2016 Boat Trip: Part 3

Previously on…

We had left Roanoke Island in the early morning, heading south. While the sun rose and sent fractals of light glittering across the calm surface of the water, a pod of dolphins surrounded our boat and traveled with us for a little while, delighting us beyond measure. It sounds like a set-up to a perfectly pleasant day. 

Our luck never seems to last that long.

Pamlico Sound Scaries 

Besides the dolphin encounter, the first half of the day was rather boring. We just puttered along into the ever widening waters of the Pamlico Sound, eventually losing all sight of land. We knew somewhere to the west was the mainland, and somewhere to the east were the Outer Banks, the long strip of islands made famous in works like Nights in Rodanthe. But we couldn’t see either of them. It felt like we could have been anywhere on the open ocean. 

We took turns steering the boat, each of us needing to take breaks from the intense sun. The morning shifted to early afternoon, and puffy white clouds appeared more frequently in the sky above us. We were nearly halfway to our destination when the distant southern sky began to turn gray. 

Kadin turned on the radio and searched for weather updates. It was late July, so pop-up thunderstorms weren’t exactly as surprising as the name might suggest. Nonetheless, seeing one building miles ahead of you with no land in sight will make the hairs on the back of your neck stand at attention. 

We could feel the air change as the darkness of the storm crawled towards us. I was getting nervous.

“Um, are we just gonna head into it? Do we anchor? Should we try to go somewhere else?”

Kadin pulled up the charts. Ocracoke Island was immediately to the east of us. It would take us nearly two hours to reach it, but it was significantly closer than our original destination, and we would be heading at an angle to the storm instead of directly into it. 

He reset our course for Ocracoke. We puttered as quickly as we could, the diesel engine under our floorboards rumbling like a semi-truck. You could feel the pressure from the storm setting in as the wind whipped the water into big, choppy waves. 

“Savannah, I think I need you to take over.” Kadin said from behind the helm.

My eyes widened in panic. “What’s wrong? Why?”

“I think it’s the weather. I feel a migraine coming on. I need to lay down.”

I reluctantly stepped behind the helm as he went below to crawl into bed. The day had been so hot, I was dressed in nothing but a cheap, Wal-Mart brand floral turquoise satin night gown. It was about mid-thigh in length, and the deep V-neck was trimmed in lace that was a neon shade of teal. I looked like a sea hooker. 

The boat wrestled through the growing waves, sending spray up into the air to be caught in the wind, misting me with every crash of water against the bow. Soon I was damp and cold. 

My phone buzzed. Miraculously, I had a text message. 

“What the hell?” I said out loud. How in the world was I getting any cell signal all the way out here? 

The text was from a family member who was angry with me for a misunderstanding. For their privacy, I will leave them unnamed. I will not, however, skip over the event itself, because it’s too goddamned ridiculous not to share. 

I replied to them “I am in the middle of the Pamlico Sound right now, signal is spotty.” 

(No more context was needed, they knew I was on a trip to move the boat.)

They ignored my circumstances and volleyed another angry accusation. It began to rain.

”I am literally sailing through a storm right now.”

Lighting struck not too far away. I may have screamed a little.

Another angry text, once again, completely ignoring my previous reply.

”I really didn’t know anything about it. I need to focus on steering right now. Probably going to lose cell signal soon. Sorry.”

It rained harder.

I started laughing. And crying. The two together probably wasn’t a good sign. But I could not believe of all the times on this trip for me to have cell signal, and of all the messages I could have received, it was an angry message, just as a storm hit and lit the sky with lighting. If it were in a movie, I would have said that the metaphor was a little too on the nose. 

I continued to cry, because of the upsetting text messages mixed with the fear of my current circumstances. I was completely soaked, now shivering uncontrollably. Between my tears and the sea spray, I could barely see anything. I did my best to keep my eye on the chart plotter and the compass to make sure I was staying on course as the bow beat through the surf. 

This first band from the storm passed by, taking with it the heaviest of the rain but leaving the ominous clouds that felt like they were going to smother me. Kadin came up from below.

 He was still out of it, but he took over at the helm and used the radio to call the marina and make them aware we would need a slip for the night. He was oblivious to anything that had transpired besides the rain. I sat down in the cockpit, not bothering to find a towel or blanket. I disassociated from my body, staring out at the water without focus. 

As we traversed the channel into Ocracoke, something maybe a hundred yards away caught my eye and brought me out of my stupor. I pointed at the object sticking out of the water.

”Is that…Is that a mast?”

