and I have a place on Shutters Arm. Boat access only and we like it that way. Two big bedrooms and a supersized living room-kitchen behind floor to ceiling A-frame windows.
Fourth of July fireworks are a family gathering time. We all pile onto the pontoon boat and anchor in the lake near the county boat docks. A couple hundred boats do the same, laughter, the sound of beer cans being popped, friendly jibes from boat to boat. And fireworks. Lots of them. And loud because of the hills, sounding like Civil War cannon fire echoing across Shenandoah.
Sal and I rode back to Willow Weep at the tail end of the day as storm clouds gathered to the north and set up for an all-out assault on the coast.
Storm or not, we had planned for our own assault, this time on the ghost paddle wheelers.
I pulled my 17-foot Smokercraft out of the toy shed and hitched it to the back of the Ford pickup. (You don’t live in this part of Oregon without at least one pickup in the family.) Sal and I buzzed down to Rocky Point and launched the aluminum boat then tied it to the dock. I’d put all of the clear vinyl curtains up and had an ice chest filled with appropriate snacks and beer. Sal brought his Nikon SLR digital camera with a dozen different lens filters.
A small propane space heater bungee’d to a cleat kept us comfortable.
We waited.
Darkness came at a little after 5 p.m. The storm came at 5:15 and blasted us with a deluge of rain, turning the river into a cauldron. The Smokercraft rocked, and rocked some more, listing hard to port then hard to starboard. Tugging the tie-up lines almost to the breaking point.
Sal and I had done this before. Many times, in fact, ever since being teenagers. For no real reason other than the rush of a roller coaster ride without buying a ticket.
The boat has high gunnels so the interior remained dry. But rain poured off of the canvas in sheets making it impossible to see out.
By 7:30, the storm passed and all that was left were winds from the north at 30 miles per hour. They howled through the tall timber and churned the river white, letting us know we weren’t welcome. Threatening to beat us to a pulp and demanding we return to our landlubbing homes.
By 10:30 the winds died, but the river continued to throw up steep chop. The sky turned blue-black from its gun-metal gray and stars began speckling the night in ones and twos and then by the bucket load.
“That was interesting,” Sal said, popping the top of a Bud Light. We never took good beer on these little adventures, afraid the bottles could be washed overboard which would be a horrible waste of first-class hops and grains.
“Indeed.”
We almost missed the blip with the sudden appearance of the ghost paddle wheeler. The one we had seen on the first day and the forward ship on our second viewing.
It slowly passed, about mid-channel, the gauzy visage churning water with its 15 or 16 foot stern-mounted paddle. No one was aboard, but the crates, barrels and other freight appeared to be the same we saw previously.
I jumped into the pilot seat, turned the key and the 50 horsepower Yamaha caught with a healthy growl. Sal unzipped the canvas and untied the stern line while I leaned out of the side curtain and did the same with the bow.
The sternwheeler had moved a few hundred yards down river toward Bandon when we finally pulled away from the dock.
The chop slammed the hull of the Smokercraft forcing me to keep the throttle no more than a third open. The bow dipped into the river and tossed up mini-mountains of water. Cold, winter water.
But we slowly gained on the ghost ship.
The paddle wheeler sparkled in the post-storm mist. Shards of reflection deflecting the edges of the ship into smears of silver. At about a hundred yards to its stern, we could see the wake, a trail of white bubbles breaking the river’s surface.
Each attempt at closing the gap was met with an increase in the speed of the paddle wheeler which seemed to shrug off the river’s chop while my boat rose and slammed back to the Coquille’s surface with thunderous bangs.
Under the Coquille River Bridge, the paddle wheeler flickered in the dark night as if someone was rapidly flipping a light switch on and off. The river was running even faster and with higher chop the closer we approached the outflow to the ocean. Past Bandon, we were never able to successfully close the gap.
“Damn! Damn! Damn!” I yelled at the ghost ship as I watched it slip out of the river and into the Pacific. I spun the wheel and dropped down to just above idle. Enough to hold my place. No way was I going out into the Pacific or crossing the bar at this time of night in this kind of weather with the surf running high, hot and wide.
“I hope you got lots of pictures,” I said to Sal.
“Dozens.”
We motored upriver, against a strong current, and loaded the boat on its trailer.
Parking the rig back in its carport, Sal and I made way to the kitchen, poured some Colombian and fell into chairs at the dining room table. Rummaging through the Kenmore I found some frozen donuts which I nuked and slid onto a plate.
Sal took a bite of one, “This is terrible.”
“What do you expect in the middle of the night?”
Sal took another bit and shuddered. “Do I need to call my friends in D.C. and have some Krispy Kremes sent over by chopper?”
“You can do that?”
“No.”
“You ol’ heartbreaker you.”
I linked up his camera to my laptop and proceeded to download the photos.
The Nikon had done its duty for God and Country.
The images on the computer screen were sharp. The sternwheeler was clearly defined. Well, as clearly as gauze can be defined. Fuzzy, spackled edges, dark smoke from the single stack evaporating into the night air.
“This is all well and good, but we never got close enough to actually touch it,” I lamented.
“And the second ghost ship never appeared.”
“We’re going to have to do that again, only with a different plan.”
“And you know what that plan is, I gather?”
“Most certainly, Ollie, I do.”
CHAPTER THREE
Having a long love affair with boats of all sorts, I lay in bed with a photo of Cookie in “Miss QT”, a miniature version of a mid-30s Chris Craft built in my carport over the course of a year. Mahogany hull, cedar planking on the deck and an outboard Johnson motor, the slick little runner flew a Martini flag on its rear deck.
I’d built Miss QT because Cookie proved hesitant about driving the Smokercraft, afraid she’d hurt it when docking. Since woodworking is a strong suit, I decided to build her a boat of her own.
Fast, dry and agile,
