| TRAVELS OF DURSMIRG VOLUME IV THE ROGUES OF ST. AUGUSTINE AND OTHER SOCIAL MISFITS Chapter 50 |
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YACHTERS, THE GOOD, BAD AND THE UGLY; JAY HERNDON
Jay Herndon; When we met this drop out from the main-stream square peg and social misfit Jay was looking for a
place to haul and paint his neat little 23 foot home made molded plywood sailboat.
Long Lanky Jay was friends with our mutual friends Steve and Lum Brown from the small wooden sailboat named
Sea Dog who was also part of the cannabis crowd.
A word about our dear friends Steve and Lum Brown who you may have met and remembered from volume 1 of
Travels of Dursmirg;
They and their little boat Sea Dog were from Hartford, Connecticut.
Steve and Lum pulled their modest little old wooden sloop rigged sailboat on the rail at Xynides boat yard at the
same time as Jay Herndon pulled his; in fact they shared the same marine railway.
Later Steve and Lum visited Jane and I in Savannah, Georgia where we did some extensive bicycle tours and lots of
fishing. This time Steve and Lum got lucky when the Feds did a surprise inspection tour of Herb Creek, in the
adjacent Savannah tidewaters where there were three sailboats anchored up. Of the three boats only one was given
a complete inspection and that one turned out to be the only totally clean vessel in the bunch, our vessel, Dursmirg.
Steve and Lum became good friends with a man named Mitty Ferguson from Cumberland Island, Georgia and went
to work for his very rich and influential aunt Mrs. Ferguson, a descendant of the Carnegie family; we had some fine
get-togethers with them at Cumberland Island and got to know the whole family.
The eccentric and very agile Mrs. Ferguson even visited our anchored out boat Dursmirg and signed our guest
book. Mrs. Ferguson commented that she rather liked our boat because it wasn’t one of those store bought proper
yachts.
Steve and Lum eventually separated, but we ran into Lum several times over the years at St. Augustine and St.
Petersburg, Steve just vanished.
Back to St. Augustine and what happened in that spring of 1973 at the Xynides Boat Yard;
Ironically both Steve and Lum’s Sea Dog and Jay’s 23 foot sailboat wound up being pulling together on the marine
railway at the old Greek Uncle Harry Xynides bare bones boatyard.
Ranting raving old Uncle Harry with conniving devised a clever way to get both of these sailboats on his marine
railway at the same time to fill his deep pockets just a little fuller.
Jane and I didn’t realize the connection between these two small wooden sailboats at the time but we were soon to
find our.
As it turned out Jane and I helped giddy easygoing Jay take his little sailboat down the Intracoastal Waterway to Fort
Lauderdale where he had a carpenter job.
This is when we surprisingly discovered the connection of the two little wooden sailboats; these people were big time
pot smokers!
Jane and I have absolutely nothing at all against anyone that wants to self indulge in this seemingly fruitless pastime
of inhaling cannabis smoke and then holding their breath until the veins on their temples bulge out, then exhale
breaking into a dazed out hilarious giddy giggle. It is not for us, but then we don’t want to set any world standards for
personal behavior figuring that everyone should have the right to do whatever their adult minds dictate.
While we were on our way sailing south to Fort Lauderdale with Jay we left our boat Dursmirg at the Xynides Boat
Yard where Steve and Lum would be docking their little boat Sea Dog and watching our vessel for us.
The very day we left town there was a surprise police raid at the Xynides boat yard and Steve and Lum Brown got
busted for cannabis possession. The only pot that the police could dig up on the premises at the boatyard was
growing in a flower pot hanging from the boom of Steve and Lum’s little sailboat. For this the judge made them pay a
$100.00 fine, and they lost their little plant to boot! The cops just missed the mother load with Jay.
Jane, Jay and I got an early start departing from St. Augustine at the crack of dawn before the raid and as soon as
we cleared the San Sebastian River and turned south I turned the helm over to Jay and went below to help Jane get
some breakfast together. We were making great speed for this little 23 foot sailboat because it had a clean bottom
and I had just set and trimmed the sails for maximum efficiency.
It turned out that Jay owned a sailboat but he was not a sailor and didn’t know how to read a chart or follow the
channel markers because we abruptly bumped the bottom and came to an abrupt halt. The fact that we had been
traveling along at a good rate of speed and were substantially heeled over at a steep angle we managed to run
hard aground in very shallow water, we abruptly halted at the same angle of heel we had been sailing at.
