02/08/2025 ICW Day 39 : Who da Boss?

Who is the boss? It’s not me or Janet! The currents and the winds are the boss and they get to decide where we go. Of you step back for a moment and look at the big picture, that’s the case for everyone; this life-support system called Earth gets the final say in what we do or don’t do. We can fight against it with motors and clever inventions, but in the end, the cosmos decides.

So with that in mind, we set forth on a schedule dictated by the boss. As usual, we are tuned into our VHF, and heard an angry transmission, “you don’t like my wake?! Well if you don’t want to get wet, you shouldn’t have a boat!” When that guy finds out who the real boss is someday, I’m sure he will sound a lot nicer.

We were fortunate to have no wind, so we stopped at another Nature center. This one was run by 4H and oriented towards children, but I called them from the water, asking if it would be fun for adults. The lady on the phone said yes, and that it’s even better if you ask questions (because she loves answering questions). When we arrived, they asked if we were the catamaran that had come into the dock (which was a half mile away). Yes, it was us. After talking to is for a few minutes, she went back into the office and handed us back our entrance fee, “Here. Take this. Spend it somewhere else.”

We made sure to ask lots of questions as they showed us a 5 year old sea turtle in a tank (whom they fed for us to watch). It is sad, but people poach these animals for pets and don’t know how to care for them. Then they need to be rehabilitated so they can (hopefully) be released into the wild.

The feeding was chunks of fish shoved into a conch shell. The turtle repeatedly lifted it and dropped it. After all the fish was out (and eaten), the sea turtle tirelessly continued to play with the shell. A precocious little girl asked, “when he is released into the wild, will he play with empty shells like that?” Good question! Hopefully not!

After that stop, the promised winds were up, and the current would soon turn in our favor. We zoomed to a harbor where they didn’t answer the phone. But it had good reviews on Google.

It looked pretty shady with pretty much no boats there. I went in and found crackers and junk and beer cans strewn about. No one was inside but I later found a man in the parking lot.

“Do you work here?”

“Yes,” he replied. This would be the last time he said that word for a while.

“We are on a sailing kayak, can we spend the night here?”

“No, we don’t do kayaks.”

“Well, it’s kind of a different kind of boat. We can sleep on it.”

“No”

“Can regular boats stay here?”

“No”

“But I saw the sign on the door saying the overnight fees are $20”

“We don’t do overnight. The DNR is all over our ass for that.”

“What is the DNR?”

“Department of Natural Resources”

“Is there anywhere we could camp or sleep near here?”

“No”

“Looks like I’m shit out of luck, huh?”

“Yes.”

I thanked him and headed back to Janet thinking that even though I didn’t have a place for us to sleep tonight, at least I had a story. That ought to be worth something to her, right?

As we were untying the boat, he wandered out and told us we could go around the island and maybe camp. Then he pointed to the public dock at the park just a few hundred feet away.

“You could stay there.”

“Is it legal?”

“Ain’t no one going to come by and monitor that dock.”

So, that’s what we did - parked at the dock and set up camp in the frisbee golf course!

⛳️