| TRAVELS OF DURSMIRG VOLUME IV THE ROGUES OF ST. AUGUSTINE AND OTHER SOCIAL MISFITS Chapter 56 |
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YACHTERS, THE GOOD, BAD AND THE UGLY: STEVE HESTLER AND JOSH
Steve Hestler; a solitary lone sailor came single handedly sailing his diminutive inconspicuous blue water
barebones no frills craft into St. Augustine’s bay front anchorage and quietly dropped the hook.
Stocky built of German working class ancestry, resolute and determined Steve was adventure bound striking out
from the Maritime Provinces of Chester Basin, Nova Scotia, Canada where those waters are wetter, the seas
unforgiving and fog laced gales are the norm.
Unassuming Steve slipped into the Old City aboard his classic little wooden sailboat Duchess attracted like a moth to
the flame. Similar to so many others Steve was drawn this way by a fateful finality.
Quiet, reserved and unpretentious Steve left Canada and went sailing financed with his deceased father’s credit
cards.
(Where there is a will there is a relative…or perhaps not.)
At any rate Steve was going to get his cut out of Papa’s estate and he took affirmative action…he was gone.
It was a glorious whimsical lark and all went well until the brakes were finally put on the credit cards for non-payment.
Steve’s little spending spree caper got him a long, long way from home and very deep in debt, especially
considering the fact that he had no job or physical means of support.
Good intentioned but procrastinating Steve had run up huge debts without a second thought and was always going
to pay them off but never quite mustered the initiative or got around to actually doing it.
Let’s face it Steve’s free spirit, heart and sentiments were not with the establishment at this particular time in his
young carefree life.
Down and out Steve was a social misfit that had been attracted and drawn into St. Augustine’s anchorage where he
fit in perfectly like the rest of us outcasts from that other outer world.
This Canadian outsider quickly melded into the St. Augustine scene and soon Steve picked up and fell in with
another loner named Josh aboard a very small but classic wooden sloop rigged sailboat ironically named “Joshua
Slocum”, also anchored out in St. Augustine’s Matanzas Bay.
Dick Kuffman was nicknamed “Josh” because of his classic little sailing sloop, Joshua Slocum that he migrated
south down from Dorrs Ferry, NY in to make the St. Augustine anchorage his winter residence.
Drooling Josh from the little sailboat named Joshua Slocum was a real slob and totally obnoxious.
Slightly cockeyed and slightly overweight drooling Josh fumbled through his life slightly out of touch with reality,
perhaps with a loose screw or two and this definitely made him qualify for the title of social misfit.
He dressed in near rags, was unkempt, unwashed and unshaven. Josh dressed in an attire of old worn raggedy
weather beaten clothes that wouldn’t even measure up to being tossed into the rag bag at the Goodwill Store.
Drooling Josh crudely gave little or no thought to his personal hygiene and drove others off with his wretchedly rank
and disgusting bodily stench.
Possessing a spaced-out dazed-out distant stare Josh let the whole world know something was amiss from his
mental processes with his persistent drooling and soon became known around the anchorage as “drooling Josh”.
According to the story that Josh told us, when he was a young child he was listening to the radio with earphones on
while in the bathtub and the high current flow altered his cranial brain waves, shorted out a few thought processes
and from then on and for evermore thereafter he became a bonafide drooling social misfit.
Among his other problems and lesser attributes he was definitely a basket case paranoid. He locked his rusted out
junkie old bicycle that wasn’t worth its weight in scrap iron with a ½ inch chain and super-sized padlock. This size
chain was far bigger than any of the sailing yachts used for their anchor chain.
It turned out that drooling Josh’s parents were well to do and had sent him off on an around the world sea voyage
when he was a teenager in order to deal with their out of touch child.
Out of sight…out of mind and Josh was truly out of his mind and would have been institutionalized if he had been
born to less affluent parents or had a criminal disposition.
Josh had clearly never been involved in life’s financial struggles, a remittance man all his adult life he was bankrolled
by his parents that didn’t want to boot him out or take him in either.
Obviously he was a colossal disappointment to them.
So, they sent their drooling Josh packing off with a monthly check and made him into a perpetual remittance man.
Absent minded vacant minded Josh was clearly out of his mind and St. Augustine was undoubtedly the perfect place
for him.
(In those days St. Augustine was jokingly known as; “the open air insane asylum”.)
We always used to tell our friends that came to visit us in St. Augustine; “the good news and bad news”.
First the bad news, St. Augustine was an open air insane asylum but the good news was that they had been
accepted…well; Josh found his home here and was accepted.
Yes, Josh was not only accepted but fit right in and nearly went unnoticed.
