While stationed in VF-174 at Cecil Field near Jacksonville, Florida in the early 60s I got a chance to buy a boat. At the time it seemed like a good idea, but time would tell that maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a boating aficionado. The boat I managed to purchase and call my own was a used wooden 12’ model with an outboard attached to the back end. It was painted up a beautiful white with red trim, and you couldn’t imagine it had a rotten spot in it anywhere even if it did.
I had spent some time in the hospital at Naval Air Station Jacksonville which is a different base than Cecil Field and they are maybe a dozen miles apart. I lived on an almost direct route between the two stations about four miles from Cecil Field in the direction of NAS Jacksonville. In my many times I drove to NAS Jax I passed over a waterway on a bridge located on Timuquana Road. The water there looked ever so inviting there and I noted a local boat ramp where one could put a boat in the water. Once I was a boat owner this seemed like the ideal place to put my boat in the water and enjoy all of the pleasures known to boatsmen the world over.
So it happened one fine evening after working hours were done for the day I hitched my boat and trailer behind my Ford sedan and headed for the boat launch ramp. My wife was not too sure about this whole boating thing, but she agreed to try it at least once. We arrived at the boat ramp in a matter of minutes, unloaded the boat into the water, started the engine and headed merrily up the bay we were in to the north. This creek, or whatever it was, led to the St. John’s River. Soon our little outboard was whirring merrily away as we cruised down the creek which led to yet another larger creek, bayou, or something or other.
After a half hour or so I turned around and headed back to our launch site hoping I wasn’t lost nevermore to find my way back off the waterway. On my southward return I steered a course along the west side of the waterway or to my right in the direction I was traveling. I was near the bank as it seemed safer there than out in the middle of the stream and I was none too sure of this entire undertaking myself. As we slowly made our way down the creek bank we were passing under trees occasionally growing out over the water. As we approached one of these trees covered with Spanish Moss hanging down, just before going under I noted, of all things, a snake hanging down from a lower limb. I had never before that time imagined a snake in a tree. But I could see that thing. Immediately I made a course change and veered toward midstream and missed passing under the snake by two or three feet. As we passed by, the snake dropped from the tree into the water near us. At the time I thought it was attempting to drop into my boat, but that may not have been the fact of the matter. Possibly it was more afraid than I, although that seems impossible, and was merely trying to leave the area. At any rate it swam away.
I thought that snake was a cottonmouth moccasin but it may not have been. I had seen a dead one only a few days before and that memory may have affected my thinking on this occasion. At any rate my first boating trip left something to be desired.
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