“The only thing that separated the Williams family from any of the other families departing from the docks of Marina Del Mar, in Madisonville, Louisiana, on Sunday, was
their willingness to bring aboard a journalist for the day.”
This was a strange note I had scribbled to myself while I sat in my car, waiting for the Sheriff’s Office boat to come pick me up.
When I originally arrived here an hour ago, I realized just as I was pulling into the
parking lot, that I’d left my camera in my wife’s 4-Runner on Friday night when she, my
son, Alex, and I went out to the fishing pier on the Mandeville lakefront.
I walked out to the bait shop on the pier at Marina Del Mar and asked a lady and her two sons if they’d seen the Sheriff’s Boat fueling up.
They all looked at me like I was a raving lunatic.
I might have been for all I knew. I’d just smoked a bowl full of good pot and was feeling jittery about having to meet a cop while stoned and then explain to him how I forgot my camera at home.
Instead of pushing the issue I backed up, out of their line of vision and paged Charlie. He called me back minutes later, apologizing profusely for not remembering to tell the boat cop to come pick me up.
He told me someone would be at the dock to pick me up in around 45 minutes, which was good, because it gave me time to go home, grab the camera and some coffee and smoke another bowl.
I did these things and put gas in my car and still had 15 minutes before the boat cop arrived.
There were more weird notes in my reporter’s pad from that morning too:
“Which brings us to now: me in my car, waiting for the sheriff’s boat. All I can see are masts, rows of them, glistening in the sun and reaching toward the sky. Bob Marley’s Redemption Song is playing on the radio and I’m pondering the events that have led me to this point - still stoned and about to climb aboard a sheriff’s boat. Am I asking for certain arrest? Surely not. I’ve smoked a few cigarettes, in an effort to hide the
smell. I also have my shades on I figure the wind, once the boat gets moving, will mask any further odors.
I wonder what sort of Nazi Charlie will send me out on the water with. Will he have a K-9 aboard and if so, will it rip me from limb to limb, as it noses my crotch and smells remnants of marijuana smell on my fingertips.
These things are too ugly to ponder. I just want to get out on the water and see what, if any sort of story is out here. I suspect there is- but I am a little hesitant to hang my hat on the premise alone of rich people behaving badly. There has to be more to it than that. Or maybe not. Maybe that’s all it will really boil down to.”
I was still trying to shake the paranoia from my head as I ambled down to the boat dock, where I had seen the sheriff’s boat pull up moments before.
I walked up to the deputy, who was around six feet tall with sandy brown hair, shook his hand and introduced myself. He introduced himself as Charlie, and I climbed aboard.
The first thing he did was hand me a large jacket that looked like it was made from Gortex.
“I’ll take that jacket of yours and store it down here,” he said as I handed it to him. “That one will keep the wind off of you.”
I zipped up the bulky thing and realized it had built-in flotation gear.
“Is this a life jacket too?” I asked.
“Yep,” he said. “Pretty cool isn’t it? We have all kinds of neat toys. I’ll show you some more once we get going.”
Our first stop came about a hundred yards down river from the boat launch at Marina Del Mar. Charlie pulled us over to show me an eagles nest perched high up in one of the trees in the marsh on the east side of the Tchefuncte River.
“There’s a momma and two babies that live up there,” he told me. “Looks like they’re gone now, though.”
He maneuvered the boat some, getting me in closer, and I rose and took a few pictures with the newspaper’s digital camera. I’d already left the damned thing home, I thought to myself, all I need to do now is drop it in the fucking river too.
I didn’t drop it, though, and I was able to get some pretty cool pictures of the eagle’s nest. Charlie assured me it was very cool to see their white, feathery heads poking up over the walls of the nest.
As I sat back down I noticed some of the gadgets mounted near the ignition switch and steering wheel of the sheriff’s boat - a single engine, 21-foot Cape Horn.
Charlie tells me The Sheriff’s Office has six Cape Horn’s - three 21-foot craft and three 24-footers.
The 24-foot boats are equip with twin engines and 21-footers have single engines. Three of the craft are used for waterway patrols on the western end of the parish, the other three are deployed on the waterways on the eastern end.
I ask him about the things mounted on his dashboard. They include a standard marine radio, a radar, a depth finder and a GPS system that basically lays out the path of the river for them. The depth finder was the coolest thing on board. According to Charlie, it could detect cars or even a human body if the bottom of the lake or river were smooth enough.
Of course, the moment he accelerated and the boat picked up speed, the numbers started scrambling erratically.
He showed me the “no-wake” zones- which were near the marina and River Rats and then downriver some more to the Madisonville public boat launch.
