This Month's Story
THE NAKED MAN
Let me talk a little more about my swimming. This was a little more serious and I came out of it with more than my share of luck, especially since it coincided with an event that changed many of our lives.
The results of my writing my book on a naval action in the War of 1812, Sink or be Sunk, have had several interesting twists. Allow me to tell the story of one of the strangest of these twists.
Sink or be Sunk was (and still is) a very popular book. What was nice to Stella and I was that after its publication, I received many invitations to give talks to groups interested in the history of the battle and we traveled to many places in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.
One group of Marine specialists in Louisiana asked me to be a speaker at their annual dinner and Stella and I went and had a very nice time. After the dinner, however, I was sequestered by several members of the group in an adjacent room.
They had an offer to make.
It turned out that my invitation to speak had had a purpose, they had ties with a small group of archeological divers and they were very much interested in bringing some of the divers to the coast and diving on the remnants of the naval action associated with Sink or be Sunk. Would I be interested in being the chief scientist and historian of the team?
I said yes.
It took more than a year to gather the diving team (one of whom was the diver that found the confederate submarine Hunley), a ship (a forty foot trawler) and the required scientific gear (magnetometers and sidescan sonar), but finally six of us met at my house on a weekend and laid out the specific plans for the search area.
The following Monday, we sailed out of Bayou Caddy Marina and cruising to St Joe’s Pass began our grid search pattern.
It was slow work.
It was a large area and the currents coming out of the Rigolets and the Pearl River are strong, often reaching speeds of four knots with the turning of the tide. This made steering the research vessel in order to maintain the search grid extremely difficult.
We took our time, going over each leg very carefully and building a large overlap in each adjacent leg of our search pattern. It wasn’t easy. When we came across a target of interest we went over it a second time to better display it on the side scan sonar and double check its magnetometer readings.
When we were done each day, we would gather our wives together and I would introduce them to the fine seafood restaurants of the coast. Stella and I were in turn entertained by stories of other dives in the worldwide searches these men had made.
Altogether we found several targets of interest. Thursday afternoon we dove on the first of these with no luck. On Friday, we tracked the second target and began preparation to make another series of dives, one of the men standing watch on the flybridge came down with a dour look on his face.
“Just got a call. Katrina has changed course more to the East. It looks very bad and we are directly in its path. We are going to have to leave the area.”
We were stunned. There was a moment of silence and then, pulling up our anchor, we began packing up our equipment and heading back to Bay St Louis.
We moored the boat in Casino Magic’s Marina and drove in several cars to my house where Stella had laid out a wonderful feast using our best china and silver.
It was a gala evening and we all parted late in the night promising each other “next year.”
Well, there was no next year. That was Friday evening, early. Hurricane Katrina winds started Sunday at around six pm and our house was washed away at around eight-thirty Monday morning.
We never found the trawler and the divers have since moved on to other areas, last I heard they had found and made successful dives on the confederate raider Alabama in the English Channel.
But I’m wrong about one thing in what I have just said. The trawler was found about six months ago high and dry in a marsh, a complete wreck.
I found this out when I met the owner by accident at the Mockingbird coffee shop in Bay St Louis. Happy to see each other, we sat for the afternoon talking about the search for the old naval actions artifacts and our joint horror stories of Katrina.
Finally, there was long lull in the conversation. I looked him in the eye and leaning forward told him a story about the next to last day of our survey that I had not told anyone.
“You remember that Thursday with all the problems we were having? Harry was down on the first target and remember how nervous we all were when we found it was an old shrimp boat? He kept fooling around with that wreck and we were worried.
“Well, it was hot, high eighties, low nineties. All I had on was a pair of shorts. When I saw that things had finally settled down, and since I wasn’t doing anything, I dropped my shorts on the deck and slipped over the side to cool off. I figured I’d be back in a few seconds.
“The water was cool and I twisted and turned a few times before coming to the surface. When I did, I found to my amazement that the trawler was rapidly moving away from me.
I was caught in the three knot tidal current!
I tried swimming but the current was too strong, I was being swept away! I tried yelling, but everyone was on the side watching for Harry. I looked to the shore, but we were in a marsh area, there was nothing for miles.
Then I saw to my right a life line skipping along the surface of the water. One of us, I forgot who, had insisted that we let one trail behind the boat.
It was about 500 feet long. I lunged for it and managed to grab its bitter end. I hauled myself back to the boat and climbed back aboard. You all were still too busy looking after Harry who was still down.
“I never said anything about it to anyone; I was too embarrassed.”
Ned looked at me for a long time, shocked,
“But we quit the next day and two days later Katrina came. We never would have found you!”
I nodded.
“That’s right.”
Ned sat still for a moment and then smiled
“Paul, if I got this straight, you were naked, right?”
“That’s right.”
The smile stayed on Ned’s face and I called the girl over to get another coffee.
