Narrow Dog to Indian River

by Terry Darlington

  We got back to the Phyllis May in time for a late dinner. The fisherman had given us twenty pounds of roasted oysters in a bag. We had not bought a drink all night. Come to breakfast tomorrow, they had said, and to the Hallowe'en party in the evening. You missed the transvestite show last night, such a pity.

  When we turned up for breakfast the next morning there were half a dozen drinking beer, but our invitation had been forgotten. They all came back to the boat anyway, and the confederate soldier recited more of his poetry to Monica and me, not too much of it, without embarrassment, and the poems had a rhythm that fitted a sunny day and the gulls crying and the pelicans diving outside the window.

  IT'S RUNNING OUT OF CONTROL, SAID MONICA. Last night I was lying awake for hours. We can't keep up. There was the invitation to breakfast, and now there is the free lunch from the posh restaurant over the marina with the English owner. Then tonight there are two Hallowe'en parties—one at the Handlebar and one with the large gentleman who kept buying us drinks. It's Oriental all over again.

  I never thought I would see the day when I would dread being asked out for a drink, I said. Perhaps we need a new approach—can we refuse to talk to gongoozlers, keep the curtains drawn? But poor gongoozlers—we paid a fortune to have our vessel carried to a country where they have never seen one before and we can't complain if people take an interest. All they want us to do is talk for hours and accept gifts and lifts and come to parties and meet their friends and join their families and never go home.

  Can we do some sort of gongoozlers’ charter? asked Monica. They all ask the same questions. Why not write a leaflet—we can stick it on the window or hand it out before they really get a hold of us.

  THE PHYLLIS MAY—

  FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

  Why are you here? A lot of people bought our book Narrow Dog to Carcassonne about sailing through France, so now we are writing Narrow Dog to Indian River, about sailing down the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway from Virginia to Florida.

  Why is your boat so thin? Locks in England are 7ft wide.

  Why is your dog so thin? Whippets in England are 6in wide.

  Did you sail the Atlantic? You think we are crazy?

  What are the specifications of the Phyllis May? 60ft long. Steel—17 tons. Draught 2ft 2in. Top speed 6.2 mph. Saloon/galley 25ft long. Headroom 6ft 4in. The flowers on the roof are connected to the main warp drive.

  Is there anything that you want to know? What was Winston Churchill's middle name? What was John Lennon's middle name? Who put the bomp in the bomp-a-bomp-a-bomp? (I'd like to shake his hand.)

  Is there a website? www.narrowdog.com. Photos, biographies, how to e-mail us.

  Thank you for your interest. Tell your leaders we come in peace.

  The next gongoozler was a Norwegian from New York. He looked puzzled when I handed him the leaflet, but walked away reading it. In five minutes he was back—What's she like in a beam sea? Do you race your dog? What do you call that sandy colour? What's your freeboard? Where do you live? Where is Stone?

  I won't be long, I said to Monica. Bergen is going to show me his sport-fisher. It's fifty feet long. He caught a four-hundred-pound blue shark once. He runs seven lines out of the back. I'll be back for lunch. We can have this pound of shrimps he gave me.

  That's very nice, said Monica, but I have just been online. The weather's gone wrong. There are twenty-five-knot winds for days and days—we are trapped. We'll be dead of hospitality before we get away.

  • • •

  I WOKE AND FRETTED IN THE SLOW WATCHES OF the night, where all is sin and shame. We had done two hundred miles, but it had taken four months, and now we are stuck again, with the gongoozlers closing in. Perhaps we are just not up to the whole thing—we can't handle the boating; we can't handle the social side. Look at this decision about leaving Beaufort—we have to go down the Bogue Sound, twenty miles long and more than two miles wide. I know so little of what we are facing, what it will be like, how suitable is the Phyllis May. I know she doesn't like high winds or currents, and can handle small waves if they are head-on, but that's about all I do know. I don't understand the weather forecasts and they are all wrong anyway. What is a twenty-five-mile-an-hour wind like? Are two-foot waves too much for us? We are falling behind again in our journey, but if we go I might be risking losing the boat or even our lives. Poor old Mon, poor old Jim. But we can't stay here until the gongoozlers eat us up and our nerve goes and the port-rot covers us with mould.

