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OAK ISLAND , NC
It was relatively easy to get from our present location to the beach. After about fifteen minutes of paddling, we were able to enter the breaker line at Holden Beach and ride a nice wave the last seventy-five yards or so to the shore. Needless to say, we were very glad to be standing on sand again.
We were very tired and thirsty, but the pier at Holden Beach was too far down the beach for us to walk to with our surfboards after our ordeal at sea. As luck would have it, we came upon three guys and a girl in their mid-twenties on the beach with a cooler full of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer on ice. They said that they had watched us while we were in the water, and they were also nice enough to share some of their beer with two tired surfers.
We thanked them for their hospitality and proceeded on to find the two girls that we had talked to earlier in the day. Hell, they were the reason we were here in the first place. We also knew that our original plan was now impossible to complete because the girls and their mother had more than enough time to get back to their house by now.
We really wanted to see these girls again, but we also knew that finding them was sort of a necessity because Bobby�s car was back on the other side of the inlet at Long Beach, and we were not going to try to paddle across that river channel again. We thought that if we could get in good with the girls, they would persuade their mother to give us a ride back to Long Beach.
It was a ten-minute walk from the beach to the house that the girls were staying in. When we got to their yard, we saw that one of the girls was outside hanging her swimsuit on the clothesline and that the other girl was just sitting on the front steps.
They did not seem to recognize us at first, until we spoke to them. Then one of them yelled to their mother and told her to come see who was there. I think that their mother was as glad to see us as the girls were.
Their mother had just boiled about six pounds of twenty-count shrimp and invited us to come inside and eat with them, which we did without any hesitation at all.
We had a great time and the shrimp were wonderful. We actually hit it off better with their mother than we did with her girls. In fact, I didn�t think that she wanted us to leave, but, we told her that we had to get back to Long Beach to get Bobby�s car, so, she agreed to give us a ride back.
There was one little detail that we had not considered. We had two large surfboards to go back also. This was going to be a very interesting stunt in a 1962 Valiant.
We tried everything to get the boards into the car or trunk, but there was just no way that was going to happen. Their mother told us that she had an idea that just might work, but she would not tell us what it was until we promised to come back and eat dinner with them that night. We agreed to return at eight o�clock that evening. It was then that she began to implement her plan.
She went into the house and returned with a very large beach towel and four pairs of ladies nylon hose. She then tied the feet of each pair of hose together and placed the towel on top of the car�s roof. She then told us to put our boards on top of the towel on the roof. We then laid all four pairs of nylon hose on top of the surfboards, opened the car doors, pulled each end of the hose through opposite doors, tied the ends together very tightly, and the surfboards were now secured to the roof. Very ingenious, I might add!
Everyone managed to fit into the car, and forty minutes later we were standing beside of Bobby�s waiting Chevy Corvair.
We went back to Holden Beach that night and ate dinner with them and had a wonderful time. We left and went back to Long Beach that night after midnight and never saw them again. Those people cross my mind often and I wonder sometimes where they are now, what they are doing with their lives, and whether they would still remember me after forty years.
That entire event added one more file to my mind�s memory banks for me to recall, enjoy, and re-live throughout the years, anytime life finds a need for fond memories to be recalled.