I’m not sure what relationship Jerry’s family had to Don Aronow, for sure there were roots stretching to Florida, but that one magic summer of 1966 when Jerry motored up to the local beach steering a beautiful red Donzi 16, smiling ear to ear and sporting a Hav-a Tampa cigar and a white terry robe hanging well past his cut-off jeans bathing suit, all I could do was wonder how on earth he got his hands on this jaguar of the boating world. My mind raced through all the scenarios that would place a kid from the tough Italian neighborhoods of Brooklyn behind the wheel of a “superboat”, but Jerry looking past the crowd that had gathered at the water’s edge straight to me and motioning that I swim out, which I did, and climb aboard and he was giddy with excitement, bustin to tell me how he blew the doors off the big Wellcraft with the twin 100 Merc outboards and how this was going to be our break-out summer, this boat was going to get us laid. I have to say there was no shortage of bikini bunnies more than willing to put up with Jerry’s brooklyneze and my shy fumbled words for a chance to buzz their girlfriends and make them jealous, and if need be I would slip into the water with my favorite slalom ski, an O’Brian that I had drilled holes in the metal skeg, tuning the slippage so I could pin high speed turns disappearing behind curtains of water only to reappear on the other side of the wake and I would use this feature to swing out on the whip and plant a turn dousing their friends with impunity. This maneuver often resulted in crazy duels where competing boats, after a good dousing would give chase literally trying to run me down but felt bad when Jimmy Stein was so intent on running me over he didn’t pay attention to the barely submerged rock I was flying toward. I pulled straight over the submerged mass, no worries for a water-ski, but Stein tore out the bottom of his boat, tossing him and two girls I had doused into the drink and the boat settled to the gunwales, his brand new evernude sputtering with a destroyed lower unit and the boat with a fatal gash to its bottom. I dropped off when it happened, kicked off the ski and swam toward the wreck as Jerry raced back to pull the girls aboard, sputtering and laughing while I was left swimming circles round the boat with Stein in pursuit. But I digress.
My first introduction to hydrodynamic drag occurred behind this boat, as I couldn’t believe the difference in behavior a surfboard exhibited in tow. Above around 15mph you could feel the wax separating from the deck under your feet, and where you expected lift and easy flight across the wake you found yourself face planting the surface. I had been using my Duke pop-out as a dive platform, paddling it to promising rocks then slipping off with my speargun to hunt for blackfish, flounder, or bugs. Seemed only natural to take a shot at surfing behind the boat. But that drag! At first we reasoned it was the skeg, and even though a glass-on knocked it off, but that obtained a bare increase in performance and illuminated the shortcomings of pop-out egg rails. Skegless, the Duke K pop-out was consigned to the backyard shed and my Hansen Competitor tried next, with the same results. How could this be? It was a much better shape than the Duke, much faster on the waves, but just as slow behind a boat! Was speed surfing ocean waves an illusion?
Funny how the mind works. We rely so much on experience the obvious doesn’t occur unless triggered by something as simple as placing a favorite slalom water-ski atop a stored skegless pop-out. And even though the thought intruded there was no reason to further mutilate the Duke. It was good for spearfishing too. Surfboards are for surfing, water-skis for boating, and that was the order of the universe until Jerry’s dad decided to move the Donzi to Sag Harbor for “business reasons”. We could still use the boat, but had to drive to Sag, which wasn’t bad cos we met a whole new crop of girls, farmer’s girls and baymen’s girls, young divorcee girls, engaged girls all attracted to the pretty red boat and looking for a fling. One drunken night in a fit of lucidity I took a power saw to the Duke, cut the nose and tail off and ripped off the glass. I cut a crude outline with the handsaw, and lacking plane or surfoam, scraped a shape using broken glass. This was a proven method to me since I had been making crude model sailboats out of flotsam found on the beach since I was 8 years old. There were often odd blocks of styrofoam, never a shortage of broken glass, carefully chosen stone keels, reed masts, odd bits of plastic wrap for sails, nests of fishing line for rigging, and when properly assembled would sail from shore till they disappeared or fell apart or were sunk by stone cannon fire thrown from shore.