Kadin slowed the boat and leaned around to take a look.

”Oh, wow, yeah it is. Look, beyond that, there’s another one!”

We counted at least three masts of sunken boats in the waters outside of the channel. Kadin continued to navigate slowly, cautious for hazards that we could not see. 

As we approached the dock of the marina, I hopped on deck and readied myself to tie off the lines. A couple of young men were on the dock waiting for us. I saw them and was suddenly reminded that they could see me. I looked down at myself. The night gown, still soaked, clung to my body, as did my long hair, which lay flat against my head and trailed all over my back and shoulders in stringy ropes. I no longer looked like a tempting sea hooker, but more like a sea witch, coming to bargain for their voices. 

I was too exhausted to be self conscious, so I tossed them each a line and began throwing fenders over the side. 

”Well, It looks like you two got caught in the storm that just rolled through?”

He posed it as a question even though it was obviously a statement of fact.

”How could you tell?” I asked with more sarcasm than was necessary, but the poor guy had caught me in a bad mood.  

He gave me a wan smile and went back to the office to get us a clipboard of paperwork to fill out. We paid up, and Kadin asked them about the sunken boats we saw on our way in.

Turns out, the waters around Ocracoke are littered with reefs and sandbars. Sailors try to enter the channel from a random point instead of the true “entrance”  and end up sinking themselves. The first mast we saw was apparently a very new Beneteau, a sailboat that was probably purchased for several hundred thousand dollars. This information only reinforced our chosen life path; buy something old and crappy for really cheap, and fix it up ourselves. In this case, if our boat were to ever sink, we’ll be sad for reasons of emotional attachment, not financial ruin.  

We decided to take a walk through the quiet evening streets of Ocracoke. The warm soil emanated petrichor, that after-rain smell that is so nostalgic of summer. After the events on the water, I was exhausted in more than one way. I walked in silence, turning over in my mind the text messages and images of sunken ships. 

On our walk, we crested a hill that held a little fenced-in graveyard of 4 headstones. A plaque reads:

”If I should die, think only this of me: that there’s some corner of a foreign land that is for ever England.”

~Robert Brooke

In 1942, the British Royal Navy sent ships across the Atlantic to help the US defend our coastline from German U-Boat attacks. 

 On May 11th of that same year, the HMT Bedfordshire was torpedoed. All of the 37 sailors aboard were lost. Only 4 bodies were recovered, having washed up on the beaches of Ocracoke. Locals collected these lost sailors and buried them on a tiny plot of land that was set aside just for them. In 1976, a perpetual lease was granted to the British government, meaning that this fenced in square of stones found on the furthest shores of North Carolina is officially and forever, British soil. 

The graves are shaded by the meandering branches of Live Oaks. The salt air blows in from the sea and sends the leaves to shuddering, which in turn makes the dappled shadows ripple across the stones. It felt appropriately somber, a place to match my mood. It was also a reminder. I had a bad day, and it wouldn’t be the last, but I was not dead on some foreign shore. I thanked the stones for their service and kept walking.

The island holds a special feeling. Like so many of these secluded places we had visited so far, it felt like a snow globe, encapsulated from change, only occasionally being shaken. For Ocracoke, the shaking comes in summer during the hurricane season. These events leave the land relatively flat, with hardy grasses and the live oaks left to hold the ground together. 

The beaches of the Outer Banks pretty much all look the same. They’re long strips of sand framed by the eternal ocean on one side and high, grassy dunes on the other. We spent our second day hiking out onto one of the nearest beaches to the marina, where we napped on the warm sand and gathered seashells to look at and bits of plastic to pack-out. 

When the evening came, we wandered into a little grocery store, where we were greeted by an older Latino man who was stocking shelves. We didn’t really need anything from the store, we were just browsing for snacks and killing time. 

The building was old and dimly lit. I stood in the glow of the refrigerator aisle, looking at the colorful produce when a familiar salsa song came on over the radio that sat on the checkout counter. Kadin loves Salsa music and salsa dancing. He shimmed up to me, stepping in rhythm with the pum pum of the bongos.  He took my hands and spun me around. We danced to the entire song, careful not to knock anything off of the shelves as we whirled. We were laughing as he dipped me at the finish, and the owner gave us a standing ovation. I turned beet red, and Kadin said something to him in Spanish that made him laugh. 

Ocracoke had never been a part of our plan, but its safe harbor and easy going atmosphere turned out to be the right medicine for a bad time.

The sky was clear and the water was calm when we left to once again make an attempt at crossing the Pamlico Sound.