We tried all of the textbook tricks to sail off.
I first sounded the water depth around the boat to determine the closest navigable water. We were so far off the
channel I knew that Jay had to have been in his spaced-out mode dreaming under the influence of his cannabis
cloud of his “what me worry” world. We put out an anchor attached to the mast head halyard to heel the vessel over
kedging off and at the same time pulling the craft in the direction of deeper water while we all got overboard and
physically heave-ho pushed…it was to no avail.
We had no choice now and we would patiently wait out our time for the imperceptibly slow but persistent tide to come
in and give our little boat the boost we needed.
The only depressing thing was that we were still in full view of downtown St. Augustine.
After a few hours Jay’s cannabis high slipped away and then Jay became totally dejected and wanted to abort the
trip saying it was all a jinx.
He lit up a reefer and was happy again.
We were soon under way by mid-day and once more making excellent time heading south in a brisk breeze on a
very broad reach and my only remorse was that we had missed an entire morning of really good sailing because of
a navigation screw-up, but Jay now was becoming a seasoned sailor.
That afternoon the favorable wind was more than just brisk, it was invigorating and almost screaming, we might have
had up a little too much sail for these circumstances but the speed was exhilarating and it felt good to be making up
our lost time.
I was a the helm with a 120% Genoa set right and stretched tight with no main sail as we sizzled past the Matanzas
Inlet shoals just before Marineland 17 miles south of St. Augustine.
This is when the jib vanished along with half of the mast from the spreaders up in less than half a nana-second.
With astonishing speed the sail was gone before my very eyes.
Our spirited sprint immediately became a bobbing bounce that literally took the wind out of our sail.
The back stay had parted at the chain-plate.
It turned out that the chain plate was badly rusted and the problem had been overlooked when the boat was recently
pulled out for its annual maintenance back at Xynides Boat Yard.
Now pot smoking Jay was really down in the mouth and ready to throw in the towel and abandon his maiden voyage.
Now his defeatist attitude became total hopelessness.
We were less than 20 heart breaking miles from St. Augustine after a hard fought for day that began at sunrise.
Jane and I were having a good time but it is always a care-free experience to go through disasters on other people’s
boats.
I truly don’t think that Jay had ever in his entire lifetime had to turn a defeat around and make it into a success.
This sailing adventure would give pot smoking Jay a totally different prospective on life and the fortitude to
persevere, something that totally escapes most.
Pot-smoking Jay led a laid-back life style but he wasn’t quite laid back enough yet to be a real purest sailor. He had
never in his life been out of the push the button and go world or even known of its existence. This was something
that would have to be experienced.
To quote our dear old friend Captain George Tappin; “you aren’t going to learn this all in just one day.”
But by the end of our week long sailing saga to Fort Lauderdale Jay had come a long way in his mental maturity
though his cannabis cloud got him to giggle at even his lowest emotional moments.
I told Jay that he was a carpenter and asked if he had any of his carpentry tools aboard. When Jay said; “yes” I told
him that we could just motor the few feet to the Marineland marina and dock and do the repairs needed. We could
be underway early the next morning.
This was going to be somewhat of a Rube Goldberg repair but I cut the damaged portion of the aluminum out of the
mast and filed the surfaces flush and perfectly true so it appeared that the job had been done in a professional
milling machine. The net result was that the mast was then shortened by about 5 inches.
Now all of the standing rigging would need to be shortened by that amount to compensate for the shorter mast.
The back stay was no problem because I merely drilled a new anchor hole lower in the rusty chain-plate where the
metal had more meat and that took up the back-stay slack.
The mast repair required a wooden plug that would need to be fashioned to the exact shape and size of the inner
cross-section so it could be force fit into the aluminum extrusion of the mast.
This job I turned over to Jay.
For wood to make the plug I located what we needed in the trash behind the marina shop.
Jane, Jay and I assembled the mast with its force fit wooden plug like a battering ram against a cement bulkhead.
We drove the two mast parts snuggly together. The whole process took less than a couple of hours and we were
ready to stand the mast up again.
If you didn’t know about this repair you would never spot the joint where the two parts had been joined together.
In this world of uncanny coincidences, just as we were pondering the process of standing the mast back up again
along came our friends Steve and Lum Brown from Xynides Boat Yard along with their incredible story about the
police raid we had just missed.
This was just what we needed, extra hands.
Yes, the following morning the sail was up and we were silently sailing south again.
