Rescue at Sea

A week of substantially easy fare at work led to a weekend of exploration along the vast number of choices of local beaches along the coast. It was a chance for me to show the kids, and Bird, my bro and summer “nanny,” the sights I have enjoyed uncovering alone over the past three years.

Following a festive Friday on our beach, we awoke early on Saturday and hit the road for the Outer Banks. Along the way, we made our first stop in the farmlands of Carolina, somewhere in Currituck County at the home of Gravedigger, the famed monster-truck rival to Bigfoot from the eighties. The kids were amazed by the size of the beasts parked in the lot, including the original Gravedigger and a newer model, the crazy bull dubbed “El Toro Loco.”

Across the Wright Memorial Bridge, which connects the mainland to the barrier islands, we passed through the beach hamlets of Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills, and Nags Head, making our next stop Jockey’s Ridge, the east coast’s largest sand dune and reminder of what the Outer Banks was like in Orville and Wilbur Wright’s day. Our group climbed the peak of the highest one in the blistering early morning sun and took in the stunning sight of the ocean and Pamlico Sound, separated by the thin, mile long sliver that we stood atop, sweating profusely from our journey and yearning for some cold ocean water in which to cool ourselves.

Down the dunes and into the Blazer, we passed through Nags Head and into the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, the state park that runs some seventy miles south to the barrier island’s end before the ferry to Okracoke Island. As we passed along the rising dunes, sea grass, and marshes, the Bodie Island Lighthouse revealed itself, another monument with black and white horizontal stripes, the sister to Hatteras Light and my home break’s beacon, Cape Henry Light, beckoning our fellowship to make a visit. We stopped, took a look around, and then made our last, short stretch for my “secret spot” at Oregon Inlet.

Now, it’s not really a “secret spot,” more of a discovery I made with my Mexican brethren last summer, Shorty, Jorge, and Oscar. There is a hidden road which was once the old driveway and access road to the now barricaded Old Coast Guard Station. The drive is also blocked, requiring us to park in a public spot and make the longer trek through the fields of Tattooine in order to arrive at the isolated beach.

The spot lies on the south side of Oregon Inlet, a nice ocean cove that cuts away at the relatively straight coastline, causing an odd mix of swell direction from the incoming and outgoing tides. The water is considerably shallow at low tide with a great deal of nice sandbars. We lugged our gear across the tundra to the same spot I visited last summer: surfboard, body board, towels, cooler left in the sand by Hurricane Isabelle containing a dozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, bottled water, graham crackers, and of course, my daughter Katryn’s beach bag, filled with every essential item for a few hours on the beach…and of course, a few other things we’d never need.

The afternoon was perfect. Surf was minimal but afforded the opportunity for all to give a try, with varying degrees of success. The picnic was something out of a demented Norman Rockwell black-light poster, and we ended the day with a walk to the massive rock jetty, beachcombing for artifacts.

Following my first visit to Oregon Inlet, I was warned about the “maneaters” and kept an ever watchful eye out for “the men in gray suits.” This process can be a bit nerve racking as you keep one eye on the incoming swells, while flinching periodically when a patch of underwater grass and moss appears to have taken a living shape, if you know what I mean…

An end to a perfect day…

But it didn’t end there. After the near two-hour drive back to Willoughby, I started dinner, a pork conglomeration of onions, mushrooms, tomatoes, and whatever else I had left in the quickly-becoming-barren refrigerator, when I heard commotion on the beach out back.

“Daddy, a whale, a whale!” my son bellowed running through the door.

“Oh god, what the hell now,” I thought, remembering the dead sea turtle that washed up a week ago.

I met Bird at the top of the dune and he pointed to a white object floating a hundred feet or so off our western jetty. “It’s some guys in a boat.”

From what I could see it appeared to be a small skiff or sunfish sailboat hull, flipped upside down with two guys floating alongside in lifejackets.

“Damn,” I thought.

“Let’s get the boat out,” Bird commanded, referring to my canoe on the dune.

“No, no, wait,” I said, watching a small bayliner, which seemed to be approaching. The two stranded silhouettes waved frantically and the boat engine, cutting quickly through the sea, passed on without even hesitating.

