As always, the Knick-Knack was about at the limit of what the pickup really was capable of handling. It wasn’t all that bad on the flatlands of Ohio, but from there on until he was well into Georgia there were times it was a downright struggle. That was especially true on long hills where he had to drop down a gear or two to crawl up the hill as traffic flashed past, sometimes with horns honking in disgust.

Life was not made easier by running into a winter storm down in the Kentucky hill country; it didn’t have a lot of snow with it, but the roads were slick enough to make Adam cautious about wrestling with the awkward load. He pulled in early at a motel south of Lexington, and wound up staying there an extra day until the weather was better.

The combination of the rain, road dirt and occasional slush made the Knick-Knack very dirty; Adam made up his mind that as soon as he was near his destination he was going to find a do-it-yourself car wash and give the boat a thorough cleaning. It had, after all, been put away for the winter and it was going to take some time to get it ready to go again.

It took a while to find Sims Boat Yard, in what was essentially in a swamp on the outskirts of Jacksonville. At first glance Adam didn’t see any alligators, but could believe they were around. Back up in Winchester Harbor Jake had shown him some pictures of the Rag Doll, so it wasn’t hard to find, even though the rather run-down yard had several boats sitting around in various stages of disrepair. Amanda proved to be busy working on something on deck and didn’t pay any attention until he called to her, “So how’s it coming on that thing?”

She looked up and got a look of surprise on her face. “Adam!” she cried. “What brings you down here? And the Knick-Knack, too?”

“I got tired of hearing about how warm it was down here. I decided to come and see for myself.”

“Does that mean you’re going to be cruising down here?”

“For a while, probably, but I thought I’d give you a little help if you needed it.”

“Oh, I can find things for you to do,” she said. “But I’m starting to get into some big stuff I’m waiting for Dad to come down and help with, and he’s not going to be here for a couple weeks, so I’m kind of having to work on things that won’t be affected by that. Some idiot who owned this boat in the past put a bunch of mostly useless deck fittings on it and didn’t use a drop of bedding compound, so there are weak spots all over the deck where water got in and rotted the core. I can fix those by drilling some small holes and injecting epoxy, and that should fix those all right. For a while I was beginning to think I was going to have to strip off the whole damn deck surface and replace the core, but it’s not quite as bad as I thought it was at first.”

“Sounds tedious, but if you say it has to be done, it’s probably best to do it.”

“Oh, yeah, it has to be done but it’s worth the effort. The real work is going to involve ripping out about half the interior and replacing the woodwork. There was water in the boat for a while and a lot of it is rotted. Plus, Dad thinks we’re going to have to get it up on the hard and replace the keel bolts, and God knows it needs the hull cleaned. There must be a ton of crap hanging on it. But I’m making progress.”

“Well, good. At least when you’re done you’re going to know you’ve got a good boat.”

“Oh, yeah. It’s been a lot of work but Ron and some of his buddies come over every now and then and help with the heavy stuff, and some of the grubby stuff, so I’m making progress. This is going to be a really neat boat when I get it done. I’m going to have a lot of fun with it, but then, I’m having a lot of fun with it now.”

“You have to do this stuff when you’re young,” he smiled. “I’ve been working on the Moonshadow with your dad some, and I’ve learned an awful lot. But I sure wouldn’t want to take on a project like this at my age with my skills.”

“It gets to me a little at times. There are times that I’ve wished that I’d just kept the Knick-Knack and gone cruising with it, but it really isn’t the boat I want. I decided I wanted to have something I could go offshore with, and it really wouldn’t be a good idea in the Knick-Knack.”

“I know what you mean. I mean, I can compare the Knick-Knack and the Moonshadow in similar conditions, and I’d a hell of a lot rather be on the Moonshadow. Hell, you were with me on the first day out of Traverse City. I sure wouldn’t have wanted to be out in the Knick-Knack in that stuff. But I figure for cruising around inside down here it ought to do just fine. It beats staying up north, anyway.”

“It does at that, although I’ll tell you what, I’d rather be up north in the summer rather than down here. Ron and Sid both tell me it gets to be bug city down here then, and it gets so humid that you don’t know whether you’re in the water or what. It’s going to be hard to go back and get on the Chinook, though. So how long are you down for?”

“Until I go back north. I’ll probably be heading back about the same time you do, so I can be there when your dad gets the crane to put the boats back in the water.”