At this point in time Steve Hestler was a no frills yachter just hanging on who swung his modest little boat at anchor
out of necessity and was on the scrounge for his victuals. Hard times had come, his deceased fathers credit cards
had dried up and reduced Steve to scavenging for oysters, clams and fishing for his food. It was apparent that
hungry Steve was not out fishing for sport but driven by famine.
Steve and Josh had almost nothing in common except for the fact that they were both living aboard small classic
wooden sailing vessels and were for the moment neighbors.
Josh came from a well-to-do family that thought enough of him to bankroll him but didn’t particularly care to have his
presence in their lives.
Josh, now in his early fifties didn’t quite measure up to the status of rogue but he surely was the perfect social misfit
in almost every way.
Josh was frugal beyond the average definition of the term but evidently his monthly stipends allowed him a carefree
independent lifestyle.
If there was the aroma of food cooking frugal free-loading Josh would come around and just happen to drop in
sniffing the air with a pleading gaze like a starving street dog.
Though he always had plenty of cash to spend drooling Josh was keen to pick up any hints of food free for the
taking.
I remember Jane and I telling Josh about how we harvested the prickly pear cactus fruit that was so plentiful and ripe
in fall and winter along the beaches of North Florida.
We sometimes would eat it raw but preferred to make a thick sweet deep red almost caramel syrup or else wine from
it.
This succulent deep magenta colored fruit wasn’t called prickly pear for nothing. The outside of this egg sized fruit
was covered with numerous small patches of minute sharp barbed spines that would break off and embed in your
flesh and cause distracting pain like fiberglass bristles.
The real problem was that these spines were so very small that they were almost impossible to detect with your
naked eye and thus extremely difficult to extract.
We always took care and used tongs to pick the prickly pears and then cut the spiny patches off before cooking.
Another interesting thing about these prickly pears was that they were filled with seeds that were harder than little
stones that I am sure would break your teeth if you tried to chew them.
Well, drooling Josh quickly discovered just how plentiful and delicious these free for the taking wild edibles were and
literally pigged-out on them. Now his drooling spittle was colored a deep magenta color.
We soon thereafter had drooling Josh come over to our boat seeking information on how to un-plug his marine
head, (toilet).
This is where the story even gets grosser; it turned out that drooling Josh in his overly exuberant gluttonous
consumption consumed these raw prickly pears entirely without peeling off the spines or extracting the seeds.
Not even the gastronomy of a wild animal could handle this.
The net result was that the fruit had passed through his entire digestive system leaving a concentration of seeds
that were harder than stone compacted in his marine toilet damming up its operation completely.
This man had to have had the gastronomy of a cement mixer. We just couldn’t possibly fathom how any person on
earth could possibly have consumed what amounted to a miniature porcupine and actually live to tell of it. The
strangest thing of all was that drooling Josh seemed to be thriving on this diet that not even the wild animals could
handle.
Of all of the eccentric dropouts that settled into little old St. Augustine, drooling Josh was with out a doubt the only
one that every person agreed was a certifiable institutional nut case.
Time went by and these two social misfits eventually drifted away like the rest of the vagabond population of old St.
Augustine.
A few years later Jane and I had our Dursmirg in storage over a winter season up on the St. Johns River and had a
chance encounter with Steve Hestler again.
The surprise for us was double because Steve not only now had a very lovely new wife but also a young daughter.
The three of them were living aboard Steve’s little classic wooden Nova Scotia sailboat named Duchess.
Steve and his new family were among the last of the 1970s dropout sailing crowd to continue their free-spirited
vagabond life style.
Our chance encounter with Steve Hestler and his newly acquired family was weird and wonderful up the St. John’s
River at San Mateo with our Dursmirg because this place was so far removed from the mainstream of the sailing
community...so we thought.
Across the river at Palatka, Florida we found three more of our old sailing friends from Crane Creek at Melbourne,
Florida down on the Indian River; Jim and Mary Flood from their vessel Puffin, John and Evelyn Burtchell from their
classic Tom Colvin designed Giselle and Jim Mooney with his pristine, 1930s vintage sloop Posh…all had taken up
residence in this little out-of-the-way nowhere called Palatka, Florida.
Further downstream we would find our dear friends Bubba and Linda Schill with their Nova Scotia sailing schooner
Jaeger and directly across the river from them another friend Bret Hollerith with his classic 36 foot all teakwood
Cheoy Lee sailing yacht.
(All of these sailing friends are featured in volumes 1, 2 and 3 of the Travels of Dursmirg.)
It appeared that many of our old crony veteran sailing acquaintances opted for the protection of inland waters after
spending many a hurricane season playing Russian roulette with their vessels as well as their lives cruising the
coastal waters of North America.
Luck is luck but if you roll the dice long enough or in this case spin the revolver chamber chances are that no matter
how lucky you are Mother Nature will eventually claim you as well as your vessel.