Despite a few trivial setbacks the rest of our voyage was a joyful uneventful lark and we had lots of idle time to
exchange stories in congenial confabulations.
We found out all about Jay’s Cuban family connections and his very rich old uncle Julio who escaped Cuba with all
his loot just before Castro and bought himself a palatial palace down on Biscayne Bay in south Miami.
It also turned out that our Jay was a member of a jug-band that toured around the south beating out hillbilly rhythms
and that life style seemed to fit his perpetually giggly personality much better than being a wood butcher.
To our surprise upon arriving in Fort Lauderdale Jay was running low on his precious weed and sneakily unscrewed
a panel in his galley where out dropped a good sized Zip-lock bag painstakingly packed full of his private stash of
cannabis…enough dope to send us all off to the slammer.
Jane and I don’t do dope…never have and hopefully never will, but we do not have any problems with the users as
long as they don’t blow the smoke in our faces or implicate us in their illegal activities.
Jay was now clearly feeling no pain in his gritty giggly smoked out blissful mental state. The only problem was his
mental processes that were more than somewhat compromised. During our last night aboard Jay’s little boat in Fort
Lauderdale we nearly took a trip to the bottom because he inadvertently forgot to close the seacock after using the
marine head. The bilge water was approaching bunk level when the problem was alarmingly discovered…remember
the number one rule of boating; “The water is supposed to be on the outside.”
It turned out that Jay was somewhat of an enigma as we found out when his mother showed up in her big long and
very expensive automobile dressed like the duchess fresh out of Vogue Magazine. Yes she could have had just
stepped out of some fashion magazine and was dripping with a ton of provocatively eye popping jewelry.
This lady was obviously extremely well provided for.
Jane and I rode back to St. Augustine in air-conditioned comfort on cushy white leather seats and got to hear a little
more about the family’s Cuban ancestry from Jay’s very elegant, articulate and proper mother.
How could you figure this one?
We didn’t see Jay for a couple of years until one day we happened to meet on a downtown street back in St.
Augustine.
It turned out that pot smoking Jay had somewhat cleaned up his routine and gotten married, had a little girl and
settled down over on the St. Johns River.
What he told us next seemed to be a contradiction to his previous life of deep inhaling.
Jay told us that he was going to have to move away because a large coal burning electric generating plant was
moving into his neighborhood and he didn’t want any smoke!
next chapter
Jay Herndon; When we met this drop out from the main-stream square peg and social misfit Jay was looking for a
place to haul and paint his neat little 23 foot home made molded plywood sailboat.
Long Lanky Jay was friends with our mutual friends Steve and Lum Brown from the small wooden sailboat named
Sea Dog who was also part of the cannabis crowd.
A word about our dear friends Steve and Lum Brown who you may have met and remembered from volume 1 of
Travels of Dursmirg;
They and their little boat Sea Dog were from Hartford, Connecticut.
Steve and Lum pulled their modest little old wooden sloop rigged sailboat on the rail at Xynides boat yard at the
same time as Jay Herndon pulled his; in fact they shared the same marine railway.
Later Steve and Lum visited Jane and I in Savannah, Georgia where we did some extensive bicycle tours and lots of
fishing. This time Steve and Lum got lucky when the Feds did a surprise inspection tour of Herb Creek, in the
adjacent Savannah tidewaters where there were three sailboats anchored up. Of the three boats only one was given
a complete inspection and that one turned out to be the only totally clean vessel in the bunch, our vessel, Dursmirg.
Steve and Lum became good friends with a man named Mitty Ferguson from Cumberland Island, Georgia and went
to work for his very rich and influential aunt Mrs. Ferguson, a descendant of the Carnegie family; we had some fine
get-togethers with them at Cumberland Island and got to know the whole family.
The eccentric and very agile Mrs. Ferguson even visited our anchored out boat Dursmirg and signed our guest
book. Mrs. Ferguson commented that she rather liked our boat because it wasn’t one of those store bought proper
yachts.
Steve and Lum eventually separated, but we ran into Lum several times over the years at St. Augustine and St.
Petersburg, Steve just vanished.
Back to St. Augustine and what happened in that spring of 1973 at the Xynides Boat Yard;
Ironically both Steve and Lum’s Sea Dog and Jay’s 23 foot sailboat wound up being pulling together on the marine
railway at the old Greek Uncle Harry Xynides bare bones boatyard.