“That sand bar is something else,” Charlie said, as we made our way out to the lake. “It’s a little cold this morning, but on a warm day in summer, when school is out there’s anywhere from between sixty to a hundred boats all docked here. They pull right up to the shore in flatboats and on jet skis, but the bigger sailboats and party barges anchor in the river. It’s pretty phenomenal.
“A lot of people party out there?” I asked.
“Oh yeah, this is, after all, southern Louisiana,” he said. “Alcohol, boating and fishing are all sort of intertwined.”
“Ever catch any public officials out here?” I asked him
I had visions of becoming some sort of deranged paparazzi, perched on the sand bar with an ice chest full of Coronas, trying to catch senators and assistant district attorneys with their pants down and their nostrils dribbling with cocaine residue, the neighbors daughter bent over in a compromising position. But these things were too weird for words and could end with a one-way trip to jail if I started jabbering to Charlie like a madman.
“If I told you that I’d have to shoot you,” he finally said with a good-natured laugh
“Some of them must get pretty torn up though,” I said.
“Oh yeah, we see that a lot,” he said. “Most of the time we just tell them to sleep it off. But we stop them if we see they’re trying to get back out on the water with a boat. The state DWI laws are applicable to any motor vehicle, including boats.
“I bet you get all kinds of people out here” I said to him, trying not to sound too
weird.
“That’s absolutely true,” he said. “I’ve never seen more of a mix of people than I
have on the waters of St. Tammany Parish.”
I asked him if he minded if I took notes. He said no and I asked him to explain this more to me.
“Just a lot of different types of boats and a lot of different types of people,” he said. “You get all kinds of people - rich, poor, black and white. You have teenagers just hanging out on the river all day during the summer. You have families that come out usually on weekends. We have a lot of people both from out of state and from Baton Rouge. Haven’t figured out the Baton Rouge crew yet. They’re kind of a strange bunch. Then you have all kinds of homes all the way up river to Three Rivers Road, and even to Boague Falaya Park up in Covington.”
Charlie paused for a second and squinted into the glistening sun.
“Everybody is different,” he said. “The crabbers in Madisonville are different from the crabbers on the east side of the parish, who crab out near the lake and near the Rigolets and Chef Pass. All the different social aspects of it interest me. You wanna see what I’m talking about, you should go out with one of our patrols on the east side of the parish next weekend.”
It was an idea - boating as a social phenomenon; but I wanted to keep the thing concentrated for now, though, on the Tchefuncte River, with a heavy focus on the sand bar. If Charlie was right, there might be a massive story here. Idle visions of book deals floated through my head as we approached Lake Pontchartrain.
Only a slight grin crept across his face as we navigated the channel markers to the lake. As we cleared the last of them Charlie showed me how boaters at sea could line up the front of their boats with a black stripe painted down the side of the Madsionville
“We’re going to pick up speed here,” he said in a dead-pan tone
I braced myself, but was still rocked a little as he thrust the throttle forward As the
Engines began to churn heavily, the bow of the boat practically stood upright in front of us. It was pure unadulterated adrenalin, as the boat began to pick up serious speed and
slam rhythmically, bambada-bambada-bambada, on the water.
Mists blew up at us, stinging, and when the boat was traveling at a certain angle, it felt like I could have been on the back of a motorcycle without a face-screen. The skin of my face and my lips flapped uselessly in the powerful wind and it felt like I couldn’t breathe. But then, we’d slightly alter coarse, and I’d be protected again behind the wind screen near the steering wheel of the boat.
We slowed down as we circled and began moving back toward the mouth of the river. Charlie maneuvered the boat and swung up behind a boat in front of us.
“I did a safety stop on them this morning,” he told me.
I asked him what all was involved in a safety stop and he told me we would make one once we got back on the river
Not one to disappoint, Charlie picked a small craft that was just making its way up to River Rats and the sand bar and flagged the driver down. He steered his boat up close until they were side-by-side on the river.
Charlie sat straddled with one leg in the cop boat and one leg in the guy’s boat.
“How are you this morning?” Charlie asked him and the guy said he was fine.
Charlie told the guy it was just a routine safety check and asked the man for a copy of his driver s license and boat registration papers. Once that was checked out, Charlie asked the guy if there were life vests aboard.
The man said yes, but that he stored them under seat.
“They have to be out where we can see them, or more importantly, where you can get to them easily,” Charlie told him, then asked the man if he had a fire extinguisher on board.
The man produced one, but again, it had been stored in plastic box of some sort.
The problem, Charlie said, is that these items are usually stored somewhere like underneath a seat, and not within arm’s reach.
