LAND HO! HOHOHO!

It was a beautiful summer morning; the sky was a cerulean blue cloudless and sparkling with the newness of a fresh day. A new day for adventure when you’re 13 years old and nothing to do on a Saturday. I decided to go over to Dunton Lake to meet Schultz with my pal Jerry. Jerry lived just 2 doors down from me, and we paled around all too often. Schultz lived by the lake about 2 miles away, and his Mom invited Jerry and me to feast on a breakfast of waffles and bacon. After eating, Schultz said we should try something daring. We decided to cross the Great South Bay in his brother’s duck boat! We would go over to Fire Island, ogle the girls, and head back to East Patchogue, and Dunton Lake.

We stocked the boat which carried 3 people with an oar, a portable radio, a fishing rod, pail, a couple of bottles of Pepsi Cola and nothing else but our stupidity. We “shoved off” as they say around 10:30 a.m., slowly leaving the channel that separated the lake from the bay, set out south toward Fire Island, a destination of incalculable distance when sitting low in a duck boat. We put on the radio, and sailed across, each taking a turn at rowing the boat across with only 1 oar.

Around 1:30 in the afternoon, we noticed that the radio started to get static every now and then that didn’t occur all morning. As we went further along, more frequent became the static, as Cousin Brucie was drowned out by the noise. We started to notice the wind pick up, and a coolness overcome us as we started pitching and yawing in the middle of the bay. The sky had turned a dark grey to almost midnight black. Suddenly a Navy or Coast Guard trainer started buzzing us, and we got his message, we were heading right into a storm, or worst still, we were being engulfed in one.

We decided to turn around, since we hadn’t made much headway in the last hour and headed toward the channel again, the boat rocking, swaying, and pitching up and down. Water started to swamp our boat, and we figured we would lose it soon if we didn’t act quickly. Schultz decided to jump out of the boat, and hold on to the back and steer us to shore as he kicked his feet to act as a motor. Jerry was standing in the middle of the boat pushing with the oar, and I was bailing with a pail that was in the boat. Suddenly jerry lost his balance and fell back slightly and lost the oar! Now it was up to Schultz to get us back. By the grace of Schultz’s feet and legs, my arms, and any luck Jerry had that day, we made great headway. Jerry decided that the radio wasn’t doing us any good and decided to shut it off, when he reached to turn the thing off, he was shocked from the exposure of the radio to the water. However our troubles were not over yet.

Around 3:30 p.m., Schultz started crying out! What was happening was we were in the middle of a school of Jelly Fish, and they were stinging Schultz in the legs. Schultz climbed back into the boat, put on his pants over his bathing suit again, and we all decided to do the same thing. We each took turns swimming behind the boat as we paddled with our feet, until about 4:30 p.m., when we landed about 5 miles off course, west of the channel, at the Patchogue Mariner where we tied up and called for rides home.