When the Covid quarantine hit, I went six months without working for the first time since I was fourteen. I am fortunate to say the most incurable virus I had during that period was boredom.
For the first few months, I remember, we were strongly advised to remain indoors. Once it became acceptable to go outside again, I convinced my brother Mike (who also had to move back home after losing his job and apartment) to split the cost of an inflatable kayak with me.
We found one on sale for a hundred bucks, which is expensive for someone who’s been unemployed for half a year. The closest kayak-friendly spot in the area was the Shark River near Neptune City, so we went there to give it a test run.
That kayak was a bitch to set up. A million air holes needed to be plugged before you could even begin to inflate it. The paddles were packaged in over a dozen pieces, making it feel like you were constructing a Lego set to assemble them.
Worst of all, the air machine to inflate the kayak took forever. We might have been better off using our own breath.
Once we finally had it ready to go, we launched from a beach near a members-only marina. At first I was impressed with how smoothly it moved. It seemed to move faster than a real kayak.
We smoothly paddled past the marina’s boundaries and into the center of the river. This kayak worked so much better than I expected, though I wasn’t given much time to gleam over it before things went wrong.
It started when I saw water pouring into our seating area from somewhere under the kayak. We could have forgotten to plug a certain hole, or it could have just been a crappy kayak after all; either way, water was pouring in fast and we needed to do something.
I showed it to Mike who didn’t take it as well, shouting “Holy sh*t!” at the top of his lungs. Next thing you know, we’re in the middle of re-enacting the movie Titanic.
Thankfully for us, the Shark River got its name from a series of shark tooth fossils that were found on its shores over a century ago. Actual shark sightings were extremely rare.
Even more thankfully, that members-only marina had a pier that stretched almost a thousand feet out into the river. There’s no way we would have made it back to shore at the rate we were sinking, but the pier’s edge was close enough to frantically paddle to.
Luckily, the pier had a ladder along the side of it. You could literally hear the air wheezing out of our semi-deflated watercraft as we hopped onto the ladder. By the time we reached the top of the dock, our kayak resembled a giant yellow sponge.
We managed to toss our paddles onto the dock before we got to the ladder. The kayak had a long rope attached to its rear that we used to hoist it up after collecting our bearings.
But now we faced a new problem. Everyone at the marina was staring at us, wondering what the hell was going on.
I said to Mike, “Just try to act normal here. If we can be nonchalant, we might be able to play it off like we did this on purpose.”
We waddled down the pier as casually as possible with all this wet baggage in our hands, when someone called out to us: “Are you guys alright?”
“Yeah, yeah, we’re fine,” I said. “We, uh… we just got hungry so we’re making a quick pit stop.” Thank God there was a pizza place right down the street.
We got out of there and decided from this point forward, we’re using real kayaks only. It costs a little more to rent them, but worth every penny after the experience we had escaping a Titanic that hit an invisible iceberg.