“All it takes is an instant for something to happen on a boat,” he said to me after he’d let the guy go and we were moving upriver toward the Madisonville Harbor Bridge. “The time a person spends scrambling below for a life jacket or fire extinguisher can really be the difference between life and death when you’re on the water. People should have their life jackets close by, if not on, and fire extinguishers should be mounted, if at all possible, and within arm s reach.”
We were in luck. Just as we began our approach toward the bridge, it opened for a larger boat in front of us. Charlie radioed the bridge operator and asked him if he would hold it for us. The guy said it was no problem and we began our journey up river.
Once we rounded the first bend of the river, that completely blocked our view of the harbor, I began to notice the GPS system. It was pretty cool too. He showed me where on the monitor, our boat was. It reminded me of that old Atari game Night Racer where the road sort of unfurled in front of you. The GPS basically did the same thing but with a lot more advance warning. It charted approaching land masses as well as natural curves of the river.
We crossed under the Interstate 12 and came to Three Rivers Road. The three rivers which meet at this juncture are the Tchefuncte, Bogue Falaya and Abita rivers.
Charlie pointed to a tree with a rope swing attached to it.
“About two years ago, a kid drowned right here,” he said
“This close to shore?” I asked.
“Sometimes the river can pull you in pretty quick,” Charlie said. “In this case though, if I remember right, he hit something, maybe his head.”
It was a morbid little tale, but it helped to reinforce the thrust of my newspaper story, which was boater safety.
There were other stories too. Charlie went on to tell me how bad weather presents its own set of problems, particularly in the lake.
“When these summer thunderstorms kick up, the lake can go from totally calm to a four-foot chop almost within 15 minutes,” Charlie told me. “If you’re out in the lake and you see one of these things brewing, pack up your gear and get out of there. Don’t try to ride it out. Get out of there and try to keep ahead of it. And try to stay calm. The worst thing you can do, in any situation on the water is panic. I know that’s easier said than done, but again, clear thinking and a quick, solid plan of action can be the difference between life and death.
As we began to head upriver, towards Bogue Falaya Park, in Covington, Charlie began making more routine safety checks. As mentioned, the second one came the first time we were headed in from the lake.
The next happened a few moments later, as we cruised upriver past River Rats.
A small craft suddenly cranked it coming out of the Marina Del Ray boat dock,
leaving a pretty solid wake behind in its path.
“You see that?” Charlie said to me. “That’s what we, in law enforcement, call a no-no.”
“Look at him, he knows it too,” I said, noticing the man, who appeared to have his
family on board, suddenly cut the throttle and slow down to a snail’s pace.
I’d done the equivalent to this, in my car. It’s like slamming the gas on a yellow light, knowing you’re not going to make it, right in front of a cop. By the time you notice the cop sitting there in his cruiser, you’re already committed because the gas is mashed down. All you can do after that, or a rolling stop, is just sit there and hope he either didn’t see you.
The only problem was that we had seen this guy and he knew we saw him. As we pulled up next to him, Charlie sat down with one leg hurled over the side of the guy’s boat and kept one leg in the sheriff’s boat.
The man, muttered, “It was the wake right?”
“Yes sir,” Charlie said, launching into a quick lecture. ‘There’s a no wake zone here for a reason. You see how I’m sitting here now?”
The man nodded, suddenly unsure of himself. His wife was pretty and he had two children, around ten years old, in the back of the boat. The demeanor of everyone on board seemed to sink and the man’s wife had this, “See, I told you this would happen if you went too fast,” sort of look in her eyes.
“Well people kind of sit or squat the same way when they’re at the dock putting gas in their boats,” Charlie said. “A strong wake can rock a man straight into the water. I’ve seen it happen before.”
“I see,” said the man with a nod. “I’m very sorry officer.”
“Well, I’m just going to let you off with a warning today,” Charlie said, then as an afterthought, decided to perform a safety check on the man’s boat. He had all his gear, but it was all stored out of view. Charlie told him he needed to keep life preservers out, where deputies or Wildlife and Fisheries agents could see them, and that he needed to mount his fire extinguisher.
The man just nodded and agreed with everything Charlie told him.
By the time we made our third or fourth stop I felt like I was becoming a seasoned
pro.
My buzz had leveled out, mingling nicely with the natural high of being out on the water, and I began to grow bolder.
“You need to keep those life preservers out where you can get to them,” I told one guy during a safety check, and Charlie just looked at me queerly.
But I shrugged him off and kept jabbering.
“The seconds it takes you to scramble for a life preserver could be a matter of life or death once you get out there on the water,” I preached to him righteously.
