Wednesday, May 16, 2001
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Wednesday, May 16, 2001 |
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Lost on a spring river cruise By
SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
Never mind that a passing fisherman can't see me through the darkened windows of the pilot house. My fear of being perceived as snobbish compels me to throw up my hand as he cranes his neck to check out Alice III. "Eat your heart out," I think, mean-spiritedly. "I bet Betty Sue would be more likely to come fishing with you if you'd get her a boat like this. Assuming you want Betty Sue along." We share two different worlds, even if on the same river. He's fishing and we're birding, and "birding" doesn't mean catching birds on a hook any more than "fishing" means looking at fish through binoculars. This has been a fine April cruise. It started out cold but we had enough blankets to fend off a 37-degree morning. Soon we had afternoon highs in the 80s and welcomed our chilly river-water baths. Our romance with our green and white trawler is still new enough to provide memorable firsts. This time we dragged her to Clarks Hill Lake, the reservoir and recreation area also named for South Carolina's Sen. Strom Thurmond. A dam bearing his name impounds the Savannah River and dozens of its tributaries, most of them worth a day's cruise just to see what's there. What wasn't there, we were puzzled to note, were (1) many fishermen and (2) a lot of the waterfowl we were eager to observe. The lack of human impact, we learned, may be traced to the fact that nearly half of the lake's 2,500-mile shoreline is publicly held, in national forest lands, state wildlife management areas, Corps of Engineers recreation areas, and state parks. Unlike lakes we prowled last year on the Tennessee River, there is virtually no development on Clarks Hill. We had a delightful sense that it was all ours but that also meant few marinas with fuel, water and the occasional package of sandwich rolls. As for the birds, I learned later from a Georgia wildlife biologist that the lake is healthy, productive of fish and drinking water, but birds like great blue herons, wood ducks and Canada geese are nesting and less conspicuous just now. We did see two pairs of common loons, not uncommon into May, the agent said, and bald eagles. One flew up from a beach directly in front of us one morning as we turned out of an overnight mooring, and while we were gawking at him, his mate arose to follow. There are three pairs nesting in the area, survivors of a sequence of tragic events that killed 14 of the big birds last year. A mysterious toxin producing a brain disease in coots poisoned the eagles when they preyed on the sick coots. For the first time ever on a river trip, we watched a wild turkey hen land on a nearby beach, where she began walking and scratching among the grasses in that typical way of barnyard fowl. At one unforgettable anchorage, during breakfast, a family of rough-winged swallows began swooping around and over the boat. One landed tentatively on the bowsprit, cocked his head to look around, then flew off, but returned again and again, staying longer each time. We knew he couldn't see in, so we got close to the windows, practically holding our breath watching him. He hopped down to the seats and examined the forward cockpit carefully before swooping away again. I took my second cup of coffee aft to watch the swallows dancing in air, when God bless if our little friend didn't land on the engine cover, peer at me only a yard away, then begin systematically checking out lines coiled on the stern. Rough-wingeds are plain little brown guys, but this one was so full of lively curiosity, I doubt I'll ever think of them as plain again. This was our first trip using a Global Positioning System, our "big" Christmas present to each other last year. All right, it's a bit of a toy. After all, how could anyone get lost on an inland lake that forms the border of Georgia and South Carolina? Very easily, actually. The bays and coves on each bank look an awful lot alike, and often not at all like the chart by which we navigate. "We came through there when we turned into this creek, Dave. You're going right by it." "It just looks that way because we're approaching from the opposite side. We make a right turn after that next headland." "Right turn? We turned right to come in here; we have to turn left going out." At which point the beep of the depth alarm let us know we were out of the channel. No more. Now we have as many as nine satellites bouncing signals off the little white mushroom atop the pilot house, telling us where we are on a postcard-sized map on the instrument panel. Where we are, where we've been, which way we should have turned back there, what time the sun will set and when it will rise in the morning. Never mind that the scale is so coarse (they want you to buy pricey more-detailed programs) that the triangle representing the A3 just sliced across a peninsula. Our track looks like the sticky trail left behind by a slug on a saucer, but by golly, we know where we are, down to the hundredth second which, FYI, is a distance of less than a foot on the earth's surface. Billions of dollars worth of navigational technology up there to tell us we're on the Georgia-South Carolina state line about 50 miles north of Augusta. Makes us proud we paid our taxes.
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