Outdoors

A day of sailing, singing and sleeping

Good thing the kayakers had sails for open waters.

By TERRY TOMALIN
Published December 24, 2004

ROCK ISLAND - A bitter wind howled out of the north as the sun rose over the salt marsh.

The temperature hovered in the mid 30s and nobody looked forward to putting on wet clothes and climbing back into the kayaks to resume our trip along the 105-mile Big Bend Saltwater Paddling Trail.

"Do we have to get up?" I moaned.

"It's seven o'clock," my friend George Stovall said. "It's getting pretty late."

My friends and I were starting before sunrise, but the previous night's paddle had left our bodies battered and sore. We had a long way to go - 30 miles or more - across open water.

With the wind blowing 15 knots out of the north, the sea could get rough. Fortunately, we had brought along some new sails to help power us down the coast.

Paddling purists cringe at the thought of the kayak under sail, but I confess that the only thing I get puritanical about is the pursuit of pleasure.

"Maybe we should paddle for a little while," my friend Darry Jackson said. "We'll get warmed up."

"Naaaaa," I responded. "The wind won't last forever. Let's ride it while we can."

The free-standing sails require no lines and mount with suction cups on the deck of the kayak. The Canadian designer modeled the sail after those used on the ancient Polynesian seafaring canoes.

The sail is intended to run downwind but with a little practice, you can sail offwind by as much as 45 degrees.

"The problem is that if you don't know what you are doing, you can tip over pretty easily," said Bob Blad, owner of Spirit Sails. "That is why we tell people to use them downwind."

Conditions on this blustery December morning were ideal for kayak sailing. Our boats made good progress, plowing through the water at a steady 5 miles an hour.

Confident and cocky, I felt like an old salt and treated my companions to a classic sea chantey:

I'll sing you a song, a good song of the sea

With a way, hey, blow the man down

And trust that you'll join in the chorus with me

Give me some time to blow the man down

The little ditty originated somewhere on the western Atlantic at the turn of the 19th century. A "halyard shanty," Blow the Man Down was a work song that was sung when hoisting or lowering sails.

The word "blow" refers to hitting a man with a fist or belaying pin, a common form of discipline aboard square-rigged merchantmen. Sea shanties such as this one helped pass the time and promote teamwork among the crew.

Sing a shanty and it's easy to forget what you're doing, which can be beneficial when scrubbing a poop deck, but not sailing a sea kayak.

"Whoa," I yelled as a bucket of cold saltwater poured into my cockpit. "The wind almost blew me down."

Stovall, a more experienced sailor, was having an equally difficult time in his kayak.

"My hips are sore from leaning to one side," he said.

After two hours of rough sailing, we found ourselves halfway to our afternoon lunch stop, Sponge Point, but several miles offshore. The wind had clocked around out of the east. If we weren't careful, it would blow us straight to Texas.

So we changed course into the wind and headed toward Jug Island. During the Civil War, rebels boiled salt in iron kettles along this stretch of shoreline to make salt for the Confederacy. The area was also a popular rendezvous for spongers from Tarpon Springs. But the island apparently got its name in the modern era when bootleggers offloaded jugs of moonshine with raccoons and wild pigs the only witnesses.

In the waters off Sponge Point, fishermen armed with long poles once gathered sponges from the shallows. These "hookers," as they were called, made a good living until a deadly outbreak of red tide destroyed the fishery in the 1940s.

Today Sponge Point has one of the premiere campsites on the Big Bend Saltwater Paddling Trail. After a quick lunch of peanut butter and pilot biscuits, a cracker reminiscent of the whalers' hardtack, we climbed back in the boat and pressed on.

The water around Big Grass Island was less than a foot deep. As we skimmed across the flats, I counted dozens of scallops hidden among the turtle grass. All around us, the boils of red drum shattered the surface's stillness as sleek boats moved swiftly across their feeding grounds.

Paddling toward the camp at Dallus Creek, we spotted hundreds of white pelicans resting near the shoreline. These true snowbirds had come from the Great Plains and would winter among the warm waters farther south. As we got closer, the birds spooked. The great flock turned and flew a few feet over our heads.

"I hope they didn't just finish lunch," I told my friend Casey LaLomia, paddling right beside me.

We kept an eye out for rattlesnakes as we hauled the kayaks through the chest-high needlerush that surrounded our campsite. The trail was covered with the tracks of wild hogs and raccoon scat. Dallus Creek was obviously popular with the local wildlife.

As we made camp, I debated whether to look for a roll of duct tape hidden somewhere within the hatches of my cavernous kayak in order to fix a broken tent pole. The sky, however, looked clear. I was cold, wet, tired and hungry and decided to take my chances.

Four hours later, as the first drops of rain began to beat down on my crippled tent, I realized that I had made a mistake.

The cool rainwater started as a dribble at my feet, then turned into a full-fledged river. My sleeping bag began to act like a sponge, but I didn't care.

Thirty-two miles of open ocean paddling had left me with little interest in anything but sleep.

[Last modified December 24, 2004, 00:23:15]