The guy just looked at me and shook his head in defeat and apologized a few times until Charlie finally dismissed him with a warning only and no citations.
As the guy pulled away I caught a glimpse of Charlie who was eyeing me with a bemused look in his eyes. He finally shook his head and chuckled slightly.
“That was pretty damn convincing,” he told me.
“At least I didn’t have to lay my Jack Nicholson on him,” I said, muttering, “You can’t handle the truth,” for effect.
“Hell, I might even have to deputize your sorry ass before the day is done,” he said. “Speaking of which - how long do you want to hang?”
“I’m in no rush,” I said. “I’ll hang for as long as possible. I just want to get a feel for the day in the life of a boat cop is.”
Just then the marine radio churned to life and Charlie muttered, “You might just be about to find out.”
The squawk of the radio was indecipherable at first and until I heard, “man in the
water…coast guard on route.”
Charlie keyed the mic and let loose with a barrage of weird cop codes like zero alpha bravo 1090, or some similar nonsense. Whatever happened to good old fashioned ten code, I found myself wondering.
Some time around 1996, around the time of the advent of the Internet, I befriended a state trooper in North Carolina while online. Over the course of our friendship, he ended up sending me a cheat sheet of ten codes, and from there on out that’s how we sort of communicated.
I wasn’t sure what codes Charlie was using though, as he spoke into the mic. Eventually, a voice on the other end of the radio said something about Biloxi and we realized that the man overboard alert was coming from out of Mississippi.
We’d traveled all the way up the Tchefuncte, almost to Bogue Falaya Park, in Covington, when Charlie decided to turn us around and start the trek back to Madisonville.
The marine radio came to life again. This time it was Charlie’s sergeant. They talked for a while and then Charlie’s cell phone rang. He answered and began speaking again. After a brief conversation which I couldn’t really make heads or tails out of Charlie hung up the phone and told me his Sergeant needed assistance down at the boat launch.
It was around this time that my own ell phone rang. I answered and it was Kessler.
“How’s it going chief?” he asked me.
“On the sheriff’s boat as we speak,” I told him.
“I see,” he muttered, and then screamed, “Where’s your bong? You got any pot man? How bout some Valium? Heroin? China White.”
“Shut up you ignorant cocksucker,” I told him. “I’m with law men now. Don’t make us have to come arrest you.”
Thankfully, the boat engines were droning and drowned out most of Kessler’s gibberish. But this didn’t stop his good time.
“What about opium man, you got any opium?” he asked. “I’ll trade you my mini 16 over and under, grenade launcher for a couple Valium man.”
“I’m hanging up now,” I told him and did just that. He called back, but I put the phone on vibrate.
“What was that all about?” Charlie asked.
“Just a friend of mine,” I said. “He’s not a well man. I think his woman just left him for a Samoan.”
Around twenty minutes later, we were almost to the boat launch to pick up the sergeant, when another problem presented himself. We’d just cleared the draw bridge over the river, which separates Madisonville from Mandeville, when news that a very large pleasure craft was adrift and headed on a collision course with a bunch of boats that had anchored near the sand bar.
By the time we got there, the boat had been moved, out of harms way. It was a huge yacht looking thing, and still was pretty close to the other boats that had begun to congregate and drop anchor at the sand bar.
A guy on a sailboat yelled over to us, “We’ve gone aboard and re-anchored Shadow Dancer. The owner was not aboard, but someone should try to reach him, so he knows we were on board.”
Charlie nodded and then radioed in.
“Negative,” he said. “The owner is nowhere to be found. He took of in lifeboat or something. I have no idea where he is, he probably went to get lunch or something.”
As we crossed to the other side of the river to pick up the sergeant, Charlie explained to me how it is important for large craft like the Shadow Dancer to always drop enough line when anchoring.
“If you keep the line too taught, what ends up happening is that you run the risk of having the anchor shake itself loose,” he said.
The Sergeant was a short guy with sharp cop features. He was wearing sunglasses. He introduced himself to me and we shook hands. While Charlie was more or less laid back, this guy seemed a little bit more tightly wound and had a definite asshole cop aura floating around him, which was fine by me just as long as he didn’t try to arrest me.
The Sergeant had barely climbed into our boat when we got another radio call, this time from cops in the radio tower on the Causeway bridge. The bridge cops reported there was a crabber about a half mile out in the lake, who was apparently stranded.
When we came upon him, the man’s small boat was loaded down with wire crab traps, and he was waving a yellow raincoat in an effort to hail nearby boaters. In a matter of moments, the patrol boat had sidled up to his craft and hooked a tow rope to its bow.