“Damn, damn,” I thought, then quickly ran into the house to turn the food down. I returned to the beach, down along the dune to the shore break, where Bird already had my canoe at the ready, the 17-foot Pelican dubiously named the “USS Katryn.”

Bird seemed frantic so I did my best to try and ease the situation. If anything, we didn’t need to have three of the four people involved in this evolution in a state of hysteria.

“Hey, calm down, don’t paddle so fast, don’t lean,” I barked like a captain in some Patrick O’Brian novel.

We made our way to our destination where we found the overturned craft was actually a jet-ski. Then, we met the riders.

“Are you guys ok?”

The two of obvious Latin descent began chattering in Spanish at breakneck speed. Bird and I looked at each other and I know we thought the same thing simultaneously, “Oh, wonderful…”

I tried communicating with them as best as I could with my rather limited vocabulary, but they were obviously rattled and not making much sense nor understanding a thing I was trying to convey to them. I tried to get one to swim over to the canoe, knowing this was likely a bad idea for both him and us and was somewhat relieved when he took two strokes from the flipped ski and frantically swam back.

“Ok, they don’t speak or understand English and are afraid to swim in lifejackets. This is getting better and better.”

Finally, I got them to throw me the rope connected to their ski and tied it to the canoe.

“What are we going to do?” Bird asked.

“We’re going to tow them in,” I answered. The awkward silence that followed could only assure me that my idea seemed a bad one, but rather than leave these poor bastards out here and wait for the rescue teams to arrive, it seemed we should give it a shot, and if nothing else, cut the line if it didn’t work and we started to drift out to sea. In the last two months on the Bay, there had been five deaths, two of which were in a canoe. I wasn’t in the mood to become a statistic on a Sunday night. However, it is important to note, the folks that had perished weren’t strong swimmers. Hell, I don’t know if any of then could swim at all.

So we paddled, and paddled, and paddled, mind you there is no motor on this canoe-just two oars, and we were seemingly not making way whatsoever.

“Are we even moving?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he answered.

I looked back and saw box that had been floating near them and saw we had moved some distance from it at this point. Now, I don’t know what was in the box, didn’t want to know, didn’t want to know if it was there’s, and to this day, hope I’ll never know. Then I saw our two victims were floating alongside the ski as we struggled to paddle, like they were vacationing on some float trip on some Midwestern creek.

“Nadas! Swim! Nadas!” I yelled. “Swim you bastards!”

They smiled and kicked softly at the now darkening water. The sun was setting low in the sky and it would be dark soon. As I looked to the beach, I saw a large crowd had gathered to see what the hell was going on, along with a group of local police and firefighters who were likely equally as puzzled by the situation.

“When we get close to the jetty post, I’m going to jump off and tie their line to it,” I told Bird. Nearly flipping the two of us into the water, I jumped over the side and found myself, at mid-tide, standing in chest high water. I tugged the line, my feet grounded firmly at the bottom of the Bay, and found the ski and its two pilots moved far better inland than when tied to the canoe. While I removed my lifejacket, one of their friends, family, whatever, had made his way to them and began tugging furiously on the line, hampering the progress I was making in the last leg of this bizarre salvage.

“No!” I barked. “I got it. Slack off. NO!”

He smiled too. Was this really happening?

We got them to shore and a slight applause came from the audience who had gathered on the beach.

“Is there anyone else out there?” one cop asked.

”No, I don’t think so,” I replied. “but they don’t speak English.”

“O-K,” he yelled to the three of them as they continued dragging the ski to the beach. They all smiled and nodded.

We were done. No longer our problem. We carried the canoe back to the cabana, assisted part way by the neighboring Mexicans. Bird and I pressed fists in our own ghettoized way of congratulating each other on a job well done and hit the water to rinse the sweat and salt off as the sun finally set in the west. If these poor bastards had done this an hour later, it would have been over, and they would likely be dead today and another statistic for the local news.

The most important point, or aspect, of this whole thing was not the fact that we saved these fools, who obviously had no business being out there in the first place, nor was it because of the “pat on the backs” or “good jobs” we received from the neighbors. To me, the most important thing was the fact that my children, who spend such a short time with me in the summers, had a chance to see their father play “hero.” That is what made me sleep soundly that night.