I couldn’t resist a little dig. “Bridgy, do you remember the theme from Cagney and Lacey? How about we hum it as we paddle around the bay trying to ‘detect’ Skully?”
I didn’t flinch when she whacked my butt with a handful of visors.
We walked over to the boat basin and were dazzled by the colorful array of canoes and kayaks hanging on boat racks and lying along the shore.
“Help you, ladies?”
A giant of a man with a perfectly waxed Hercule Poirot mustache, much grayer than Poirot would have ever allowed, was standing behind us, a clipboard in his hand. He was wearing a faded blue Fort Myers Beach tee shirt with “Boaters Do It on the Water” stenciled across his massive chest.
Bridgy must have flashed on Ryan’s collection of “Deputies Do It Safely” shirts, because she asked in a soft undertone, “Do you think he knows Ryan?”
There was just enough of a breeze coming in off the water to carry her question farther than intended.
The man raised his eyebrows. “Ryan the Deputy or Ryan the Busker who sings in Times Square on Tuesdays? Know ’em both. You?”
Bridgy was all tongue-tied at being caught mid-whisper, so I answered, “We only know the deputy.”
“Nice feller. Helpful, too. Gave me this shirt when I donated some prizes to a Christmas party for the children of fallen deputies. Good man. So am I, come to think of it. Name’s Tony. What can I do for you gals?”
I told him we were looking to rent a kayak, and I casually pointed to a long two-seater.
“The green one looks like we could handle it.”
Before he agreed to let us have the kayak, he grilled us, making sure we knew the differences between a kayak and a canoe. Then he asked when we’d last been out on the water, where we’d paddled and had we ever gone on our own without being part of a flotilla. We had to fudge our answer to the last question since our on-the-water experience was limited to group tours of Lovers Key and Bonita Beach. He seemed satisfied we were experienced enough to handle his craft safely, and showed us a couple of kayaks and talked about the differences.
“You looking for speed or stability?”
It didn’t garner his confidence when Bridgy shouted, “Speed,” while I landed firmly on the side of stability. He scratched his head and then muttered something about “women” under his breath before saying aloud, “Well, since you two don’t agree, a sit-on-top model is out of the question.”
He pointed to a silver kayak with no cockpit and a black seat and backrest much higher than I was used to riding. It looked far less secure than I’d like. Gentle though the bay was, I was afraid sitting high could lead to overturning in the wake of even the smallest speedboat. I’d be worried about balance the entire ride.
We settled on a fourteen-foot recreational boat, a compromise that sacrificed some of Bridgy’s need for speed and gave in to my yen for stability. It was about five feet shorter than the green kayak, and the difference in length might slow us down but would give us a more secure ride. The two cockpits were wide and roomy for easy access getting in and out.
We rented the ubiquitous bright orange life jackets, loaded a couple of water bottles, a bag of chips and a pack of M&M’s under the covered deck and pushed off, with Tony yelling after us, “Don’t go too far, you two. I close at six sharp.”
We balanced our double-bladed paddles and synchronized our movements until we had a smooth roll, barely moving the water’s surface and gliding through the mangrove trees that spread out from the shoreline. I asked Bridgy exactly where we should look for Skully.
She laughed and lifted the right side of her paddle in the air, while dragging the left in the water, throwing my careful rolling strokes off-kilter.