Here is a picture of a nice man in a boat. That thing he is standing
beside that looks like a post with things sticking out of it is called
a 'tow bit'. At the back of his boat are two 250 hp engines. The nice
man ties a big fat rope called a tow line or a hawser to the tow bit,
and uses it to haul sailboats out of the mud when they get stuck.
Why do sailboats get stuck in the mud? Well, you might ask that,
mightn't you? The intracoastal waterway is not very deep and it's not
very wide in a lot of places. In Georgia swamps this is especially
true. And sometimes the chartplotters have mistakes in them that show
the route as being through a place that's too shallow for a big boat
to go. Unhappily, the paper charts show the same thing. The cruiser
guide book, which describes the route in words and pictures as opposed
to the map presentation on a chart, doesn't say anything about the
shallow spot. Neither does the Coastal Pilot, a book put out by our
friend, the big benevolent federal government. And the navigational
aids in the location are put in the wrong place so there's no warning.
Then the sailboat sails into the shallow place and gets stuck.
The nice man in the tow boat said he had pulled six people off that
sandbar this month. In the picture the nice man is adding up the
charges for his visit to pull us out of the mud. The nice man calls
adding up the charges "cyphering" as in "well, I have to do some
cyphering now". But he says,"waal, ah gots ta do sum sahferin' nao.".
He cyphered the charges to be $1200. If the nice man cyphers up
charges of $1200 for every poor, lost Yankee fool he hauls off this
mismarked, blesséd sandbar, how much money does the nice man cypher up
in a month?
You and the teacher figure that one out, then have a nice holiday.
Love from the swamps!
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