Idiot with a shotgun

On our tenth leg of the trip, we found ourselves in some shallow, narrow passages in Georgia between Savannah and the Florida state line.  Just before reaching Florida and while passing a resort property labeled Cabin Bluffs, we had a bit of a scare with a local ridding the property of large rodents.

As we rounded a small bend, Joe, Karen, and I heard a shotgun blast in the wooded area just off of our starboard side.  Keep in mind that the passage is narrow so we weren’t far from shore.  Plus, we’re busy concentrating on keeping the keel from running aground.

Soon after the shotgun blast, a young man emerged from the woods carry a large, seemingly dead rodent.  He threw the carcass into the water between us and the shore not noticing the 30-foot sailboat less than 100 feet away from him. 

What happened next was frightful.

He raised the shotgun and basically pointed it at us in the cockpit of the sailboat.  He pulled the trigger.

Realizing what was happening, I ducked down in the cockpit just as the blast was fired.  I raised back up almost immediately and yelled, “Hello, friend. How are you?”

OK.  That’s not what I yelled. 

First, it wasn’t a yell.  It was a scream.  An expletive-laced scream, in fact. 

As it turns out, I get very angry when I think a person’s carelessness is endangering my life.  And let me be clear about this: This guy fired a shotgun at an animal carcass he’d thrown into the water not realizing that three of us were on the other side of that carcass just 70 or so feet away, directly in line from what he was shooting. 

We were fortunate that his shot didn’t bounce off the surface of the water; or that he hadn’t slipped when firing so that the barrel was raised a few inches to target us; or that a myriad of other possibilities occurred that could have resulted in tragedy.

We were close enough to each other that he had no trouble hearing me or my vocabulary lesson. 

At first, he was stunned.  He lowered the shotgun and seemed to shrug, expressing regret.  Then, he seemed to get angry that I called him on his stupidity.

For quite a while after the encounter, I remained angry.

Of course, my friends, Karen and Joe, the boat owners, were horrified at the experience.  First, they were horrified that we were being shot at.  Then, their horror shifted to me because I was screaming at a guy with a shotgun.

We were motoring at the time and we simply puttered on by the idiot at five knots with no further exchange. 

We were safe.  The boat wasn’t damaged.  And the idiot with the shotgun was lucky.