“Yeah, I ought to be there for that, too,” she sighed. “But look Adam. I’m glad you’re here and are willing to help out, but you ought to do some cruising, rather than just grub around on the boat with me all winter. Besides, while the weather is nice compared to Michigan, it’s not real nice all the time. This is the warmest day we’ve had in a couple weeks. I get along all right living on the boat, but there are times I’m glad I have a warm sleeping bag and an electric heater. You’re welcome to stick around if you want, but if I were you I’d leave the Knick-Knack on the trailer and head a couple hundred miles south, maybe more. I’m told that it improves a lot as you get farther south.”

“I suspect you know more about it than I do, and your dad pretty much told me that himself when we were kicking this trip around. But look. The Knick-Knack was all buttoned up for winter when I took it out of Frenchtown Harbor. I mean, I just tossed stuff aboard and let it go at that. I need to get stuff put away, and I need to stock up on groceries. All of that could take me a couple days, and then it’ll be getting close to Christmas. How about if I stake you and Ron to a Christmas dinner, then head on south?”

“I’m sure Sid won’t mind if you park the boat here for a while, especially if you slip him a few bucks. Are you going to stay on the boat?”

“If it gets that cold here at night maybe I ought to think about getting a motel, but it would only be for a few days.”

“All right, it sounds like a plan. If we didn’t do something like that, Ron and I would probably be here working on the boat all day and having Christmas dinner out of cans.”

It took a couple days to get the work done on the Knick-Knack, and Adam was very glad he’d decided to get a motel room and leave the boat near Amanda and the Rag Doll. It didn’t get down to freezing, but did get chilly, and it would have been uncomfortable sleeping on board, especially while the boat was still on the trailer. But, after thinking about it and talking with Amanda some more, he decided to start his cruise here. He figured he could live with the cool conditions while he was on the water, and Sid’s was a good place to leave the truck and the trailer – Amanda had an occasional need for a truck, and it would be available to her.

He wound up having a restaurant Christmas dinner with Amanda, Ron, and a couple of his Coast Guard friends, who seemed to be a pretty good group, more mature and professional than he had imagined. Later that afternoon he got a favor in return when the group helped him get the mast up on the Knick-Knack and the boat in the water. He spent the night in a slip at Sid’s, and Amanda waved good-bye to him as he started south the next day.

The next few days were warmer, and he was able to sail at least some of the way down the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway when the winds were favorable and run the Honda when they weren’t; it helped that while the channel was narrow, it was also pretty straight. His plan was to move fairly quickly southward, hoping for warmer weather, so he didn’t stop to investigate every possible place.

On Amanda’s suggestion, he’d bought a long extension cord and a portable electric heater, and if it looked like it was going to be a cool night from the weather forecast, he found a slip with electric power. He couldn’t find one every night, so a couple of nights he had to anchor out, run the alcohol stove a lot, and wrap up in his sleeping bag and an extra blanket to stay halfway comfortable.

But that was relatively minor. He’d realized there were going to be nights on board the Knick-Knack that weren’t going to be exactly like living in a luxury hotel, and he thought he could manage it for a short time. After all, there were going to be times when he was living on the Moonshadow next summer that might not be the greatest, either. He was learning to live this life, and put up with some of the down sides, and to enjoy the challenges of overcoming them.

Several days out from Jacksonville he was nearing Cape Kennedy. He’d heard the story of Jake watching a rocket launch from there in the original Pixie, and had hoped that he would be able to see one, but when he inquired locally it proved there was nothing on the schedule for the near future. It would be worth checking on his way back through, but that was about all he could say.

The weather improved incrementally once he was south of the Cape; some nights it was nice enough that he didn’t bother with the little electric heater. There was a decision coming up he knew he had to make. Jake had told him that he didn’t particularly like the crowded area around Miami, and when he’d been there in the distant past, he had usually avoided the place, sometimes by taking the canal to Lake Okeechobee and then across the state to Ft. Myers. Adam didn’t much care either way, except that he thought he might as well take the canal route one way and go through Miami the other, but he couldn’t figure out which way to go first. It might come down to a coin flip, he thought, but the decision had to be made at Stuart, which wasn’t far ahead.

