Gray solstice

This December 21st, the winter solstice of 2014 started out as a gray day. On my early morning run the landing told the same tale with waters reflecting the gray sky,and a northeast wind enhancing the gray atmosphere. The winds, and that specific calendar day, inspired me to plan a sail. It had also been a long time since my last voyage, and I had a real desire to be out on the water in Kingfisher.

A primary reason for the sailing drought was a major home renovation going on for months in my household. Though I contracted with my neighbor Bill Bennett for this job, I was very involved throughout, occasionally working side by side with Bill, though more often alone on planning, organizing, painting, and building a couple of storage units.

One very labor intensive and laborious part of the job was going through years of accumulated stuff (a mountain) prior to moving it to a portable storage unit (or trashing, recycling, or Goodwilling).  Yes, treasures and trash. In that massive pile of boxes, I came across one labeled “Solstice 2003 Shells”. I had collected these on an epic walk from one end of Bull Island to the other and back in 2003 (see Exploring Bull Island, chapter December 22). Tun and lettered olive shells were what caught my eye that day, and they helped me recall those memorable experiences.

The grayness of this day also brought to mind several sick gray machines of mine, now on the rebound. My central house and cabinet building tool, an ancient Sprunger table saw, put out an unholy screech of ruined bearings on one day in the past year. This saw, like the majority of my tools, was inundated by the Hurricane Hugo storm surge, and my initial assessment in 1989 was that it was a goner. However, when my father visited in the following months, he was able to free up all the working parts with elbow grease and WD-40. After in installation of a new motor, it was reborn for the next 25 years until the failing of the sealed bearings around the arbor. My best efforts, and several other neighbors, to get at this arbor failed; several of these people recommended a new table saw.  I finally enlisted the very able assistance of my neighbor Yogi, who took the difficulty of the task as a personal affront. Once the guts of the saw were apart and yielded the arbor, new bearings and a rebuild have the machine whirring away.

And there was another sick gray machine, my 2009 MacBook Pro (on which I now type this post).The main symptoms of its illness was pinwheeling; trying to restart resulted in the dreaded “gray screen”, a term I learned at the Genius Bar. I wondered if it was circling the drain; the “genius” ran diagnostics and found the sick organ was the hard drive. Replacing the drive was a no-brainer – economically and philosophically, since I have always been one to repair and reuse, hence the table saw and now the laptop. A past decision to purchase a little external hard drive, and back up all the data on a regular basis, was exquisitely reinforced after the hard drive replacement: all the data was restored on this new drive.

There is no other piece of equipment in my possession with more repairs and replacement components then my Sunfish Kingfisher.  A leaky fiberglass hull patched multiple times, three masts, three rudders, two daggerboards, two sheets, two sails, etc. etc. My friend Billy Baldwin has wondered with me why I just don’t replace it. It is an ethic I learned from my parents, and one which I may have taken too far at times. I have reformed a bit, finally replacing perhaps the most rusted boat trailer in Charleston County still rolling (put it out to pasture but it still has good parts on it.) But Kingfisher has served me well for many years, and I expect it will continue to do so. In rigging up before my sail, I took stock of some of the issues – sharp rivet heads covered with pieces of duct tape, a lower spar much repaired, shortened, jury-rigged together, and water still accessing the inside of the hull. It will be time to replace those spars when they break again, and I am forced to jury-rig and limp home.

Getting to the landing was the hard part of this day – trying to locate my cold water gear and other items, some moved to somewhere unknown due to the house renovation. My neighbor Bram Ballam was just pulling his johnboat out, and told me that he had not seen another boat during his two hours on the water.

I was dressed in my full cold water kit as I headed out Andersonville Creek. I sailed close hauled against the incoming tide an hour after low tide, and the northeast wind was partially blocked by the creek banks due to the low water. The migratory waterfowl swimming and flying through the creek blended in with the gray world. I was drawn to Bulls Bay ahead, and the wind filled in more fully past the Shark Hole. We made progress against the incoming flow, and could see a small outboard coming across the Bay. They passed in the creek, two men in their johnboat suited up against the elements and returning from an oyster mission. I reached the edge of the Bay, and had planned to turn back there. I tacked and luffed, standing to take in the marine landscape of open waters. Sheeting in for home, and grabbing the unfettered wind from the Bay, we picked up onto a plane and scudded along before settling back in the creek passage to the Intracoastal Waterway.

The red flash of an oystercatcher’s beak added a splash of color to the creek as the bird flew past, and another three beat away around a creek bank close to the ICW. I had hoped for a stronger wind for some windward work north in the ICW, but the breeze had moderated. Disappointed and ready to go in, I spotted a major anomaly in the gray day – a large raft of white pelicans, swimming ahead toward the little sound behind the mud flats. They stopped to stand on one of the flats, the flock appearing to number a couple of dozen. I continued my sail to windward, hoping to get a closer look and a photo from the only camera on board, my phone, and headed across the waterway as quietly as possible. Close up, I marveled at the size and beauty of these spectacular birds, with wing spans up to nine feet. From my experience white pelicans have become much more common in the area. In fact I had never seen them before in the ICW, and this gathering rivaled the larger ones I had observed off of Cape and Murphy Islands. They tolerated my closer look until  finally flying off. Part of the raft paddled ahead until they also joined the departed flock to the north. The appearance of these majestic birds was an amazing finish to my little sail, and a reminder of what often awaits us when least expected.