Thousands of vacationers travel the highways with travel trailers, thousands of sailboats roam oceans and lakes, and thousands of cabin cruisers spend most of their lives tied to docks. Some cruisers are actually used for travelling lakes, rivers and canals, and this can be a source of pleasure and adventure. Relatively few venture far into salt water, for various good reasons, and I don't recall reading any chronicles of cruises such as ours down the East Coast Inland Waterway. Many yachts make annual round trips between New England and Florida, but most of these have professional crews. Our trips have been do-it-yourself experiments by amateurs.

Our boat POLARIS was a single crew twenty-eight foot wooden lapstrake Owens. It was trucked from its home port in Seneca Lake in upstate New York, and launched at a marina near Annapolis.

My brother Dave and his tiny wife Marie went aboard with me on a cold, windy February day in 1966. (Fortunately, they both loved boating, because we nearly froze for the first half of our journey). We headed South down Chesapeake Bay, at full speed to keep ahead of the high waves, pushed by a twenty knot tailwind, that threatened to wash over the stern. When we talked with other boaters at the marina where we landed that evening, they told us we had been foolish. They had taken two or three days, shirting the shoreline. Also we had been lucky, in that our boat had been short enough to ride the waves, while the large yachts smashed hard on every wave.

At the South end of Chesapeake Bay, where it opens into the ocean, we came within sight of the impressive bridge that links the Eastern Shore of Maryland with Norfolk. Turning in-land into Norfolk Harbor, we passed a number of freighters and part of the Navy fleet, while trying to follow our course markers through a bewildering maze of criss-crossing channel markers leading in every direction. For your information, channel markers are the road markers of the harbors and waterways. They may be in many forms, down from coastal lighthouses through numbered bells and lights with individual times of ringing or flashing, to floating buoys, to mere sticks. The boater buys charts, the equivalent of road maps, that correspond to the markers. In Chesapeake Bay and other open waters, the markers may be miles apart and hard to follow, especially in bad weather. Shifting sand bars, random fields of crab traps that can entangle the propeller, and other hazards, kept us from being bored on our travels.

We finally entered a narrow waterway through Norfolk. Only a few miles south, we encountered the aptly named DISMAL SWAMP, where a narrow canal winds through many miles of primitive watery roadless jungle. This is the northern edge of cottonmouth moccasin and alligator habitat. The only human life consists of deer hunters who wait in boats at the water's edge, waiting for their dogs to chase deer out of the swamp, and hoping the dogs will come back. (Farther south, I heard a hunter complaining that his dog had swum across a waterway after a deer, and had been eaten by an alligator.)

From here south, marinas and gas stations existed only about one or two days apart, so we had to worry whether our fuel would last. Sometimes we anchored for the night, in bayous off the main channel. We swam, fished or caught crabs for entertainment.

Whenever we did stay at a marina, no matter how isolated and primitive, we were invariable treated to a delicious seafood dinner, often crab meat in one of many forms, and hushpuppies. I've heard several theories explaining the name of these tasty cornpone balls but probably the best is that coon hunters, eathing supper around a fire, would feed them to their hungry dogs.

The Coinjobk, North Carolina, marina was typical of these overnight havens. Here we tied up at a wall behind a luxurious sixty foot sailing yacht. When we went in to dinner the only other guest was an elderly lady, the owner of the schooner. Her sad story follows:

As many very wealthy Easterners do, this lady and her husband had homes in New York and Florida, and each year moved South and North with the season along with their yacht and its crew; a captain, a mate, and a cook. The husband had recently passed away, and when she made the trip without him, she learned that the crew were incompetent drunks. She had just fired them, and was stranded far from civilization. She was so desperate she even offered us the job, but we reluctantly left her to her fate.

Indeed, we met so many unusual people cruising the waterway that just telling their stories would fill a book. Several families had cut their ties, quit jobs, sold homes, bought big old boats, brought schoolbooks to educate their children, and were living an itinerant life. Two couples, docked on night next to us, came to a loud parting of the ways and one huffy couple took their luggage and went ashore. We saw several groups of hippies living in old wrecks along the way.

As we continued south from Coinjock, our engine started giving trouble and the boat started leaking. That night in a marina we were sitting on the deck with drinks in hand, and invited an angel to join us. He was tall and black, the only occupant of a big handsome yacht. He had heard us discussing our problems, and after a companionable drink, he insisted on opening the hatch, going below, and examining the engine and bilges. When he came back up, he told us, "Your oil level is too low, and the asbestos packing where the shaft goes through the hull has come loose." Sure enough, we took care of those problems and had no more trouble of that kind. It turned out that our kind benefactor was taking the big yacht from New York to Miami for his wealthy boss. The boss was in a hospital temporarily. By a strange coincidence, our angel was to rescue us again, weeks later, in Florida!

