushes. What sane person, man or woman, would voluntarily climb into a twenty foot boat with a single outboard motor, a small cutty cabin to sleep in, a Coleman stove to cook on, a Coleman lantern to read by, an ice chest to sit on and " oh yes, a chemical toilet to tinkle in." However, since I'm only six foot two and a half and my wife is five foot four, why would we need a bigger boat? Bigger boats do not make bigger adventures. ...back to 48° North title page.
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