I have taken quite a hiatus from my blogging responsibilities. Apparently, I am a cold weather blogger. Barbara and I just returned from a week on the sunny Gulf Coast of Florida. We stayed in Bonita Springs but visited Naples, Boca Raton and Coral Springs. We got to play two enjoyable rounds of golf in 80 degrees weather and took the resort launch out to a private beach area to catch some refreshing gulf breezes, lounge in the sand and swim in the medicinal salt water. We visited with both Barbara’s brother’s family and my brother’s family. The family visits were the highlight of the trip. We actually spent an afternoon looking at condo open houses in the Park Shore region of northern Naples. There is nothing like the first chill of New York air to spark the interest in finding a warm refuge from old man winter.
A cool and windy afternoon a few days prior to leaving for Florida, The Pondit grabbed his fishing gear and headed off to take a rowboat our on choppy Dickerson Pond. The pond had seen several days of morning frost and I judged this might be the last chance to fish this year. Rains earlier in the week had filled our fleet of wide bottomed aluminum rows boats with about twenty gallons of water. I had nothing with me to bail out our reliable behemoths. I did spot our Grumman aluminum canoe that was also inundated. It however could be lifted up on the dock and tipped over to separate the canoe from it unwanted cargo of rainwater. I accomplished this in minutes. I snatched a paddle and one floatation cushion and headed out to troll the pond. Handling the canoe solo sitting in the rear seat on a windy day while watching your fishing line was a challenge. Every time I hooked a perch and needed to reel him (her) in and dislodge the hook, the canoe would be somewhere I didn’t want it to be – usually tangled in beaver fallen tree limbs on the shore of the pond. As I reached the far end of the pond – the far end of any pond or lake is the place you are mysteriously attracted to, but is as far away from where you eventually need to be as humanly or nautically possible.
Here as the sun was beginning to set, the forty-two degree temperature winds began to stiffen. I was having trouble keeping the bow of the canoe pointed into the wind. As I tried once again to swiftly paddle the boat to turn windward a gust of wind raised the bow and within seconds the canoe’s only passenger was adrift in Dickerson Pond. I quickly assessed my fate. I was sopping wet but uninjured. The canoe was totally awash with only the tips of each end out of the water and I hanging onto one edge of the vessel. The paddle was still in my one hand but the seat cushion floatation devise was now about ten feet away and moving southward in the wind. My fishing pole was gone, but the vinyl tackle box was floating within the confines of the canoe frame. My fishing net was drifting nearby between the seat cushion and me. Did I mention that the water was damn cold!
The nearest shore point was about 100 yards to the west and although Dickerson Pond is not a deep body of water, I was not able to reach the pond bottom with my sneakered feet. I was wearing jeans and a fleece jacket at the time. My first morbid thoughts were of hypothermia. I did mention that the water was damn cold! My next thought was that nobody knew I was out fishing and there would be no people who would notice or hear me in this corner of the pond. I decided that the seat cushion would be more important to me than the swamped canoe. I let go of the canoe in order to swim the relatively short distance to the drifting seat cushion. As I let go of the canoe and tried to raise my feet to get into a swimming posture, all I did was start to sink below the surface of the pond. With my jeans, fleece jacket and sneakers, I was basically a lead sinker. I reattached myself to the rim of the canoe and tried to use the paddle to reach the seat cushion. There is probably a physics law – Heinrich’s Arm Stretch Law - to explain this, but the four-foot long paddle and my five-foot reach did not allow me to snag the cushion that was now at least twelve feet from the canoe. My next brilliant Idea was to try and kneel inside the swamped canoe. Again turning to the laws of physics, there must be a theoretical place you can place your knees in a swamped canoe and not actually tip the canoe over in the water. If you find that exact swamp you must remain totally motionless. Two realizations became evident: first, I was not going to find that magical spot and, second, if I did, then remaining motionless forever was not going to help my situation. I quickly abandoned this tactic and tried to lay semi-diagonally across the beam of the submerged edges of the canoe. I was able to do this and keep the swamped canoe steady. I looked over my right shoulder and watched as my vinyl tackle box drifted slowly away from the canoe. I wondered how long it would stay floating?
About five to eight minutes had passed and I had accomplished very little. I lost my seat cushion and my tackle box. I was getting colder by the minute and the sun was continuing to set. Although my seat cushion, net and tackle box were being blown to the wind to the shore at the south end of the cove, the heavy swamped canoe and its soggy passenger were merely inching along. My ETA for windblown landfall was about twelve hours. I needed a plan, even a bad plan. If I moved further across the rims of the canoe with one side across my mid thighs and the other at my chest, I could actually move my arms a bit. Choking up on the paddle handle, I could gently, ever so gently, make a small, shallow padding action using only my wrists. Whenever I tried to increase my stroke, my upper body tilted into the water and I feared the canoe would tip over. I did not want to try to use an upside down canoe to use as a floatation device! Did I mention the water was damn cold?
After about twenty-five to thirty minutes of mini-paddle stokes my craft and I were reaching the shoreline. Of course, I came to shoe amid another tangle of beaver induced fallen tree branches. After two failed attempts to sidle off the top to the canoe and stand in the water (even ten feet from the shore I could not reach the bottom of the pond – perhaps my legs had shrunk), I was standing in the primal ooze of the pond bottom. Crawling onto the shore, I took stock of my situation. First I was not injured or shivering. Those were good signs. I removed my fleece jacket. This was something I should have done about three minutes after falling into the water. I checked my brand new iPhone to see if it was operational – NOOO. I realized that my dickersonpondit.com baseball cap and my glasses were still on my head. In fact I had on my sunglasses and soon realized it was not nearly as dark as I thought it was! The canoe was not going anywhere. I started walking toward the trail that encircles the lake carrying my fleece jacket in my hands. I now realized that not only was the water pretty damn cold, but walking in the woods sopping wet in the wind was also on the cool side.
I walked briskly hoping the pace would warm my up. In another twenty minutes I was opening the front door to my condo. Stripping out of my wet clothing, I headed straight to the bathroom to run a hot bath. It was a good bath! I did notice that the clear water was turning slightly green as I lay soaking. I was sporting a couple of black and blue marks from where I was laying of the rimes of the canoe, but all-in-all, I was feeling OK. I put on warm, dry clothes and hung my fishing wardrobe to dry in the laundry room. Tomorrow I would head out to rescue the canoe and try and recover my tackle box. Some people never learn.