We had docked at Fort Pierce, where Dave and Marie had reluctantly left for their Iowa home. My elderly Dad and Mother and Uncle Randall came over from their home in Homosassa, on the west coast of Florida. We planned to go on to Miami and the Florida keys, which we did. North of West Palm Beach, Randall was steering, got out of the narrow channel, and ran us onto a rock. Just when we had decided we were stuck for good, I saw a familiar looking yacht going by. You guessed it! Our black angel, who had meanwhile gone upriver to Savannah and picked up his now-healthy boss, answered my hail and hauled us off the rock! All this for one coctail; I hope he'll be better rewarded in heaven!

Many miles of travel along the coasts of the Carolinas and Georgia had intervened between these events. We went through broad shallow sounds, with narrow channels dredged in the sand. We tried, sometimes successfully, to haul a number of sailboats off the sand banks. With their deep keels, and engines too feeble to keep them in the channel against the ocean wind, sailboats were not designed for traveling the Inland Waterway. On the other hand, it takes a bold and expert sailor and a seaworthy boat to skirt the perilous Outer Banks - the notorious graveyard of sailing ships. History records that in older days, many ships were lured to their doom, not only by the violent riptides and ever shifting banks, but also by unkind people on shore who shone lights at night to misguide ships to dangerous shores and wreck them.

After our rescue from the rock, we continued south to West Palm Beach, and to the luxurious Bahia Mar marina known far and wide to yachtsmen as one of the finest on the East Coast. A harbormaster with his office on the labyrinth of docks instructs each entering captain where to dock, using a radio telephone for the elite and a bullhorn for us hoipolloi.

Once tied up, we were immediately visited by white-coated waiters with offers to install telephones, bring ice and liquor, get groceries, and tell us where to check in and pay the exorbitant rent.

Obviously, this was the destination of all the magnificent yachts we had seen on our way south. The location was indeed lovely, with swaying royal palms, the skyscrapers of the city across the waterway, and the ocean with its white sand beaches just a block to the East.

We stayed here for a week or so. One day, looking out over the emerald sea and the deeper blue Gulf Stream, I conceived the craziest of my many wild ideas. Why not cruise over to Bimini, the nearest of the Bahama islands?

Bimini is "only" about thirty miles off the coast, beyond the Stream which flows north at five miles an hour. A strong headwind was blowing from the East. I was not equipped with radio telephone nor radar, or Loran. My fuel capacity was barely sufficient to reach Bimini, even if there had been no wind and my navigation had been perfect. My crew, though brave, were all octogenarians and Dad was suffering from emphysema. Still, in my madness, I confess that I went so far as to fill several war surplus Jerrycans with gasoling and stow them on deck!

I queried my geriatric crew. Mother was gung ho; Dad was so miserable that he didn't give a damn. Randall was noncommittal. Next day, Randall and I were standing on the beach watching the big waves come in. Suddenly I felt some qualms. I said, "If I didn't think it would hurt Mother's feelings, I'd call this trip off!" Randall said, "It wouldn't hurt my feelings!" Randall had done a lot of ocean fishing, and I finally came to my senses.

So we continued south, to the Florida Keys. One day, when we were anchored and fishing for sea trout, something large came up under the boat and gave us a jolt. It turned out to be a manatee, a peaceful sea cow.

At Whale Harbor, we chartered the sportfisher boat "Comin' Home" captained by my friend Joe Herzog. I'd had many exciting big game fishing trips with him. Knowing that my crew were good fishermen but frail, we tried some fishing that might be exciting but not too strenuous.

We were fishing the Hump, a unique undersea mountain at the edge of the Gulf Stream.

The mountain rises from about three hundred feet at its base to a plateau only fifty feet deep, and is alive with all kinds of fish. The unusual phenomenon is that the different kinds of fish are segregated in layers, so that the knowledgeable fishermen can select their choice by using the right bait and tackle at the proper depth. For example, the base of the hump contains very large bottom feeders; grouper, amber jack, and large sharks. To catch these monsters of the deep, a large chunk of meat is dropped rapidly three hundred feet to the bottom, weighted with a one-pound sinker. The bait is usually swallowed in two to three minutes. The fisherman then hauls the fish to the surface as fast as possible, to try to keep a shark from eating it. Lifting this heavy weight is not child's play, so electric reels are used.

The captain thought my crew would enjoy catching bonito, small tuna weighing ten to thirty pounds. He mate caught a supply of bait minnows by throwing a cast net. Then, going to the bonito area, he baited the hooks on our spinning rods with minnows and tossed two or three dozen into the water to attract the fish. Soon there was a school of tuna behind the boat, and Randall and I were each fighting bonito. These happened to be larger than the captain had ordered - thirty to forty pounds -- and they are very strong fighters. Randall gave up, exhausted.