  I decided to go.

  I decided to stay.

  I decided I didn't know what to do.

  I decided to ring Michele and Brent.

  Michele said—Stay where you are, there is a warning out for small boats, then Oh well the sound is not too bad. It's shallow and not much of a fetch for the waves and no swell. Perhaps you shouldn't go really but you will probably be all right.

  Jim began to shudder.

  • • •

  ACROSS THE BAY WAS MOREHEAD CITY AND ON the great mirror of the city harbour it was almost dark, and it was cold, and we were alone, but a pelican passed us gliding inches over the water, and I felt he might be my good luck pelican. We had been studying the alphabet soup for days and some of the daymarks were where we expected.

  The fingers of the Outer Banks had slipped from our shoulders but the great waters of the Bogue Sound lay inside barrier islands. The cold wind came from behind and fussed and cuffed and pulled a chain of glittering waves under our stern and along the boat and out ahead but the Phyllis May held steady—6.2 miles per hour said the little beetle screen. I held the throttle down—we were haulin'.

  We were a quarter of a mile out—houses and hamlets to the west, a low green shore, sometimes a road, always wooden piers, white boats bouncing. The sun had come up on our left as it should, turning the sea, the spray, to jewels and bright crystal—and here were narrow sandbanks and islands, spoil from the channel. Beyond the banks the sound was two miles wide, and the land smoky before the ocean. The wind got up some more.

  Black fins sweeping towards us—My God, we are being attacked by sharks! It's only us, it's only us, said the dolphins, and rolled their grey shoulders out of the water, and their bright eyes, and they seemed to smile. The wind was howling now but it was behind us and our sixty feet slithered across the waves without pitching. From time to time a sport-fisher or a powerboat or a trawler came from behind, always slowing and waving, and the wakes rolled us and swung us back.

  I went below and comforted Jim—he wanted to come out on the deck, but I could not risk it on this vast water. And he didn't like it when the boat swung about. Peace, my little one—as soon as we arrive a nice walk and lots of new places to sniff and tonight we will bring you some chips. I know it's tough and you are a land dog and a highly tuned athlete and you hate the boat, particularly when it moves, but we love you and you are our dog and we have got a boat so tough luck.

  On the spoil banks cormorants and gulls dipped and strutted. We sloshed and thundered along—Monica on the tiller, in her Australian bush hat. The Phyllis May was back in business.

  FIVE HOURS LATER WE WOUND THROUGH A paisley pattern of islands to Swansboro. The marina gave us leaflets for local restaurants. One of the restaurants said it could quite possibly be the best restaurant in the world.

  Most of the works of man have something of style about them. There is a reflection, an interpretation, however dilute, however corrupt, of a place or a time. The humblest French bar has advertising graphics, tubular furniture echoing the thirties, the curve and stain of glasses. The fake English pub, three years old, with thatch and beams and old chairs, is conscious of the traditions it parodies. But this restaurant was style-free. It would have served as a set for a modern play about despair.

  The room was big, and the ceiling was low and off-yellow, faced in acoustic tiles—the plastic foam ones with holes. The lighting was dim, as if you were just coming round from a faint. The carpet was congealed blood, in swirls. The t
ables were Formica, in a dull grain, and they had rims of aluminium. The pictures on the walls had been salvaged from outside the Ebb Tide Motel. It was hardly November but in the corner was a fully decorated Christmas tree.

  The restaurant had been there for many years and I imagine it had begun looking like a North Carolina fifties domestic dining room and then slowly slipped into the abyss.

  It should be preserved for the nation, and indeed the world, as an example of a nothing, a zero marker, against which all attempts at style or design could be graded. Like the Greenwich Meridian, the Beaufort Scale, the Periodic Table, the Oxford Dictionary—the Swansboro Scale could slow our drift to chaos.