“Put your life jacket on,” said the Sergeant, having to raise his voice some above the idling engines of the 21-foot Cape Horn patrol boat. The man motions that he can’t get to his life jacket because it is stored under the seat, beneath the stacks of crab traps.
“A lot of good it does him there,” said the Sergeant, as Charlie turned the patrol boat back around and began the voyage back to the boat launch. Once safely back on land, Fletcher thanked the patrolmen profusely.
“I just can’t tell you how grateful I am,” the man said. “I honestly don’t know what I would have done if you guys hadn’t shown up.”
This time it was the Sergeant who spoke up. “Well, you need to keep your life preservers out where you can get to them in case something happens,” he said.
The man nodded and as he turned away, the Sergeant said to me, “A lot of this is just plain old common sense. You’d be amazed at how folks who are usually intelligent people, just seem to get stupid once they hit the waterways..”
Charlie finished untying the tow rope from the crabber’s boat and the Sergeant then nodded.
“It’s time to go pay my fiend a visit now,” said The Sergeant.
His “friend” was a guy who had earlier sped across the no wake zone, between the boat launch and the sand bar, at top speed on jet skis. The Sergeant, who was patrolling
the boat launch at the time, didn’t have a boat with him
“I told a friend of his, who is a girl I know, to go tell the guy to come back over here and see me,” The Sergeant said. “I told her to tell him if he didn’t come see me that I was going to see him. Well, needless to say he either thought I was bluffing or stupid, and he didn’t come see me. So now, we’re going to pay him a visit.”
In a matter of minutes we were across the river, and pulled up to the sandbar.
This was the closest I’d been yet to the sand bar without actually going on land. I was amazed at what I saw. On land were about 50 people, scattered into various groups. Some of them were families. One family even had a tent and a hibachi grill set up. The rest, though, were clearly groups of friends. A lot of the smaller craft had just pulled right up to land.
Off of our port side was a small group of people. Charlie nudged me and I noticed than one of them was a pretty good looking woman who was laying flat on her stomach.
“Look at the ass on that one,” he whispered to me. “This is one of the perks of the
job.”
The Sergeant spotted his man, who was around 20 yards away on our starboard side, sitting down talking to a bunch of friends. The Sergeant stood up, pointed at the guy and motioned for him to come over.
The guy, who probably wasn’t much older than 30, ambled over with a stupid look on his face.
“You got a problem son,” The Sergeant said to the guy.
“No sir,” he said, with a far away glazed look in his eyes. It was a look I knew well. The guy was stoned, but I wasn’t about to let on that I knew this.
It was cool if the Sergeant made the presumption on his own, but I wasn’t about to let on that I knew how to identify stoned people. This sort of talent would obviously lead to awkward questions from the cops.
“Didn’t your friend tell you I wanted to see you?” The Sergeant asked him.
“I thought she was just messing with me,” the guy said stupidly, shaking his head, squinting as the sun beamed into his eyes.
“Well you were going way too fast in a no wake,” The Sergeant said. “I need to see some ID.”
The guy produced it and The Sergeant radioed in the information. Meanwhile, Charlie was checking out another woman on our starboard side.
“She’s a Saintsation,” he told me. “She comes out here almost every weekend.”
The Saintsations were the official dance team and cheerleaders, for the New Orleans Saints football team. From where I sat, she appeared to be pretty good looking.
But that really wasn’t what I was interested in.
I am, after all, a happily married man. When I mentioned this to the boys they just chuckled and said, “It never hurt to look.”
It was true, I guess, but the fact of the matter is that Andrea basically puts all women to shame. No. Any dingbat with a sack full of testosterone and a couple of beers in him, could gape at bikini-clad women all day. It takes a real pro, though, to figure out the culture of a community. And that’s what I’d stumbled into our there on the water that day. It was a community of river rats.
But I still didn’t know them.
When we initially pulled up, we didn’t get so much as a glance. The glances we did get were those of baleful annoyance. Although nothing was said, the message was clear. The cops were not wanted or needed on the sand bar- merely tolerated.
The Sergeant wrote the guy a ticket and we slowly moved away.
“Well, this is the part of the story you have to leave out,” Charlie said.
“Yeah,” agreed The Sergeant. “What stays on the sheriff’s boat, stays on the sheriff’s boat.”
I told them their secret was safe with me and we eventually docked for lunch.
“You wanna come with?” Charlie asked me.
“No, I have to be getting home,” I told him, thanking him for having me along.
“Any time you want to get out on the water just page us,” he told me.
I thanked him again and began walking back to my car.