Ranting raving old Uncle Harry with conniving devised a clever way to get both of these sailboats on his marine
railway at the same time to fill his deep pockets just a little fuller.
Jane and I didn’t realize the connection between these two small wooden sailboats at the time but we were soon to
find our.
As it turned out Jane and I helped giddy easygoing Jay take his little sailboat down the Intracoastal Waterway to Fort
Lauderdale where he had a carpenter job.
This is when we surprisingly discovered the connection of the two little wooden sailboats; these people were big time
pot smokers!
Jane and I have absolutely nothing at all against anyone that wants to self indulge in this seemingly fruitless pastime
of inhaling cannabis smoke and then holding their breath until the veins on their temples bulge out, then exhale
breaking into a dazed out hilarious giddy giggle. It is not for us, but then we don’t want to set any world standards for
personal behavior figuring that everyone should have the right to do whatever their adult minds dictate.
While we were on our way sailing south to Fort Lauderdale with Jay we left our boat Dursmirg at the Xynides Boat
Yard where Steve and Lum would be docking their little boat Sea Dog and watching our vessel for us.
The very day we left town there was a surprise police raid at the Xynides boat yard and Steve and Lum Brown got
busted for cannabis possession. The only pot that the police could dig up on the premises at the boatyard was
growing in a flower pot hanging from the boom of Steve and Lum’s little sailboat. For this the judge made them pay a
$100.00 fine, and they lost their little plant to boot! The cops just missed the mother load with Jay.
Jane, Jay and I got an early start departing from St. Augustine at the crack of dawn before the raid and as soon as
we cleared the San Sebastian River and turned south I turned the helm over to Jay and went below to help Jane get
some breakfast together. We were making great speed for this little 23 foot sailboat because it had a clean bottom
and I had just set and trimmed the sails for maximum efficiency.
It turned out that Jay owned a sailboat but he was not a sailor and didn’t know how to read a chart or follow the
channel markers because we abruptly bumped the bottom and came to an abrupt halt. The fact that we had been
traveling along at a good rate of speed and were substantially heeled over at a steep angle we managed to run
hard aground in very shallow water, we abruptly halted at the same angle of heel we had been sailing at.
We tried all of the textbook tricks to sail off.
I first sounded the water depth around the boat to determine the closest navigable water. We were so far off the
channel I knew that Jay had to have been in his spaced-out mode dreaming under the influence of his cannabis
cloud of his “what me worry” world. We put out an anchor attached to the mast head halyard to heel the vessel over
kedging off and at the same time pulling the craft in the direction of deeper water while we all got overboard and
physically heave-ho pushed…it was to no avail.
We had no choice now and we would patiently wait out our time for the imperceptibly slow but persistent tide to come
in and give our little boat the boost we needed.
The only depressing thing was that we were still in full view of downtown St. Augustine.
After a few hours Jay’s cannabis high slipped away and then Jay became totally dejected and wanted to abort the
trip saying it was all a jinx.
He lit up a reefer and was happy again.
We were soon under way by mid-day and once more making excellent time heading south in a brisk breeze on a
very broad reach and my only remorse was that we had missed an entire morning of really good sailing because of
a navigation screw-up, but Jay now was becoming a seasoned sailor.
That afternoon the favorable wind was more than just brisk, it was invigorating and almost screaming, we might have
had up a little too much sail for these circumstances but the speed was exhilarating and it felt good to be making up
our lost time.
I was a the helm with a 120% Genoa set right and stretched tight with no main sail as we sizzled past the Matanzas
Inlet shoals just before Marineland 17 miles south of St. Augustine.
This is when the jib vanished along with half of the mast from the spreaders up in less than half a nana-second.
With astonishing speed the sail was gone before my very eyes.
Our spirited sprint immediately became a bobbing bounce that literally took the wind out of our sail.
The back stay had parted at the chain-plate.
It turned out that the chain plate was badly rusted and the problem had been overlooked when the boat was recently
pulled out for its annual maintenance back at Xynides Boat Yard.
Now pot smoking Jay was really down in the mouth and ready to throw in the towel and abandon his maiden voyage.
Now his defeatist attitude became total hopelessness.
We were less than 20 heart breaking miles from St. Augustine after a hard fought for day that began at sunrise.
Jane and I were having a good time but it is always a care-free experience to go through disasters on other people’s
boats.
I truly don’t think that Jay had ever in his entire lifetime had to turn a defeat around and make it into a success.
This sailing adventure would give pot smoking Jay a totally different prospective on life and the fortitude to
persevere, something that totally escapes most.
