We’ve had a tremendously good time with our early morning rides. Every day something fun happens, it seems. Whether it’s someone we meet or something we see, it’s never dull.
Back in mid-November, just a day or so after I had last written, we were still doing our “later” rides, leaving at seven a.m. or so. Back then we were only riding twenty-five miles a day, so our stopping point was the Boynton Inlet. You’d think after seven years of stopping there we’d be tired of it, but oh no… It never fails to delight us.
Fish and fishing stories
That first week after I posted was so spectacular, it was breathtaking. Three separate rides were absolute treasures of fish and fishing related fun. In one day alone (only an hour or two) we saw sergeant majors, file fish, pilchards, parrot fish, southern sea robins, puffer fish, drum, porkfish, Atlantic needlefish, ballyhoo, red snapper, skip jack, and a lizard fish aka slippery dick.
Mind you, we go days and weeks seeing nothing, then all this abundance was in only several hours on one day, standing in one spot at the seawall.
We saw several guys cast net fishing, one of whom was Jeff, an infrequent regular, who brings his piebald long-haired dachshund (Sydney) with him. If you’ve never seen a piebald long-haired dachshund, it’s quite a treat. Jeff was talking quietly with us, standing on the sea wall oohhing and aaahhing over the incredible variety of fish (well, we were oohhing and aaahhing). Within minutes another fisherman came up, spotted the file fish, and headed for his cast net.
We’d been having great fun watching all the fish, as it’s a true rarity, and we couldn’t help but be disappointed that this guy was clearly going to disrupt our fun. Chelsea and I exchanged sad glances, and then we heard Jeff, sotto voce, murmur, “Run little fishies! Run!” That endeared him to us forever.
We had other entertainment as well. At the seawall we have a front row seat on all the boats heading out to the ocean. Jeff glanced up at a fishing boat passing us and suddenly hollered “Felipe! Felipe Alou!” The guy in the boat turned and waved…turns out he’s one of the bona fide baseball greats (as all you baseball fans will already know). Jeff has met him several times, and says Felipe is a terrific guy.
Another amazing sight was watching two guys in a small rowboat working at the waterline on the seawall across from us. For a while all was calm. Then the tide started rising. The rowboat would rock wildly with the wakes caused when boats passed, especially the bigger boats.
A third guy on the dock hung on to a rope attached to the boat. It did keep them from floating away on the tide, but did nothing for their stability or safety. We got a couple of photos of the guys in the boat laughing and fending off certain disaster as they continually shoved themselves off the seawall.
One last fishing story – there’s an older Asian couple who are regulars at the Inlet. They are very quiet and keep strictly to themselves. Talk about professional…these two really know what they are doing. They will always have the best catch of anyone on the seawall, though you have to be paying attention to see it. One of their methods is unusual, at least to us. They have a strange stick-like end to one of their lines, with a variety of hooks attached to the stick.
The day after the huge fish “explosion”, I happened to glance up and saw the woman fishing with that line. Her husband laughed good-naturedly, watching her as she pulled the line up. She had five fish hooked on that line at the same time! Five, count ‘em, five, at the same time! Now there’s a fish story! (On my honor, it’s a true story…) Chelsea commented “She must be singing the right song!”
Locals
As with any local hangout there’s always “local color”, those characters that add life to the fabric of the place, and there are always one or two who provide entertainment value. Jungle Jim is one of those. A Vietnam vet (thus the moniker Jungle Jim), Jim is a born-again Christian. He’s homeless and has been for a while, sleeping on the beach at the Inlet or in the bushes next to the parking lot.
His extra loud voice precedes him everywhere (yes, he knows he’s loud). He’s not shy, and is known to all the regular visitors, many of whom avoid him studiously. Others, though, have taken him under their wing, giving him food, taking him out to breakfast, lunch and dinner, and providing all manner of goods and services to him. Jim simply sees it as proof of his benevolent God.
Somehow we’d never met Jim until that mellow November day. He was immediately intrigued by our story of cycle touring, and began introducing us as “bad-ass cycle chicks, world travelers”. By the end of our short meeting (we really had to get back and start working), he’d invited us to a deep-fried turkey dinner the following night, to be held at the Inlet.
At the last minute we opted out of going as we had so much to do, and didn’t want to ride the twenty-five mile round-trip again, especially at night, but what a night that would have been. Bet we’d have come away with some great stories. The group is primarily Vietnam War vets, many homeless or living in low-income circumstances. Many have emotional troubles, we’ve been told. Most of them drink heavily, and you can bet there’d be a steady supply of the “funny cigarettes”.
