Chapter 14

Josh’s turn:

Bouncy auburn-headed thing is lying with her head on my chest. There’s really a hurricane outside. Inside? Thunder. Lightning. Earthquakes. I’ve heard and read dozens of tales about people riding out hurricanes. None of those accounts mentioned outrageous, unbridled sex.

I’d love to lie here for a bit more, but the boat’s got a definite motion to it, and it’s time for me to do my ‘responsible riverman’ thing.

“Gotta get up, honey,” I said.

“Mmmmmmm.” She nestled into me.

I almost gave up, but those four lines are our links to safety. “I have to check the moorings.”

“Okay. Put some pants on. Don’t want the wind to blow debris into something important.” I was going to do that anyway. Swirling eddies of wind were blowing a driving rain that felt like little pellets hitting my body.

I pulled on a pair of canvas shorts. Commando. I eased a door open, realized how much the cabin had been attenuating the fury of the storm. Gee was right. Branches and other tree debris was being blown loose and when it reached the green chasm of our little channel, it dropped, still propelled by the mucked up wind eddies below the treetop level. The rain came from one direction one moment, another the next.

That same thing – the wind not being in a constant direction and speed – meant that the mooring lines were working a bit. I made provisions, loosening the line on one side, pulling the boat in another direction. A couple of feet was all I needed to put a fresh section of line at the point of friction. Moving my makeshift chafing gear showed me that I had not yet damaged the lines. Still, prudence is the rule.

When I re-entered the cabin, Gee was clad in her own shorts, red faded denim, short, stopping at the top of those wonderful thighs. I KNEW she didn’t have panties on. No bra either, underneath that simple colored cotton T-shirt. She knows what that does for me.

“Well?” she asked.

“Best I can tell, the eye’s southwest of us. The wind’s out of the southeast. Rule of thumb is that if you face into the wind, the eye is to your right.”

“And our moorings?”

“Still good. We’re not seeing much wind down here, really. Big question is how far up river we’ll see any storm surge. History says we might see the river rise a couple of feet. We can live with that. We just need to watch it.”

“Gonna be a long night.” She picked up the hem of that T-shirt, raised it a bit, flapping it. “Wonder whatever we can do to pass the time?”

“You THING, you!”

“Me???? I was getting ready to make some coffee.” Her eyes twinkled. In the middle of a hurricane, she’s still bouncy and giggly and oh so adorable.

We tried staying awake all night, ended up dozing and drifting in each other’s arms, a timer on my iPad beeping us awake to check things. The boat moved with the wind, the somewhat loose moorings giving us a bit of slack for the changes in direction.

I’d walk outside with a battery searchlight and scan the surroundings, looking to the treetops for the wind direction. Two AM.

“I think the eye’s passing us. It’s still west of us, but the winds are getting hard south. And water level’s up a foot.”

“So we made it?”

“Six or eight times since this morning, I think,” I smirked.

“Did NOT! I did. You got four.”

“But we’ve lived through the hurricane. I don’t know if I’ll survive the Georgina, though.”

“Die in my arms, baby,” she sighed, wrapping me in them.

“I just may do that.” I twisted, flopping back into bed with her in my arms.

We kept up the half-hour checks, but when the strange light of impending dawn started to show, it was over, at least the storm part.

“Made it, Josh,” she said. “Let’s open the windows, get a breeze going though here. And we can at least catch a nap.”

Yes. Pickles got his morning feed, went out to do cat business, came back in and joined Gee and me on the bed. The three of us slept, making up for the night’s fitful napping.

Late morning, I woke up. Had to ease out of the cabin and dangle it over the rail for relief. The waters here are normally dark even in calm times from the tannins and stains of the leaves and vegetation that fall into the waters. Today the waters are littered with leaves and branches. The storm has torn up the trees pretty bad. They’ll recover, though. Trees and storms have been the Gulf Coast mix for eons. I heard soft footsteps behind me, then a pair of arms around me, hugging me from behind.

“Now what?”

“Let’s get untied and ease back downstream. No cell signal, though. If we can get through the saltwater barrier, we can get to the marina and see what it looks like in town.”

We busied ourselves on boat activities. I had to disconnect and pull in a few hundred feet of wet Dacron line. It got flaked down in piles on the deck, to be straightened, inspected and properly coiled and stowed later. Once freed, I gingerly eased Dorable out of her safe little hidey hole and back into the river.

