My first time sailing a canoe: the naïve approach
It has been almost 40 years since I first sailed a canoe, and now is the time to share the experience. I’ll ask the reader to do the same when the time is right, especially if it’s a good story.
I was with my Boy Scout troop out of Miami. We went for a canoe trip into the 10,000 Islands area of Florida, a place where the land and sea fight for preeminence over the very southern tip of the state.
We paddled a mélange of canoes out to an island, maybe just a couple three miles or so. We made camp on ground barely above the high water mark, scattered with coral and transient soil. Plants consisted mostly of sea grape and whatever weedy stuff grows in such inhospitable conditions good only for crabs, mosquitoes and the ubiquitous sand fleas.
By that age I had pretty much reached the point where I was too independent to be a Scout anymore and this would prove to be my last trip hanging off the umbilical of a Scout Master, especially one who (in my youthfully arrogant thinking) was better off sitting in front of the tube watching a Dolphins game than trying to lead a hardened outdoorsman like myself. I had already spent many days in the Everglades and practically lived in the drained-swamp pine barrens surrounding our southern Dade County home by then. (Within a couple years of this trip I would find myself held by the foot by trap in alligator-infested, chest-deep water in the Big Cypress Swamp; but that’s another story.)
