It got pretty warm today. The low tide was around midday. The sky was mostly overcast, but there was only a light breeze, so I had to make a dash for it and hope for the best. The image on the left illustrates the wardrobe I chose for the occasion.
When I arrived at the creek, the tide level was pretty low, so I was emboldened by the possibility of playing in some of my favorite mud. I hustled to my really deep mud spot, but I wasn’t sure the tide would be low enough for that spot. Paddling to the mud hole, I gauged that the tide was not still going out, which gave me a clue that the tide would soon be coming back in. I wonder if my tide table is running a bit late this time of year. I really should put together a spreadsheet of actual tide observations vs. the tide chart, over the course of a year or two, so I can learn from my experience. The tide chart I use is just a rough approximation, because my play spots are 4 to 6 miles from the ocean, if you follow the creek. That creates a time delay, so I use a chart for a different location that seems to match pretty closely to what I observe … most of the time.
Okay, enough about the damn tide. It took me a while to decide what to do, but I knew I wouldn’t have much time, so I decided to make due with the first location I visited and shoot an “explorer” video. Of course, my explorers seem to gravitate towards deep quicksand (or quickmud, if you will), but that’s just an occupational hazard for a mud enthusiast.
I shot a few minutes of exploration scenes before I got trapped in quickmud and drowned. The saga will be mercifully short; partly because the tide was coming in by the time I got to the final scene, and partly because the mud I drowned in was the thinner stuff, which makes for a pretty quick sink.
By the time I was climbing out of the mud, I heard a voice from the creek. It was coming from a spot with a clear view of where I had to emerge, still muddy and wearing really short shorts with no underwear. Once I got my gear loaded, I paddled as quietly as I could down the narrow canal leading to the creek, listening to the voice and hoping I’d get a break. As it turned out, they moved up the creek to the spot where I would have cleaned up. I decided to clean up just around the corner from them, as much as I could, and paddle back up the shallow canal to get dressed. I was standing, up to my waist in water, and up to my knees in mud, when the fishing boat came around the corner, and I was face to face with two curious fisherman. They were friendly, and we exchanged a few words. I told them I was muddy from having been up the channel, shooting video, and I was washing off. All of that was true, although I left out some details. I got washed up well enough to get back in my boat and paddle up the creek to a more private spot. The first two fisherman didn’t really get to see what I was wearing from the waist down. As luck would have it, I paddled right into another fisherman, still dripping wet and clearly wearing very short cut-offs. I’m pretty sure my junk wasn’t hanging out anywhere, but I couldn’t be too sure. I exchanged greetings with the third fisherman and paddled past him. A few minutes later I arrived at a private place with a sandy bottom where I could strip, get clean, and get dressed in dry clothes. There was probably a deer hunter in a nearby tree, watching me.
The image on the right is how I looked when I was done shooting.
