Wrecked for real

On Monday September 29th the RAD team left Gainesville, Georgia and headed to Tuckasegee, North Carolina. We left with two vehicles, a trailer full of food and camping supplies and a trailer loaded with five canoes and a john-boat. We were going on a river trip. The first thing we did arriving in Tuckasegee was look for a field close to the river to spend the night. We found a farmer named Mike who let us use his land, but not close to the river because his hay field was ready to harvest and he didn’t want us to crush the grass. We set up our tents in a long row all tied together. We pulled the chuck box off the trailer and got out the planned meal from the menu I’d made – chicken fajitas. It was a fun night. The only low point was when Wesley got a call from the Clay County police. His boat that had disappeared during hurricane Faye a month and a half ago had been found stranded in the St. John’s River. He would have to come get it within the next thirty days.

At about five the next morning a dog ran through our camp barking. It sounded very aggressive. It passed back and forth a few times, and then stopped in front of the girls tent, right where I had left my shoes after getting up in the middle of the night to take an allergy pill (because Kelsi’s liner was covered in her dog’s hair and I couldn’t breathe). After that it headed for the woods on the other side of our tents. During the whole thing someone in the next field over across the road was chanting and clapping. It sounded like Indians to everyone else. But I knew from having lived in Mexico that it was a church meeting. They were singing incredibly loud and off-key some very familiar songs. They were singing about Jesus coming again and everyone else was expecting Indian spirits to come flying down the mountain side to get them – at least those of them who didn’t sleep through it. When I woke up in the morning my shoes were gone.

Wesley was able to make a phone call when we got to the Wal-Mart (my sandals that the dog stole were the only shoes I had with me for the river so we had to make a trip for shoes and some other supplies and a phone call). He was making plans to leave us and go take care of the boat. The team decided that it would be better for us to go with him than to lose him as part of the group. We changed the plans from the Tuckasegee River in North Carolina overnight to the St. John’s in Jacksonville, Florida. It was a nice drive.

When we got to Florida and met with the sheriff, we discovered that getting the boat out of the river was going to be a lot more complicated than we thought. We found several willing people who let us use their backyards to put canoes in the water and go look at the wreckage. The boat definitely could not be reached going in by land. We would have to motor in to get it out. It had at least two holes in the hull and was stuck on top of several cypress knees. It would not be floating out either. Wesley decided that the only way to move it was to get saws and chop it up, load it into the canoes and motor it back to a dock. From there it would be loaded into a trailer and junked.

The next day we started early and got the equipment. Kelsi and I took the john-boat and a canoe out to the sailboat. At one point the canoe came loose from the john-boat and we had to turn around to get it. I was nervous because I’d never driven a motor-boat before, but we made it alright even with the choppy water. We met the boys with the canoes and tied them all in a long string – seven boats in all; the john-boat with the motor leading the line, then five canoes and finally the bass boat.

It seemed like it would take a least a few days to finish, especially since by the time sawing actually started on the boat it was past noon. But we finished in five hours and were done motoring out and loading all the trash up and on the way home by 7:30. If you look at the spot now the only evidence that Wesley’s boat was ever a boat and not just some junk in a trailer are a few pieces of foam floatation and a keel submerged in the St. John’s shore line. The best part was motoring out on the St. John’s with seven boats all in a line and all five of us spread out between them, all fully loaded with trash. It was quite a sight – especially Wesley in the second to last boat with his feet poking up in the air over the trash and his hair all wild taking his last sailing trip with his beloved Catalina.