Yesterday I reminded myself of an adventure that happened back when I was young and giant lizards still ruled the planet. Man, am I giving away my age - we used to think they were lizards and that's what I was taught in school. Now we think those ancient lizards were birds, not lizards.
Somehow being run down and eaten by a huge bird seems to be less fun than having a lizard chase you. If ever I have a choice, I'm gonna be eaten by a lizard. They just appear to have better credentials than birds. I mean, really, I think I would stand a better chance of laughing myself to death, if a big yellow bird was trying to eat me while singing a song to a bunch of preschoolers, than I would have of being consumed.
Learning the wrong stuff has been a way of life for me, everything from Newton's physics to History has changed since my first exposure to a classroom. I'm betting it also happened that way to you. What a waste. If we had learned the right things, you and I, we could have spent our productive years being, you know, productive. Instead, we've been kept busy unlearning stuff so we could relearn it. Small wonder education costs so much. We have to keep paying the teachers til they get it right.
Anyway, back to my tale of misadventure. The adventure started one weekend when I fouled my anchor on the rocky bottom of the sea off the island of Anacapa, 18 miles south of the California town of Ventura. After trying to raise it for an hour or so, I finally gave up and cut the line. It was getting late in the day and I wanted to make it back to my slip in Ventura harbor before nightfall. I didn't know it at the time, but cutting that line started a sequence of events that cost me the boat. Actually, the sequence started long before that, when a bearing on the prop shaft seized up leaving me without power. It took a while for the part to arrive, and frankly, I was just too lazy to install it soon as it got there.
Several weeks later, a three day weekend turned up on the calendar so my buddy Rodger and I headed to Catalina for two nights. Long before my time the Avalon Ballroom used to rock, but by the time I discovered Catalina, the party had moved to the harbor. Everybody motored from boat to boat in skiffs and boy did we let our hair down. PARTY! All things eventually end, or wear out and wind down, and by early Sunday morning it was time to unmoor and head for home. The song says "Twenty-six miles across the sea, Santa Catalina is a-waintin for me" but that's a straight line to the closest shore. It's about 85 miles from Avalon to Ventura harbor, and in a sail boat that makes 6-7 knots in a good wind, it takes all day. Did I mention that sometimes there is no wind?
That's what happened to us. We had sailed all day and were just about even with the naval station in Oxnard when the wind died. Vanished. Gone. Was no more, and we started to drift. Now, if you happen to have a map of the area, draw a line between Avalon and Ventura. You'll find that Port Hueneme, a Naval Base, is very near that line. We drifted with the current for several hours, and around midnight it became real obvious we were going to wind up on the beach. I had no engine with which I could hold us off shore, and no anchor to keep us at sea til the wind came up.
Roger was frantic, all the more reason for me to remain calm and in charge. I reassured him by announcing I wanted to be rested if we were going to have to swim for it, and told him I was going below to take a nap. I advised him to do the same, but if he insisted on remaining alert, could he please shout out a warning just before we went in? I went below, gathered most of my valuable possessions in a bag, and went to sleep.
Roger's scream and the boat lurching at the same instant woke me. It had come ashore with the port side facing the beach, and when the keel dragged bottom the boat acted like a catapult and threw Roger about twenty feet into knee deep water. The scream I heard happened during his time in the air. I grabbed my bag, climbed the now sideways companionway, and jumped in. We both waded ashore and started to shiver in the cool 3:00 AM air. As we were walking towards the nearest lights a vehicle of some sort came towards us and the command "Halt! Stand Fast!" was given.
Turns out we had beached on US Navy property and had to stand cold, wet and shivering in the now blowing wind while we told our tale and they checked out the wreckage. Finally Roger was allowed to call his girlfriend, she picked us up and allowed us to take warm showers and rest, then fed us. The adventure was over, we had survived, and I had made another payment to a teacher. The teacher, in case you haven't figured it out yet, works at the University of Hard Knocks. A really expensive institution. At least I thought the adventure was over. It was not.
Several weeks later I got a letter in the mail, from the US Navy, at Rogers address. I had used his address in the Naval report because I had been living on the boat and it now was full of water. No way I was gonna tell them to send the mail to their beach. And besides, the storage facility where all my stuff was stored, and where I would be sleeping for a while, did not allow mail to be delivered to residents who were not supposed to live there. They advised me I had thirty days to have my trashed boat removed from their beach or they'd remove it and fine me $10,000.
Well, my Dad did not raise an absolute idiot, although you'd never guess it after reading the above tale, so I made a few calls and found out there was a Sea Scout chapter located right on the base! I called them, made a tax deductible donation of the boat to them and everybody lived happily ever after. The adventure, finally, was over.
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