Weekend hobby

Apart from housing guppies and Siamese fighting fish in an aquarium when I was unrecognizably young, I cannot recall having had a certifiable hobby.  Something, say, like stamp collecting or pottery making. Or, as one of my former acquaintances did, making fanciful and complex fishing flies. I considered the latter both then and now a brilliant leisure pursuit, certainly exotic, capturing as it does an uncommon aesthetic trait combined with the rustic image of a sole fisherman up to his waist in a burbling English stream. His father (himself an Englishman and a man of precision, a medical surgeon) practiced gardening with identical gusto and aplomb, creating enormous blooms of white summer flowers.

My weekend recreation this morning began with a less than athletic submission to sudden drowsiness and fatigue. The overwhelming lassitude piloted me as though already in a dream to a couch in the master bedroom where I mechanically extended myself and promptly vanished into utter somnolence only to awake an hour later in a happy state of confusion following a short but deep sleep. The evaporation was precedent to a purgative venture on my bicycle this Sunday morning but with renewed energy I don’t mind saying. The moderate enterprise was notable for arising in the face of impending rain.  I had however consulted the Weather App on my iPhone and determined there was a window of penetrability of two hours without an umbrella.

As usual in these matters of transit on the Island I am drawn to the sea.  It beckoned with less than normal fascination this morning because the sky was grey and I had not remembered to investigate the Tide Chart. My recollection from yesterday’s forecast was that Low Tide today would be an hour later, say around three o’clock. I have since determined that Low Tide today was in fact at 02:47 PM (and by the way, tomorrow it will be at 03:24 PM so the one hour prolongation is not far off the target). Anyway soggy sand especially at Tower Beach Club where the draining feature of the tides is notoriously unpredictable is not favourable so I contented myself to drift along the boardwalk within sight of the sea.

The sea was the only thing in sight.  There wasn’t another person around.  Earlier along the darkened paths I had seen tourist interlopers on their bicycles. But Tower Beach Club was deserted except for me . This is the advantage of Hilton Head Island at this time of year; viz., Off-Season! For people such as I who are satisfied to look at the sea and to avoid the necessity of undressing publicly, this is unparalleled desertion.