The Water Keeper(18)

Realizing her mistake, the woman relaxed her death grip on the tiller, idled the engine, untied the line, and without bothering to check the gas level, backed up, banging into two yachts, one piling, and the bulkhead. Finally, she managed a circle like a one-legged duck and ran smack into the hull of a sixty-foot sport fisherman, which sent her rolling head over backside to the bow. Recovering, she returned to the stern, steadied the tiller, and began an erratic and serpentine path out of the marina. Free of the no-wake zone, she twisted the throttle and put the small boat up on plane, where she immediately stuck it in the soft mud. Cussing again, she stepped out of the boat, pushed it off the mudflat—finally losing the other flip-flop—found reverse, and backed out into the deeper channel. Once free, she again floored the throttle and motored southward down the ditch.

Her pinball path proved she’d never steered an outboard, but she was in the process of training her mind—push the opposite way you want to go. I admired her gumption but wondered how long it’d be before the marina sent the authorities to drag her back. Or she sank that boat.

Tabby and I loaded into Gone Fiction and slipped out of the marina. By then, the woman was gone. As was her wake. This time of night, the larger yachts had moved inside to escape the winds off the coast and were traveling north and south in the ditch—some as fast as twenty-five or thirty knots, thinking themselves safe from smaller vessels. Few people travel the ditch at night. Those yachts would be splitting the channel down the middle with their wakes—some as high as five or six feet tall, rolling and breaking toward the shoreline.

I thought about the woman. She and that boat didn’t stand a chance.

Tabby and I left St. Augustine with thoughts of making Daytona by midnight. The problem was that it was dark, and while my electronics are accurate, hurricanes and storms have a way of moving boundaries and causing changes in depths. Nighttime navigation can be tricky, and while I knew these waters, I didn’t trust my electronics. Never have. I only use them to confirm what the markers are telling me. That’s not to say they’re not accurate. They are. Generally. I’ve just learned to trust my eyes more than the screen.





Chapter 6


The moon was once again high and clear, casting our shadow on the water. This stretch of the IC was primarily residential, which made it poorly lit compared to a city like St. Augustine or Daytona or Jacksonville. Also, while the Florida Keys get much of the attention when it comes to the waters of Florida—and deservedly so, because they are lovely—some of the most beautiful water in North Florida can be found on the Matanzas River between St. Augustine and the Tomoka Marsh Aquatic Preserve. Or the waters leading into Ormond and Daytona Beaches. Right in the middle sits Marineland—the world’s first oceanarium. Made famous by Hollywood moviemakers for eighty years with such 1950s classics as Creature from the Black Lagoon and Revenge of the Creature.

Half an hour outside St. Augustine, I throttled down through Crescent Beach, passed just west of Fort Matanzas, and then cruised along the stretch where A1A literally forms the border of the IC. I ran with my bow and stern running lights on, along with lights atop my T-top, but I turned off the light from my electronics as it interfered with my ability to find the center of the channel and the next buoy. With Marineland on my port side separating me from the Atlantic Ocean, I made the bend heading south-southwest when I spotted residue of a small craft’s wake. It wasn’t tough to spot. Foamy white powder on a sea of black glass.

The woman. Had to be.

And she wasn’t alone on the water. Something else up ahead, traveling from south to north. Something big.

The problem with the Intracoastal here is that it narrows to less than a hundred yards. The further problem is that there is shoaling at either edge, meaning the actual channel is maybe forty yards wide and seven feet deep. Narrow and shallow, yes, but this is not normally a problem on sunny afternoons. When it becomes a problem is now—when it’s dark and two vessels traveling opposite directions are fast approaching one another at the narrowest point.

I saw the white water from the cutwater of the northbound vessel and quickly judged her length at greater than a hundred feet. The woman in the dinghy had the sense to move to the right but only slightly, proving she was unaware of the havoc about to be unleashed on her small vessel. She could avoid the bow of the bigger boat but not the wake.

I nudged the throttle forward and kept my eyes on the coming vessel.

What happened next would have been amazing had it not been horrific. With the throttle high and traveling something between twenty and twenty-four knots, the na?ve woman passed the perpendicular line of the bow only to meet the wake of the oncoming vessel, which was traveling closer to thirty knots. And unlike the cutwater, the wake was dark—same color as the water. Which was the same color as the night.

The speed of her boat meeting the speed of the wake ejected her at better than fifty knots. Shot out of a cannon, she spiraled some fifty feet in the air. Her small boat road up the first wake, only to leave the water entirely. The propeller spun dry just briefly, maxing its rpm’s. Then the nose of the small boat slammed into the second wake. The collision broke the dinghy in half, both pieces disappearing into a sea of foam while the woman’s flailing, screaming body flew through the dark night air.

Crossing the bow of the oncoming yacht, I pulled back on the throttle, turned slightly westward toward the shore, and rolled over the six-foot wake. First one, then a second, then a third. When clear, I slammed the throttle forward and ran three seconds to where I thought she’d landed. My depth gauge read five feet, then four. Then two. Given the height of her cannon shot, the impact would probably knock her unconscious. At the very least, it’d knock the wind out of her and might break a few ribs. The trick for me was to ride far enough to hear or see her hopefully on or near the surface of the water while not so far as to chew her up under my spinning prop. I pushed it as far as I could, watching Tabby’s ears for any signs of life, and pulled back on the throttle when he sat up and looked to our right. I cut the engine when he stood and began barking, and then I shined a spotlight across the surface of the water.