He was still thinking about it when he pulled into a marina south of Ft. Pierce one evening, still several days away from having to make a decision. He still didn’t have a clue of which way he was going to go, so he hardly noticed a woman on a nearby dock, painting at an easel, and certainly didn’t think about it. He went about getting things put away and organized for the night when he heard a familiar voice call, “Adam! Fancy meeting you here!”

“Good grief, Audrey!” he replied, amazed to see the smiling face of the woman he’d picked up in the Mary Sue at Ballycotton Cove on his trip to Blanche Tickle last summer, and then met again at her family cottage on Georgian Bay. “You’re about the last person I expected to see around here! Still painting, I see.”

“Oh, yes. I have to do something to pass the time. I never expected to see you and the Knick-Knack here! How’s Carolyn?”

“Just fine, the last time I saw her, whenever that was. A month or six weeks ago, I guess. I didn’t even ask her if she wanted to come with me since I knew she’d be teaching school. What brings you here?”

“I expect the weather in Toronto is about as depressing as the weather in Detroit. I come down here most winters to get away from it, but it gets a little dull at times. But you never know when someone is going to show up to make life interesting again. You didn’t mention anything about coming south in the Knick-Knack when I talked to you up in Flower Harbour last summer.”

“I had no plans whatsoever to do it then,” he replied. “I was starting to climb the walls looking for something to do, when a friend suggested that I bring the Knick-Knack down here.”

“That must have been a long, hard sail.”

“Actually it was a long, hard drive. I brought her down on a trailer.” He spent a couple minutes explaining how he’d left the truck and trailer with Amanda at Jacksonville, and had been coming down the Intracoastal ever since. “Most likely this is going to be my last trip with her since I have a new boat sitting in Michigan. It was too big to bring down on a trailer, though.”

“Oh, I want to hear all about that,” she said. “I still feel a little ashamed of the lousy lunch I subjected you to in the restaurant in Flower Harbour. There is a very nice seafood place here, just up the street. Why don’t we go sit down, get something to eat, and we can catch up on things.”

“Talked me into it,” he smiled. “I haven’t seen anyone I know since I left Jacksonville, and I’d love to sit and talk with you for a while. Give me a few minutes to get the boat taken care of first, though.”

“Oh, I can wait. I haven’t seen anyone I know myself, except for the people I know down here, and most of them are waitresses and clerks and that sort of thing. I’ve just about been bouncing off the walls for want of someone to talk to. I sometimes wonder why I come down here, except for the fact that it’s warm. Believe me, I’d much rather be out sailing with you.”

“No reason we couldn’t go for a spin tomorrow. I don’t have any place I need to be before the last part of March, so I’m not exactly in any rush.”

“I’d love that,” she smiled. “I like to sit here on the dock and watch the boats sailing by wishing I were out on them, and sometimes I paint them. I have a lovely picture back up in Flower Harbour of your boat entering the place. I’d love to show it to you sometime.”

“Well, maybe you’ll get to, except that I don’t expect that I’ll be there with the Knick-Knack again,” he said, finishing with his putting things away and locking the hatch closed. “That’s a long story, too.”

“You can take your time telling it. Oh, it will be so nice to have dinner with someone I know I can talk to and knows things I like to talk about.”

The restaurant proved to be not far up the street. The food was all right as far as Adam was concerned, although he thought he preferred Rachel’s fresh lake trout in the snack bar of the Channel Stop, especially if it had been caught on the Chinook that day. But it hardly mattered, for they sat there for hours, just talking and catching up.

Adam filled her in on the idea of the reason for buying the Moonshadow, and how he’d wound up buying it, beating the obnoxious salesman around the ears in the process. He also talked about his plans to live aboard the boat starting in the spring, and his idea to sail it around the lakes in the early summer, then take it south in the fall. Or, alternatively, start early in the spring with the idea of going to Blanche Tickle with it.

“Oh, that would be delightful,” she mused. “I’m thinking I may go to the artists’ camp there next year, but I haven’t made up my mind about it. I had such a delightful time there last summer, I don’t know how I could top it. I’m afraid I haven’t been doing anything as exciting as you’ve experienced.”

She went on to detail it; he’d heard pieces of it all along. Apparently she’d stayed at the cottage in Flower Harbour until into September, when the weather began to cool, then went back to her house in Toronto. “Frankly, it was rather dull,” she told him. “I have things like my painting to keep me busy, but I’ve had nothing like the adventures I seem to find you on. I often find myself at loose ends and have to look for things to do.”

