Gives Boaters
A Merry Chase
Sitting in the stern-sheets with your hand on the tiller and watching your crewmates row their hearts out is exhausting work, let me tell you.
I only wanted to feel one thing at that moment -- the bump of the good ship BOONDOGGLE'S bow against the dock. Then would come a steak -- ribeye, blood-rare, blessed with a few drops of Pickapeppa sauce; a bottle of Mexican beer to soothe my throat, parched from the effort of yelling ''Stroke! Stroke! Stroke!' all afternoon. Then a nice, long, hot bath and a good night's sleep.
Honest reward for honest toil.
I could almost smell that steak, when the bow watch said, "Oh, look at that seagull, he's dying!"
I glanced over to where she was pointing, and yes, there was a bird, alive but exhausted, obviously unable to fly, bobbing on the breeze-whipped wavelets. I took brief notice, muttered something along the line of "what a pity," and continued my ribeye reverie.
"You know, that's what I do at workó rehabilitate injured birds." That was from Oarsman No. I, who I now remembered worked at the Sea-Arama marine park. "We could go back and get him."
I should mention at this point that we had taken in the oars and rigged "Boonie's" sails. The craft being one of ELISSA's historically re-created wooden boats, her two-sail, "dipping lug" rig is picturesque but the very devil to set and maneuver.
"How about it?" our skipper asked. "Shall we go after him?"
"How about we don't?" I replied hopefully, but my dream of steak and suds was dissolving before my eyes.
"Oh, yes, please!" cried the bow watch, who was the skipper's daughter. "Let's go get him!"
"Yeah, why not?" answered the skipper. "I want to tack this thing, anyway."
My argument that there were 50 million seagulls on Pelican Island alone and one less wouldn't shake the earth out of orbit fell on deaf ears.
I won't describe how one "tacks," or turns around, a sailing craft with an archaic rig like BOONDOGGLE's. I couldn't, even if I wanted to.
Suffice to say it is at best a hopeless tangle of arms and lines and legs and spars and elbows and arguments and curses. The only thing I've ever seen to compare is the time in college that I watched eight foreign-exchange students packed into one battered '71 Dodge Dart, all trying to parallel park it.
Nevertheless, after an eternity of you're-standing-on-my-foots, get-out-of-my-way-I-can't-sees, and one unexplained splash, we got Boonie pointed the the other way and by some infernal miracle ó considering we had drifted halfway to Sunday in all the confusion -- we re-located the stricken fowl.
My dire warnings about psittacosis, bubonic plague, halitosis and God only knows what he's got went unheeded, especially after the bird made a remarkable recovery when we reached out with an oar to scoop him in. He let out an angry squawk and led us on a merry chase as he skittered across the water to the Pelican Island shore.
We beached the boat, our oarsman-birdman hopped out, and ran a hundred yards down the beach before he could catch the poor, sick seagull ó who, it turned out, was suffering nothing more than a nasty fishhook gash on its wing.
Then, it was shove off, back into the stream ó another tack ó and finally, on our way home.
I wasn't sure I could survive the voyage, as starved as I was. But the withering looks I got when I suggested an immediate repast of spit-roasted seagull took the edge off my hunger.
Later that evening, sated with my long-overdue steak and feeling mellow, I recounted the day's adventures to the other boats' crews, gathered at the winner's home for a little post-race afterglow.
"Can you imagine?" I said. "They all wanted to leave the poor thing there to die -- but of course, l wouldn't HEAR of it ... "