We did ask Jim how it went. He was furious. He told us he’d gone across the parking lot to talk to others when he heard the guys hollering at him that the first turkey was ready. By the time he got back over to the deep-fry area (he headed back immediately), they’d eaten the whole first turkey. “They ate that damn thing so fast their mouths were smoking!” he fumed. We couldn’t help but laugh out loud at the way he told the story. He started to laugh with us. Jim’s not done a turkey deep-fry again. “No way” he says, “not with that bunch of ungrateful vultures!”
A few days later Jim showed up at the seawall dressed in a very creative outfit. The weather had changed for the colder, and this is a guy who lives in shorts and open shirts and bare feet. That day he was wearing a peach-colored quilted outfit with black knit cuffs, sporting an jacket about three inches too short in the sleeves, and what appeared to be button-front capris (at least, on Jim they were capris). The jacket had a zipper front, but Jim was wearing it open, over an unbuttoned red flannel shirt, showing off his deeply tanned chest.
Jim was quite proud of his outfit, telling us it was great for the colder weather. He’d just received it, and called it his Hugh Hefner outfit. I never did figure out how it got the Hugh Hefner label. Of course I had to pose with Jim wearing his new outfit. We got a great photo. Be sure to check out the album.
Akeem is another regular at the Inlet. We didn’t get much background on him, but he sure does know how to fish. He fishes anywhere he can, anytime he can. Out in the Inlet he spear fishes with goggles and a wetsuit. He’s got quite a reputation for the spear fishing. Like us, he only has a bicycle. He lives on our route, so he’d already seen us any number of times riding past his house.
Akeem’s fishing set up is very clever. He took an old golf bag and hooked it up to a two-wheeled trailer/cart. The golf bag holds the fishing poles and spear fishing equipment, with the dive flag, dive buoy, and a cooler strapped on to the bag. Very clever, and very efficient.
Birds
The week of fabulous fishes was broken up by a day of birds, along with the fish. Great egrets, ibis, brown pelicans, cormorants, osprey, and starlings all converged on the Inlet on one spectacular day. As with the fish, we can go weeks without even seeing a great egret, and suddenly the seawalls were flooded that day with egrets. Osprey flew overhead. A cormorant floated by barely skimming the water, followed by a pelican casually cruising the surface. Ibis and pelicans and starlings all lined up on the seawall, mixing in with the dozens of great egrets.
What a day it was…bird-watcher’s heaven! We didn’t want to leave…
SUP
Life wasn’t all about fish and birds. Another day we watched an instructor teaching his student the basics of stand up paddling, known as SUPing. They started out in the Inlet where the water is calm and flat, while the student learned how to get his balance on the board. Then they headed out to the open water. At that point the student looked pretty tentative, probably thinking, “Do I really want to do this?”.
As a side note, my sister Maureen just took her first SUP lesson. I am so impressed! She didn’t get up the first time, but knowing her, she’ll try it again until she’s really got it. She says it’s terrific for building up the “core”. Now Chelsea and I will have to learn to SUP too (Chelsea assures me she’ll cheer me on from the shore). Maureen is learning in the cold and rough Pacific ocean, but give me the warm quiet Atlantic any day, at least till I know how to do it.
We saw the SUP instructor a few days later, with the same student, under very different circumstances.
Spectacular waves
As if we hadn’t already been astonished daily by the fabulous weather, the birds, and the fish, we then had a three-day spell of ten to fifteen foot waves in the ocean. Talk about astounding! It was so unusual that major surfing publications were camped out on the beach each day. Photographers supported cameras on their shoulders with lenses the size of small sports cars, focused intently on the water.
Surfers came from everywhere. Sightseers flooded the roads and beaches. A1A is a narrow two lane road; it was clogged for hours each day. You’d have thought it was a major festival, with the number of people coming by to hang out and check out the sights.
And the waves were absolutely gorgeous. Chelsea’s Nikon was clicking nonstop, taking it all in. From the fishermen on the south jetty, the pelicans getting flooded by waves on the north jetty, the SUPs out in the waves, the surfers, the jet skiers working with their surfing buddies to maximize the number of waves they could ride, to the folks on the beach searching for shells and the treasure hunters with their metal detectors, looking for a big find…the spindrift on the waves…she got it all.
We had so many photos to go through after a one-week stretch that the job was completely overwhelming. It’s taken me literally months, an hour or two here and there, to get them into some kind of manageable album. I’ve left in more than I usually would, but we finally didn’t want to cut any more.
When you go through the photo album, see if you can spot all the surfers and SUPs. One photo alone has six surfers and one SUP.
Oh, and remember the SUP instructor with his student? Much to my entertainment, I spotted them in the crowd of surfers and SUPs in our photos. We snapped a series of photos showing them on the beach, getting through the initial waves, paddling out through the pelicans, then positioning themselves for the big-boy waves.
What a November to remember!