The unfashionable rent a catamaran

The Outer Banks consist mainly of large expanses of water, with some land added here and there as an apparent afterthought. In some areas it is almost easier to get around on the water than on the land, although as we discovered, this applies mainly to other people and not to us. Take the catamaran, for instance.

The catamaran is technically a boat, although if one undertook a careful analysis of it, one would find basically two pieces of wood, a trampoline, and a plastic shower curtain. The basic design appears to have originated as part of a last-minute science fair project by a fifth-grader. Although catamarans have come a long way in terms of design, here is a good idea of what it feels like you are riding on.

Now, when you see a catamaran out on the water, they are always gliding smoothly across the surface at a congenial clip, the people on them happily letting the wind blow through their hair as they relax and enjoy the ride. They keep a hand on the tiller, of course, just in case, but they never need to steer or perform any other actual work to get the boat to move.

These people are not real.

They are professional actors, or perhaps professional racers, placed out there on the water to cause gullible people like us to say, "Hey, that looks fun! Let's rent one of those!"

For people like us, "catamaran" translates roughly to "two hours of toil and sweat, two minutes of reward." Because a basic rule of sailing is that no matter where you want to go, the wind is always blowing in some other direction, or not blowing at all, although it appears to be blowing in a perfectly amiable direction for all the other boats. In our case the wind felt very strongly that we wanted to be blown toward shore, into very shallow water, whence lurked icky reeds ready to suck us in. More than once, the Hero had to climb in among the icky reeds to perform a daring water rescue of the boat in 8 inches of water.

One positive thing about sailing, however, is that one gets to wear fashionable boat clothing, consisting of various combinations of red, blue, and white stripes, boat shoes, and perhaps a jaunty hat. This, as I said, is what wears if one is fashionable. This is not what we wore.

Our attire might more appropriately be termed nautical nerdy, and fortunately -- to our knowledge -- no photos exist of us adorned in this manner which might be used to blackmail us. The individual who rented the boat to us -- who was of course attired in fashionable surfer dude clothing -- restrained himself very admirably from saying aloud what he must have been thinking, which was, "Are you in costume?"

But nevertheless, we and our costumes did experience some successful wind. One of our goals was to stay out of the way of nearby jet skis, which we managed admirably well, caught as we were between them and the icky reeds. According to the dictionary, by the way, a reed is a tall grass with "large, plumelike terminal panicles." So you can see why we were interested in staying clear of them. Those panicles can wreak havoc with your boat, not to mention with your person if you have to get in among the reeds, as the Hero had to do during his daring water rescues. Fortunately he escaped with no lasting injury from the panicles. (A panicle, according to the dictionary, is a "branched cluster of flowers in which the branches are racemes." Obviously nothing to fool around with.)

So although we did not set any records with the catamaran -- except possibly amount of times stuck among the reeds -- we liked being on the water so much that that very afternoon we rented a kayak (meaning "two days of toil and sweat for possibly no enjoyment at all"). Stay tuned.