Jane and I both had felt these pressures of pressing our luck beyond the limits and understood these cautious
sailors that wanted their twilight years spent in some measure of tranquility.
next chapter
Steve Hestler; a solitary lone sailor came single handedly sailing his diminutive inconspicuous blue water
barebones no frills craft into St. Augustine’s bay front anchorage and quietly dropped the hook.
Stocky built of German working class ancestry, resolute and determined Steve was adventure bound striking out
from the Maritime Provinces of Chester Basin, Nova Scotia, Canada where those waters are wetter, the seas
unforgiving and fog laced gales are the norm.
Unassuming Steve slipped into the Old City aboard his classic little wooden sailboat Duchess attracted like a moth to
the flame. Similar to so many others Steve was drawn this way by a fateful finality.
Quiet, reserved and unpretentious Steve left Canada and went sailing financed with his deceased father’s credit
cards.
(Where there is a will there is a relative…or perhaps not.)
At any rate Steve was going to get his cut out of Papa’s estate and he took affirmative action…he was gone.
It was a glorious whimsical lark and all went well until the brakes were finally put on the credit cards for non-payment.
Steve’s little spending spree caper got him a long, long way from home and very deep in debt, especially
considering the fact that he had no job or physical means of support.
Good intentioned but procrastinating Steve had run up huge debts without a second thought and was always going
to pay them off but never quite mustered the initiative or got around to actually doing it.
Let’s face it Steve’s free spirit, heart and sentiments were not with the establishment at this particular time in his
young carefree life.
Down and out Steve was a social misfit that had been attracted and drawn into St. Augustine’s anchorage where he
fit in perfectly like the rest of us outcasts from that other outer world.
This Canadian outsider quickly melded into the St. Augustine scene and soon Steve picked up and fell in with
another loner named Josh aboard a very small but classic wooden sloop rigged sailboat ironically named “Joshua
Slocum”, also anchored out in St. Augustine’s Matanzas Bay.
Dick Kuffman was nicknamed “Josh” because of his classic little sailing sloop, Joshua Slocum that he migrated
south down from Dorrs Ferry, NY in to make the St. Augustine anchorage his winter residence.
Drooling Josh from the little sailboat named Joshua Slocum was a real slob and totally obnoxious.
Slightly cockeyed and slightly overweight drooling Josh fumbled through his life slightly out of touch with reality,
perhaps with a loose screw or two and this definitely made him qualify for the title of social misfit.
He dressed in near rags, was unkempt, unwashed and unshaven. Josh dressed in an attire of old worn raggedy
weather beaten clothes that wouldn’t even measure up to being tossed into the rag bag at the Goodwill Store.
Drooling Josh crudely gave little or no thought to his personal hygiene and drove others off with his wretchedly rank
and disgusting bodily stench.
Possessing a spaced-out dazed-out distant stare Josh let the whole world know something was amiss from his
mental processes with his persistent drooling and soon became known around the anchorage as “drooling Josh”.
According to the story that Josh told us, when he was a young child he was listening to the radio with earphones on
while in the bathtub and the high current flow altered his cranial brain waves, shorted out a few thought processes
and from then on and for evermore thereafter he became a bonafide drooling social misfit.
Among his other problems and lesser attributes he was definitely a basket case paranoid. He locked his rusted out
junkie old bicycle that wasn’t worth its weight in scrap iron with a ½ inch chain and super-sized padlock. This size
chain was far bigger than any of the sailing yachts used for their anchor chain.
It turned out that drooling Josh’s parents were well to do and had sent him off on an around the world sea voyage
when he was a teenager in order to deal with their out of touch child.
Out of sight…out of mind and Josh was truly out of his mind and would have been institutionalized if he had been
born to less affluent parents or had a criminal disposition.
Josh had clearly never been involved in life’s financial struggles, a remittance man all his adult life he was bankrolled
by his parents that didn’t want to boot him out or take him in either.
Obviously he was a colossal disappointment to them.
So, they sent their drooling Josh packing off with a monthly check and made him into a perpetual remittance man.
Absent minded vacant minded Josh was clearly out of his mind and St. Augustine was undoubtedly the perfect place
for him.
(In those days St. Augustine was jokingly known as; “the open air insane asylum”.)
We always used to tell our friends that came to visit us in St. Augustine; “the good news and bad news”.
First the bad news, St. Augustine was an open air insane asylum but the good news was that they had been
accepted…well; Josh found his home here and was accepted.
Yes, Josh was not only accepted but fit right in and nearly went unnoticed.
At this point in time Steve Hestler was a no frills yachter just hanging on who swung his modest little boat at anchor
out of necessity and was on the scrounge for his victuals. Hard times had come, his deceased fathers credit cards
had dried up and reduced Steve to scavenging for oysters, clams and fishing for his food. It was apparent that
hungry Steve was not out fishing for sport but driven by famine.