  The nineteen-thirties Lyon Yacht Club building on the Rhône—97

  Concorde—94

  The Chrysler Building, Manhattan—92

  The Albert Bridge, Chelsea—88

  A Jean Muir dress—87

  The Star Trek Feature Films—61

  The London Gherkin—49

  The Ford Scorpio—13

  The Osmonds singing ‘Crazy Horses’—6

  The MI6 Building, Vauxhall—3

  Cap'n Charlie's Swansboro restaurant—0

  Back at the boat Jim growled and squeaked and groaned to welcome us and complain that we had left him and to extract from Monica the chips he had smelt as we came along the dock.

  Outside the galley window under the boardwalk a Night Heron stood on a cable, watching the water. Night Herons are stocky with a thick beak and I guess they can see in the dark, or they would all have starved long ago.

  We have beaten the weather, said Monica—it is blowing a gale for days but we have made it to the narrow waters. We can move on.

  THE GOOD LORD STARTED WTIH LIGHT, AND then he divided the earth from the waters, and then He said Let the earth bring forth grass, and in North Carolina He stopped right there, and moved on somewhere else to do all the trees and stuff, and He forgot to come back to the Intracoastal Waterway.

  First the channel, waves flashing and spitting, then yellow grass for ever, standing in water, the wind stroking it, sometimes a creek running away. Seas, seas of grass. Far off, to the east, higher ground before the ocean, then a scrubbed sky and an attenuated cloud ten miles long like the sketch of the first cloud ever. Light, and more light, and blue and yellow and white and a touch of dark in the distance, and air, the first air, a wind that none has breathed.

  So it must have been at the dawn of the earliest light.

  To set off such purity, such restraint, the Good Lord would have introduced a pelican, floating above the waves, relaxed, but no, He would have the pelican tumbling through the air just like that one—a clownish comma in the poetry of dawn, here on the North Carolina sea of grass.

  • • •

  MY TASK WAS TO BRING A NARROWBOAT INTO the quay at Swan Point Marina behind two one-hundred-ton shrimp boats moored side by side and a three-knot current behind me and a twenty-five-mile-an-hour wind against the current, and the quay just the right height to snarl my front fender. It took me three passes and I cannot pretend I knew what I was doing, having not spotted the current, but I did it, or Monica did it, by getting a line off the bow into the hands of the dockmistress, who stood astonished on the quay—My God that's the cutest thing I ever saw!

  I had read that the tides on the US East Coast were a few metres and I had assumed we would not notice them. The tides around England can be forty feet, and all the estuaries on our little island empty twice a day, with a great deal of water rushing about. But I had underestimated the tides, as I had underestimated everything in the US—the rise might be modest, but the great sounds leading to the Atlantic take up and lose millions of tons of water, often through narrow channels. This was our first meeting with currents, and the Phyllis May does not like currents.

  We strapped Jim into his life jacket and handbagged him on to the high quay. He likes it when we do that. The marina was a long way from any shops but it said in the book there was a convenience store.

  In the convenience store there were ordinary crisps and crinkle crisps in light and dark: in regular, salt and vinegar, cheese, barbecue or spicy: and in small, large, medium or car-trunk size; and there was a cigarette lighter and some rope—every convenience for a chap who fancied a bag of crisps and a smoke before he hanged himself.

  We will eat from a tin tonight, then, said Monica, and have a glass of Tennessee Brown. Tomorrow we pull out the big one—we have a six-and-a-half-hour run to Wrightsville. Six and a half hours is as much as we can handle—we need a quiet night and an early start.

  Here, I said, these barbecue dark crinkles are not bad at all.

  WHEN YOU HAVE A LONG DAY AHEAD YOU TAKE care—not too much Californian red wine with your dinner, because at the last it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder. You wake in the middle of the night because you are nervous, but try to doze until six, then out with Jim for his first walk, and away at seven with the dawn. It was bright and cold and windy. Here's your tea, said Monica, for the top of the boat—you get us out of the bay.

  No probs, I said. Tits Magee at your service. Nothing's gonna stop us now!

