If you go offshore, even a few miles from land, what you see is mostly waves. If you stay inshore, cruising the coast in shallow water, you’re close enough to enjoy the scenery on land. You get the same view that the shore-side millionaires had in mind when they built their starter castles along the waterway, and the price is right.
Gillian and I always choose the inshore route, if there’s a choice. Its true that the ever-present danger of going aground means one of us always needs to be paying attention, but what’s wrong with that? We enjoy the variety of scenery by day and the quiet nights swinging at anchor, listening to the gurgle of the incoming tide. If this sounds too serene, I should add that there are occasional moments of fear during a gale, but when the gale is over, it’s over. There’s no continuous background anxiety, as there often is ashore, particularly near cities.
Some boaters cruise to an itinerary, racking up the miles. “Miami by Wednesday, Key West by the weekend.” By contrast, Gillian and I have only vague goals and destinations in mind, easily changed and cheerfully abandoned. Our average speed for the last twelve thousand miles has been 7.2 miles an hour. This makes Jazz a slow boat by most standards, but we don’t mind. Slow is an excellent speed for noticing the world around you. You don’t miss much at seven miles an hour.
At the beginning of a cruise, it always takes me awhile to slow myself down to Jazz’s cruising speed, seven miles an hour. I mean internally. City living is life in the fast lane, at least thirty miles an hour, maybe forty-five or more. Not just the cars, but the people too. Everyone seems to be running late all the time, and getting further behind. Go here. Go there. Buy this or that. When that’s done, start the next thing. It’s unnatural and exhausting, not to mention stressful, and I did it for thirty years running my own company, until we retired and bought Jazz.
It’s simple multiplication, really. Cruising the Interstate at seventy is ten times more stressful than cruising Jazz down the ICW at seven. Stands to reason, there‘s nothing natural about seventy miles an hour.
For the first few days on the boat, after a summer back home, I can feel the tension slipping away. It helps to have no timetable, and only the most general of goals such as “Let’s go explore Florida’s west coast,” and it’s important to be in no hurry to get there.
Above, crossing the Okeechobee waterway.
A lot depends on the weather. If it’s windy, we stay at anchor. If it’s raining, we drive Jazz from the Pilothouse. In warm weather we sit side by side on the fly bridge, with a perfect view of the waterway and everything around us.
I usually steer while Gillian keeps track of our position on the chart. I have the better part of this deal because Jazz pretty much steers herself. It’s much easier than driving a car. Most of the time—unless dodging crab pots—I don’t even need to touch the steering wheel.
A friend asked us why we chose a trawler and not a sailboat. One reason is that in a sailboat you’re always looking up. Up at the sails if you’re underway, up at the world from inside the boat if you’re at anchor. On a trawler, particularly a fly bridge trawler, you’re up above the water, and you’re looking down.
Another difference has to do with the weather. In a trawler, if the weather turns cold and wet, you turn up the heat, find your slippers, and put the kettle on. In a sailboat, you have to go out on deck, if you can believe it, where it’s really cold and nasty, to fiddle around with the sails and maybe get pneumonia.
Sailboat die-hards will argue that the wind is free. Trouble is, sails and rigging aren’t. The price of a good set of sails, maybe 10,000 dollars, will keep Jazz cruising for nearly a decade. But the real reason we didn’t get a sailboat had nothing to do with the price of diesel fuel. The real reason is much simpler. Gillian said “No Way.”
Which brings me to an important nautical observation. All seafaring folk know this to be an absolute truth. It’s simple really—if the Admiral isn’t happy, nobody’s happy. The converse is also true—if the Admiral’s happy, you get to go.
In the Florida Keys, look who’s driving.
My son Andrew says if we had a sailboat (he has a sailboat), we could go further, go anywhere in the world in fact. True, but you don’t necessarily need a sailboat. Some trawlers are designed to go off-shore and cross oceans. Although a forty foot Trawler recently completed a circumnavigation, and Jazz is a forty foot trawler, she isn’t an offshore passage maker. She’s a coastal cruiser, and we are seldom out of sight of land. Which is fine with us. We both enjoy exploring the coastline, just ambling along the waterway, paying attention, and enjoying the scenery.
Being a guy, I also get quite a bit of pleasure from actually driving the boat, steering us around obstacles like crab pots or deadheads and keeping us safely in the channel. Gillian prefers the chart work, choosing anchorages and learning about the history of the area we’re traveling through. She’ll often read aloud to me from one of our cruise books, which is how I happen to know that Point No Point (photo below) is a lighthouse well off shore in the Chesapeake Bay.
We have bird books of course, but I think I want a butterfly book too. We were crossing the Chesapeake Bay, four miles off the western shore, roughly in the middle. We were running at our usual seven miles per hour. Gillian happened to look out the pilothouse window to port.
“Look, Don,” she said. “Look at that.” Her tone was reverent. I looked and saw a yellow butterfly; a little one with a wingspan of no more than three inches, keeping pace with us, twenty feet to port. This kind of thing takes my breath away. I hoped it would land on Jazz for a rest, but it had its own plan and we seemed to play no part in it. The butterfly kept pace with us for a couple of miles, then slowly turned away to the north. The closest land in that direction was a hundred miles, and I don’t know how I know this, but I’m sure it got there.
Coastal cruising is always interesting, but every so often there are special moments. Today we saw a butterfly. Who knows what we’ll notice tomorrow about this incredible world we live in? We’re keeping our eyes open as best we can.
It’s called gunkholing. You poke your nose—or rather Jazz’s nose or no-name-dinghy’s nose—into every little bay, river or creek you think might be deep enough. You explore. You discover. You notice things. You anchor for the night. You enjoy a glass of wine on the stern deck. Occasionally you’ll find yourself in an anchorage, like Cane Patch Creek in Georgia, or the Little Shark River in Florida, where it’s possible to pretend you’re in another century, a better time, before the cities, with nothing made by humans in sight, and the only sound a gull calling to his mate.
Gunkholing the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida could take years, and if we tire of the good old USA, there’s always the Bahamas, or Mexico, or Cuba. We’re definitely planning on doing the Great Circle route around the eastern part of North America one of these years. The Great Circle goes up the Intra-Coastal Waterway on the eastern side of the US to New York City, then the Hudson River to the Great Lakes and Chicago, and down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. We’re looking forward to it. But there’s plenty of time.
Speaking only for myself here, the most important thing I learned from our first six months cruising on Jazz was something I was supposed to know already: that time is relative. The idea was familiar of course, but until I retired and started a new life, I had no idea what it really meant. When I was working as a software programmer, the years roared by. I barely noticed birthdays. I was like one of those donkeys in Holland, keeping my windmill turning. I walked my rut every day, not even feeling the harness anymore, and after a while the rut was so deep I couldn’t see over the edge. The years are short when they are identical.
It took retirement and a total change of life-style for me to realize how time slows down when each day is different. I meet people, I learn new things, there’s time to be curious. I’m alert and alive, experiencing the world directly. I live in the world these days, instead of cut off from it by television and newspapers. So of course I’ve changed, and so has my sense of time. That first winter, six months long on the calendar, lasted at least a year in my head. It made me think—are some people’s years longer than other people’s? If you do more living, do you live longer? It seems likely, considering I got a whole year’s worth of memories from only one winter. Two for one, like at the supermarket.
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