“I was getting the same way until the idea of cruising around down here came up.”

It was so good to see a friend that they sat and talked for hours more. He heard a lot about her adventures, especially those she’d had before Bert had died; he didn’t have stories like that, since his life with Brittany had really been rather dull, and he admitted it to her. She was a good listener when he got onto that subject, and appeared to be understanding about the troubles he’d been through and why he’d had to do what he’d done.

It was after dark and the restaurant was closing before they left. He walked her back to her car, which was sitting at the dock not far from the Knick-Knack, and then headed to bed himself, thinking that he might stay around this place for a couple more days just for the sake of being with Audrey. She was a very bright and articulate person, who enjoyed an outgoing and exuberant view of the world. It was catching, especially considering his talent for self-reflection and occasional moroseness.

The next day they went sailing, getting an early start on what promised to be a beautiful day. Rather than just mess around in the rather narrow Indian River, he went down to a nearby inlet and sailed out onto the ocean proper; it wasn’t something he might normally have done in the Knick-Knack but the conditions were mild and there was no reason not to.

As had been the case last summer up in Georgian Bay, she was delighted with the sailing. She was a good sailor, and when you got right down to it after all her years of sailing with Bert she had more experience than he did. And of course they talked some more; it was again a delight talking with her, as always, and he felt little need to hold back on anything.

Eventually they had to head back in for the day, easily the best day he’d had on the trip, and he knew exactly why. It was so much more fun to have someone to sail with, to talk with, to share experiences with, than it was to be alone on the Knick-Knack. And to have it be someone like Audrey, who seemed so able to wring fun out of life, made it even more special. While he’d learned to sail by himself, even to like sailing by himself, it was so much more rewarding to not be alone.

She seemed to feel the same way. They weren’t far out of the marina when she said, “Oh, how I envy you this trip you’re taking. Bert and I rarely got down here, and we never had the opportunity to go sailing here. You’re going to be seeing so many new places and new things, I really wish I could go with you.”

Perhaps it was his enjoyment of having someone with him that caused him to reply, “Well, if you wanted to come with me, I’m sure we could work it out.”

“Oh, would you take me with you? Really?”

“Sure, if you want to come along,” he told her, not really believing he was hearing what he thought he’d heard. “Let’s face it, Audrey. This boat is small and the quarters are pretty tight, so it’s pretty primitive compared to the Moonshadow and probably to the boat you and Bert owned. I’ve been able to get along well with it, and it even worked well when I was with Carolyn, but we can probably manage it all right.”

“Oh, I’d love to come!” she replied, almost gushing. “I’ve been so fucking” – the mere fact that she used the word put emphasis on it in his ears – “bored it’s not funny, and I really have wanted to do something interesting.”

“Well, it’s all right with me so long as you understand that it’s going to be pretty close quarters. If it gets to be too much, we shouldn’t be too far from here, and we ought to be able to get you back here without too much trouble.”

“I think I can manage,” she smiled. “And I really don’t mind primitive. I’ve enjoyed camping and things like that over the years. I’ll admit there are times when hot showers and soft beds feel good, but being primitive for a while makes them feel better afterward.”

“If it gets too bad we can always find a motel for a shower and bed,” he said. “There are times this boat gets a little close for me, too. The other thing is that since space is limited, you can’t bring a lot with you.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem. As I told you, I’m used to camping and living on a boat, so I know how to keep my things to a minimum. I shall probably want to stop at a large variety store to pick up a few things I don’t have with me, but that shouldn’t take long.”

“I don’t have a car with me, of course, so we probably ought to stock up on groceries a bit, too. I cook pretty simply on this boat, and if you don’t like it you’re welcome to try yourself.”

“Oh, I can manage that,” she replied, her enthusiasm clearly showing. “Just because you’re on a boat and living simply doesn’t mean you have to depend on your can opener to keep you alive.”

“Good enough,” he smiled. Just the prospect of having her along on this trip put it in a whole different light. He had realized he was getting a little tired of being alone – well, more than a little tired – and she would put a different light on the trip. It was beginning to be a lot more interesting than it had seemed in the morning. “How long is it going to take you to get ready to go?”

“Not long,” she replied. “It’s still early enough that we can go to the store tonight, and it won’t take me long to pack what I need. Why don’t you stay with me at my place tonight, and we can get going in the morning?”

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.