  I swung the Phyllis May from the quay and held the throttle down and made for the first red triangle on a pole in the middle of the bay. I could see a second red daymark a mile away. The water thrashed behind me.

  I left the daymark on my right and headed across the bay to the next one—we've got a long way to go, let's rock and roll! A breaker was following me on the right—how strange. A brushing skittering sound and the back counter slowed under me and at full speed I drove the Phyllis May aground.

  Monica came up on to the bow and looked back at me along the boat with one of her expressions.

  I went round the first red mark, I shouted, and I headed straight for the second one—I am innocent. It's a fault in the dredging!

  What about that daymark over there? shouted Monica.

  A hundred yards to my left there was a green square on a pole with a green light over it.

  I had decided weeks ago to follow the red daymarks and ignore the green ones, and this had worked well until now. After all, the Phyllis May drew only two feet and you have to cut out some of the bullshit from this navigation business so you don't drown in the alphabet soup.

  So why did someone go out in a boat and drive a fifteen-foot pole into the bed of the bay, Terence my son? Why did he nail a big green square to it? Why did he put a light on top? Why did he take a wire all across the bay under the water and wire up the light so it shone lovely and bright? So some brain-dead Brit could come along and pretend it did not exist? No-I will tell you why—he was trying to help the boaters keep to the channel, helping them keep away from that little island of marsh grass about twenty yards from your right-hand side, the one you had edited out of your deranged view of the world. Do you know what you are, Terence my son? You are a fucking idiot, Terence my son, that is what you are.

  We'll be fine, I shouted, I'll back her off. I dropped the throttle into reverse and a cataract rushed down both sides of the boat. We seemed to be moving but a quarter of an hour later we were in the same place.

  Monica joined me on the back counter so she could give me the expression at close range, the one that can freeze gin. I'll ring Towboat US, she said. She picked up the mike to the VHF and there was a lot of squawking and shouting of numbers—latitudes and longitudes. They are coming, she said, in thirty-five minutes—good job I took out a subscription.

  I'll give it another burn, I said, I'll get her off, no trouble. I always do.

  Thirty-five minutes later a white dot came into the north of the bay and became a line of foam and an orange inflatable—at the wheel a black dog.

  THE INFLATABLE CAME CLOSER AND THE DOG, A German shepherd, passed the wheel to a large young man with a suntan and a baseball hat and white teeth. I thought Towboat US would send out a tug, with a smokestack, and an engine that was immensely strong, to draw us back into the channel with a stea
dy heave and a certain amount of foam, and cheerful nautical shouts from men with Breton sailors' hats and beards—but here was a rubber dinghy, and a redneck and a dog.

  The inflatable was alongside—the dog passed a rope to the young man and he threw it to me and I tied it on. I'm going to dig you off, he shouted.

  He shortened the rope to four feet and revved up his two outboards, which said on the back they were both a hundred and forty-seven horsepower. Hold the tiller, he yelled.

  I did and he swung the inflatable around the stern of the Phyllis May and back around again, his engines bellowing, surf blowing under the boat and along the boat and over my feet. The tiller tore out of my hand. Hold the tiller, shouted the young man again, and the dog barked at me.

  Two hours later we were still doing the same thing. We had been joined by a dozen dolphins, circling round. I don't know if dolphins can laugh, but I would say these dolphins were having a great time. The dog barked at the dolphins and the young man fastened his rope on a new place on the Phyllis May grab-rail and revved up and the tiller tore out of my hand again. The wind was strong and I was shuddering with cold. The back counter was covered in sand, the back fenders had come up and were lying on the counter in their chains, and the Phyllis May lay dead in the water.

  I thought, I have been in some strange situations, but never in the middle of a bay freezing to death with a redneck trying to pull my arms off and a big black dog barking and dolphins laughing at me. And this is not going to work and the young man is getting desperate and he will damage me or the Phyllis May or himself or the dog. I think he has already dislocated my shoulder.

  All at once the Phyllis May heeled over.

  She's floating! shouted the young man.

  She's sinking! I shouted.