What came out of that “creative” explosion bore little resemblance to either surfboard or water-ski. Besides a pile of glass and foam what was left was approximately 6 feet long and 17 inches wide, a real hack job. It had two deep channels running from mid-point to tail, about the width of the bottle I used. The tail was squareish and the rails were hard down to get that edge the water-ski had. It had the worst glass job ever done, ripples and bubbles, and stuck to the sawhorses when I let it cure deck and bottom all at once. The “shortboard revolution” was yet to come, but this “thing” birthed from the Duke pop-out prepared me to embrace change, though at the time I never believed anyone would effectively paddle into a wave and stand on anything less than 9 feet long. I whittled a small piece of wood into a replica of the slalom skeg, minus the holes, and glassed it on.
Having brought it all the way to Sag Harbor, at first Jerry refused to allow the “thing” on his boat, much less waste his time towing me behind in an effort to prove what? That once again a water-ski is better. Besides we were going to head from Sag over to Gardiner’s Island and scout the shoreline for where Capt, Kidd might have put in to bury treasure. Jerry had had this dream about a specific tree visible from a boat looking toward shore on an island, that there was treasure there, revealed at the end of a bottle of rum a week earlier. Out near Bermuda a monster hurricane was throwing swells to Long Island, but the local winds were stiff WSW setting up cross chop and making things ugly on the ocean, day and a half to north winds and I would disappear from boating to surf. He agreed to try the tow thing after we checked Gardiner’s. Cost me a bottle of Bacardi.
The trip from Sag Harbor was relatively fast in the Donzi, past Northwest Harbor around Cedar Point and into Gardiner’s Bay now in full view of Gardiner’s Island west side. The island is private so we knew landing was out, but the dream tree loomed in Jerry’s mind as we motored round the island counter clock. I was not prepared for what came into view as we rounded the southern tip and headed ENE. Surf! Glorious waist high, occasional chest high surf spilling in perfect lines. Impossible yet there it was, and off shore winds to boot. It had to be monstrous in the ocean and the waves must be rounding Montauk Point and continuing on to Gardiner’s. Jerry didn’t understand my excitement, but there on the prominent point sat his tree, which he denied, but I knew the change in his expression and demeanor and sudden willingness to let me drop off the back with “thing” and try once again to tow this “thing” other than a water-ski but too small and ugly to be a surfboard, but the plan was to see how “thing” behaved. After a few tries I managed to stand and it handled all the way up to 25mph before yanking me off but I could get outside the wake so I told Jerry next time I stood keep it around 20mph and tow me toward the shore where the peelers were and I’ll swing out on the whip. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to climb over the back of the swell from behind and travel in pace, the line going slack as the “thing” dropped in and after a few feet I tossed the rope and flew down this wall transfixed by the balance afraid to alter the line or move a muscle gliding along underneath the feathering lip daring only to muster a kick-out which sent me flying over the back of the wave smiling ear to ear. Jerry didn’t understand that I wanted to do this for hours, he had stealth and shovels and treasure on his mind and wanted to head back so I had to be satisfied with one wave, one blissful moment where an ugly creation gave something back and I experienced an unknown wave on an unknown craft pulled behind a beautiful boat at the most improbable place to find surf on Long Island. Two days later I snapped my Hansen in half in overhead surf at a place called Threes. “Thing” was useless for surfing and when I tried to tell my tale of “ski-surfing” the surf at Gardiner’s the laughter from my surfing buds hurt almost as much as sitting on the beach with my Hansen in two pieces. Jerry refused to admit we were ever there, owing to rumors of speedboats running drugs past Gardiner’s late at night. His dad put the boat at Sheepshead Bay, for “business”. An Aussie named “Nat” won at Huntington Beach. The surfing world was turning upside down.
Gardener Island
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