Three Full Moons
Article by Kitrick Nielson
The late May sun was low behind us as we scuttered over dirt washboards to the bottom of Crawdad Cove. It’s the kind of place you might find three men getting their trucks stuck back to back to back, each valiantly plunging into the low lying muck that trapped the first. Other afternoons a line of cars park on the high beach, competing to drown out nature’s clarity with noise to make girls stand on the hood of dad’s Jeep and twerk into the empty desert.
Today for no reason at all, nearing dusk on a windless evening in early summer, the beach is quiet. We’ve cartopped our little spritsailed, slab-sided dory. It has transoms at both ends to maximize waterline on two sheets of ACX. My wife hates it because it’s too tender for the weight of the rig up high. Often we find ourselves shouting at a near capsize when Tchitch, our dog, repositions for a better smell of a windward shore. Angelica tolerates it because it moves in just a whispered rumor of wind, and she has to escape to the water too, still, even if it just doesn’t make anybody happy with her taking that level of risk.
It was the second full moon of May, a blue moon, and we load four on board, depending on how you count it, including me, my wife, and our blue heeler. Only a friendly looking middle-aged woman sits alone at the beach enjoying the fading light. The water reflects a skyline broken to black by zig-zagging angles of repose. We drag the dory off the roof and launch in thin, tepid, water.
Again we’re surprised at how easily this thing tips. Angelica sits aft, her butt on the sole with a pushpull tiller jutting a body’s length from her hand like a spear. I row from the forward thwart, my back against the mast with the rig lashed tight. Only the soft rhythm of oar strokes on darkening water breaks the silence of desert nightfall.
Natural light is disappearing quickly out in the cove, so I unfurl the sail and sit down in the bottom between the daggerboard trunk and the forward thwart. Husband and wife sit facing each other on a butt-jointed strip of 1/4”. Angelica steers while I handle the sheet and we navigate a starboard tack to the west to drift slowly through black water.
The dory is perfect for a night like this. Often we can’t feel enough wind to know where we’re being pushed from, but water keeps flowing along the hull, and we don’t lose steering often. A couple inches are submerged at both ends, and shifting zephyrs don’t send us swirling in confusion.
