Trawling the ICW, day 3
No discussion of the ICW would be complete without mention of "SkipperBob". This guy wrote several cruising guides to the ICW; one describing the route, another describing the marinas, and probably a few more that I'm not familiar with. Over the years, these books have become very well known by the pleasure boaters who scamper up and down the ICW, and Skipper Bob became somewhat of a "legend in his own time" within this community. Although Skipper Bob is no longer with us, I understand that his guide books will continue to be published by others. One of the nice things about the Skipper Bob guides is that they are fairly detailed, and fairly up to date. One of the things that make this possible is that cruisers on the ICW will often send in updates when there are changes on the ICW: this marina closed, that channel is now only 4.1 feet deep at low tide, and so on. There is even a Skipper Bob web site with a page that has up to the minute updates on what has changed since the last official publication. Captain Frank had many of these Skipper Bob publications, and referred to them often. Frank and I got into the spirit of the Skipper Bob state of mind by rating the bathrooms in the marinas we stayed at, on a scale of 1 to 10 (and they were definately NOT all "10").Rating marinas is a pretty subjective call, but some tend to stand out pretty clearly (for better or worse). Frank told me about going into a marina called "Fishing Camp". It turned out to be one of those "marinas from hell". The directions given over the radio were not clear, the current made it difficult to manuever into the slip, and the staff was less than helpful. As if all this was not bad enough, you had to go out of your way a couple miles off the ICW in order to get abused by this marina. I listened to Frank as he told his "marina from hell" story, and I took it all with a grain of salt. I figured it was possible that either Frank caught them on a bad day, or maybe Frank himself was having a bad day. However, all my doubts were erased as we were cruising though the general area of the "marina from hell".
We were motoring along, monitoring channel 16 on the vhf as usual, when we started hearing a "marina from hell" experience in progress. Some guy was trying to get in there, and the instructions he was getting from the marina on the vhf were a colorful combination of confusion, delay, and misinformation. The skipper's emotional pot was rapidly approaching the boiling point, and eventually he exploded. The skipper not only dressed down the marina radio operator, but also came forth with the ultimate threat: he would report his bad experiences to Skipper Bob. Back on our own boat, Frank and I were enjoying the fireworks display coming out of our radio. To add to the entertainment, Frank later called the skipper on the radio and they chatted for a while, trading "marina from hell" stories. By the end of the radio conversation, three things had happened. One, the skipper had vented his frustrations. Two, Frank and I were entertained in the midst of a long, quiet day of motoring down the ICW. And three, the marina employees had returned to their routine, so absolutely nothing had (or probably ever would) change at the "marina from hell".
click on the day you want to see...
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |