A World Apart
The St. Johns River is a tyrant in the winter because it will shatter any expectations you may have of the Sunshine State as it slowly tries to break you. It engages in the kind of psychological warfare that torturers use; that Sun Tzu would surely respect. Like a classic schoolyard bully, it’s big, imposing, and prone to wild fluctuations in attitude. This isn’t your grandmother’s Florida, it seems to snarl on a bad day. Its body is wider than the Mississippi in parts, and it flows northward like the Nile. Its weather is subject to fits of highs and lows, and the lows are low; they tend to resemble the typical conditions that bear a dusting of snow in the Northeast. It’s the furthest thing from good weather for cruising, really, and yet that was exactly what Capt. Bill Pike and I were in the middle of doing, out here on the St. Johns without another soul in sight.
We had just rounded Devil’s Elbow, going around a blasted stretch of land that jutted out into the channel like a hook. An abandoned boat, capitulating to the whims of the rust-colored waters, whacked itself against the swampland. “There’s a lot of trees down. This area must’ve got hit pretty hard in the last hurricane. Holy smokes,” said Bill. “Wanna take a look?” He passed me the binoculars.
“We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
From the flybridge of the , I could see them, large swaths of