Steve and Josh had almost nothing in common except for the fact that they were both living aboard small classic
wooden sailing vessels and were for the moment neighbors.
Josh came from a well-to-do family that thought enough of him to bankroll him but didn’t particularly care to have his
presence in their lives.
Josh, now in his early fifties didn’t quite measure up to the status of rogue but he surely was the perfect social misfit
in almost every way.
Josh was frugal beyond the average definition of the term but evidently his monthly stipends allowed him a carefree
independent lifestyle.
If there was the aroma of food cooking frugal free-loading Josh would come around and just happen to drop in
sniffing the air with a pleading gaze like a starving street dog.
Though he always had plenty of cash to spend drooling Josh was keen to pick up any hints of food free for the
taking.
I remember Jane and I telling Josh about how we harvested the prickly pear cactus fruit that was so plentiful and ripe
in fall and winter along the beaches of North Florida.
We sometimes would eat it raw but preferred to make a thick sweet deep red almost caramel syrup or else wine from
it.
This succulent deep magenta colored fruit wasn’t called prickly pear for nothing. The outside of this egg sized fruit
was covered with numerous small patches of minute sharp barbed spines that would break off and embed in your
flesh and cause distracting pain like fiberglass bristles.
The real problem was that these spines were so very small that they were almost impossible to detect with your
naked eye and thus extremely difficult to extract.
We always took care and used tongs to pick the prickly pears and then cut the spiny patches off before cooking.
Another interesting thing about these prickly pears was that they were filled with seeds that were harder than little
stones that I am sure would break your teeth if you tried to chew them.
Well, drooling Josh quickly discovered just how plentiful and delicious these free for the taking wild edibles were and
literally pigged-out on them. Now his drooling spittle was colored a deep magenta color.
We soon thereafter had drooling Josh come over to our boat seeking information on how to un-plug his marine
head, (toilet).
This is where the story even gets grosser; it turned out that drooling Josh in his overly exuberant gluttonous
consumption consumed these raw prickly pears entirely without peeling off the spines or extracting the seeds.
Not even the gastronomy of a wild animal could handle this.
The net result was that the fruit had passed through his entire digestive system leaving a concentration of seeds
that were harder than stone compacted in his marine toilet damming up its operation completely.
This man had to have had the gastronomy of a cement mixer. We just couldn’t possibly fathom how any person on
earth could possibly have consumed what amounted to a miniature porcupine and actually live to tell of it. The
strangest thing of all was that drooling Josh seemed to be thriving on this diet that not even the wild animals could
handle.
Of all of the eccentric dropouts that settled into little old St. Augustine, drooling Josh was with out a doubt the only
one that every person agreed was a certifiable institutional nut case.
Time went by and these two social misfits eventually drifted away like the rest of the vagabond population of old St.
Augustine.
A few years later Jane and I had our Dursmirg in storage over a winter season up on the St. Johns River and had a
chance encounter with Steve Hestler again.
The surprise for us was double because Steve not only now had a very lovely new wife but also a young daughter.
The three of them were living aboard Steve’s little classic wooden Nova Scotia sailboat named Duchess.
Steve and his new family were among the last of the 1970s dropout sailing crowd to continue their free-spirited
vagabond life style.
Our chance encounter with Steve Hestler and his newly acquired family was weird and wonderful up the St. John’s
River at San Mateo with our Dursmirg because this place was so far removed from the mainstream of the sailing
community...so we thought.
Across the river at Palatka, Florida we found three more of our old sailing friends from Crane Creek at Melbourne,
Florida down on the Indian River; Jim and Mary Flood from their vessel Puffin, John and Evelyn Burtchell from their
classic Tom Colvin designed Giselle and Jim Mooney with his pristine, 1930s vintage sloop Posh…all had taken up
residence in this little out-of-the-way nowhere called Palatka, Florida.
Further downstream we would find our dear friends Bubba and Linda Schill with their Nova Scotia sailing schooner
Jaeger and directly across the river from them another friend Bret Hollerith with his classic 36 foot all teakwood
Cheoy Lee sailing yacht.
(All of these sailing friends are featured in volumes 1, 2 and 3 of the Travels of Dursmirg.)
It appeared that many of our old crony veteran sailing acquaintances opted for the protection of inland waters after
spending many a hurricane season playing Russian roulette with their vessels as well as their lives cruising the
coastal waters of North America.
Luck is luck but if you roll the dice long enough or in this case spin the revolver chamber chances are that no matter
how lucky you are Mother Nature will eventually claim you as well as your vessel.
Jane and I both had felt these pressures of pressing our luck beyond the limits and understood these cautious
sailors that wanted their twilight years spent in some measure of tranquility.
next chapter