Pot-smoking Jay led a laid-back life style but he wasn’t quite laid back enough yet to be a real purest sailor. He had
never in his life been out of the push the button and go world or even known of its existence. This was something
that would have to be experienced.
To quote our dear old friend Captain George Tappin; “you aren’t going to learn this all in just one day.”
But by the end of our week long sailing saga to Fort Lauderdale Jay had come a long way in his mental maturity
though his cannabis cloud got him to giggle at even his lowest emotional moments.
I told Jay that he was a carpenter and asked if he had any of his carpentry tools aboard. When Jay said; “yes” I told
him that we could just motor the few feet to the Marineland marina and dock and do the repairs needed. We could
be underway early the next morning.
This was going to be somewhat of a Rube Goldberg repair but I cut the damaged portion of the aluminum out of the
mast and filed the surfaces flush and perfectly true so it appeared that the job had been done in a professional
milling machine. The net result was that the mast was then shortened by about 5 inches.
Now all of the standing rigging would need to be shortened by that amount to compensate for the shorter mast.
The back stay was no problem because I merely drilled a new anchor hole lower in the rusty chain-plate where the
metal had more meat and that took up the back-stay slack.
The mast repair required a wooden plug that would need to be fashioned to the exact shape and size of the inner
cross-section so it could be force fit into the aluminum extrusion of the mast.
This job I turned over to Jay.
For wood to make the plug I located what we needed in the trash behind the marina shop.
Jane, Jay and I assembled the mast with its force fit wooden plug like a battering ram against a cement bulkhead.
We drove the two mast parts snuggly together. The whole process took less than a couple of hours and we were
ready to stand the mast up again.
If you didn’t know about this repair you would never spot the joint where the two parts had been joined together.
In this world of uncanny coincidences, just as we were pondering the process of standing the mast back up again
along came our friends Steve and Lum Brown from Xynides Boat Yard along with their incredible story about the
police raid we had just missed.
This was just what we needed, extra hands.
Yes, the following morning the sail was up and we were silently sailing south again.
Despite a few trivial setbacks the rest of our voyage was a joyful uneventful lark and we had lots of idle time to
exchange stories in congenial confabulations.
We found out all about Jay’s Cuban family connections and his very rich old uncle Julio who escaped Cuba with all
his loot just before Castro and bought himself a palatial palace down on Biscayne Bay in south Miami.
It also turned out that our Jay was a member of a jug-band that toured around the south beating out hillbilly rhythms
and that life style seemed to fit his perpetually giggly personality much better than being a wood butcher.
To our surprise upon arriving in Fort Lauderdale Jay was running low on his precious weed and sneakily unscrewed
a panel in his galley where out dropped a good sized Zip-lock bag painstakingly packed full of his private stash of
cannabis…enough dope to send us all off to the slammer.
Jane and I don’t do dope…never have and hopefully never will, but we do not have any problems with the users as
long as they don’t blow the smoke in our faces or implicate us in their illegal activities.
Jay was now clearly feeling no pain in his gritty giggly smoked out blissful mental state. The only problem was his
mental processes that were more than somewhat compromised. During our last night aboard Jay’s little boat in Fort
Lauderdale we nearly took a trip to the bottom because he inadvertently forgot to close the seacock after using the
marine head. The bilge water was approaching bunk level when the problem was alarmingly discovered…remember
the number one rule of boating; “The water is supposed to be on the outside.”
It turned out that Jay was somewhat of an enigma as we found out when his mother showed up in her big long and
very expensive automobile dressed like the duchess fresh out of Vogue Magazine. Yes she could have had just
stepped out of some fashion magazine and was dripping with a ton of provocatively eye popping jewelry.
This lady was obviously extremely well provided for.
Jane and I rode back to St. Augustine in air-conditioned comfort on cushy white leather seats and got to hear a little
more about the family’s Cuban ancestry from Jay’s very elegant, articulate and proper mother.
How could you figure this one?
We didn’t see Jay for a couple of years until one day we happened to meet on a downtown street back in St.
Augustine.
It turned out that pot smoking Jay had somewhat cleaned up his routine and gotten married, had a little girl and
settled down over on the St. Johns River.
What he told us next seemed to be a contradiction to his previous life of deep inhaling.
Jay told us that he was going to have to move away because a large coal burning electric generating plant was
moving into his neighborhood and he didn’t want any smoke!
next chapter