The river was now rife with debris, branches all over the surface, a few trees blown down from the banks into the channel.

Gee joined me on the hurricane deck, handing me a fresh egg and bacon sandwich. “It’s a mess.”

“Yes, it is. And we only see what’s on the surface. We’re going to go very slowly. Don’t want to damage the prop.”

“What about the hull?”

“Industrial barge, babe. At the speeds we run, we could hit Titanic‘s iceberg and survive. That propeller, though, that’s our delicate spot.”

She snickered. “I know where YOUR delicate spot is.”

“Tease.”

“Nuh-uh. Teases would tell you things and then prance off and leave you hanging. I do NOT intend to leave anything hanging, except that cute thing when it’s all depleted.”

“I can live under that threat,” I said.

The trip downriver was unusual. The foot and a half of water forced up the river by the hurricane’s storm surge was now seeking its way back out, so we were riding a current not normally seen unless after major rainfall up in the river’s basin. I kept Dorable‘s speed just high enough for the rudder to have authority, a couple of knots in the water. That showed up on the boat’s knotmeter. I looked at the GPS, the final arbiter of the boat’s speed in relation to the universe. A bit over five knots made good, so we were riding a three-knot current.

We dodged a few full-sized trees that had succumbed to the hurricane’s winds. Getting within range, I keyed the marine band radio.

“Saltwater Barrier, this is Dorable.“

“Go ahead, Dorable,” came the reply.

I was surprised. I really expected that there would be no attendant and we’d be stuck upstream, the barrier being an obstacle to our trip downriver to our home marina.

“Are you open for business?” I asked.

“We’re open. Be advised we have a pretty good current. I’m closing the downstream gates. Come on in.” Closing one set of gates would stop the flow through the locks, otherwise Dorable would be at the mercies of the current. Her eighteen horsepower would be ill-put to risk the current’s eddies as it pushed through the narrow confines of the locks.

We nosed in, dead slow, Gee at the helm, me on the port walkway with a line. I had us snubbed off before the upstream gates closed. When the downstream gates opened, I retrieved the line and Gee eased us forward downstream.

An hour later we were dead slow again, surveying the chaos that was the home marina. It being closer to the Gulf, the storm surge had been higher. Several boats had not been properly moored, a couple of them had popped too-tight lines and ended up onshore after the surge. Three were sunk. The finger piers were a mess. The fueling dock was a mess.

“Shit!” I said. Let me think about this.”

“What?” Gee asked.

“Where I can tie Dorable up and get us ashore.” My SUV was still in the vicinity of where I parked it, but the fact that it had moved at all told me it was flooded at least enough to float.

“We’ll need the scooters,” Gee opined. “Look at the debris on the fence. Your car’s not that high.”

“That’s what I’m thinking. Let’s ease up the slip and see if we can get to the bank at the end. Watch real close. I’d hate to hit a submerged boat.”

“Let me operate,” Gee said. “You get down there and probe ahead of us with the push pole.”

“Great idea,” I said. I smiled.

The girl really gets into this. I positioned myself on the bow with the pole. We nosed into the marina channel. She stopped. I probed with the pole.

“Ease ahead.”

We repeated the exercise a couple of dozen times. The channel was clear. At the far end, away from the deepwater channel, we nosed Dorable into the soft bank. I jumped ashore trailing a hundred feet of mooring line and a spare anchor. I set the anchor in the soggy soil and made the line fast to it.

Offloading the scooters is an exercise we have down pat. I grabbed a sheet of paper and a marker and hand-wrote a sign, leaving it on the door.

“I’m kind of ambivalent about this,” I said. “I wouldn’t expect anybody but emergency responders to be out and about. For them this note makes sense. Looters, though...”

“Uh, are you carrying?” Gee asked.

“Yep!” I said, patting the almost invisible bulge of a concealed pistol. Hey, I’m legal. Got the permit in my wallet. And it’s a whole new world right now and I have Gee to protect. We put our helmets on and buzzed up the road together.

The waters still covered part of the driveway out of the marina. Neat thing about scooters – they’re narrow and can get through spaces a car or truck couldn’t. That ability paid off as we navigated the back roads towards our house. Trees were down. We passed a couple of rather incredulous crews already at work trying to clear paths on major roads. We pulled into our driveway.