When I was a little kid, I read a book, titled Miss Pickerell and the Supertanker. It was one of the most fascinating things I read as a wee, impressionable youth. It involved a mysterious supertanker that was leaking all sorts of nasty stuff, and a spry, elderly woman, Miss Pickerell (the heroine of several Ellen MacGregor books), who donned a wetsuit and used a kickboard to paddle out to the supertanker and save the day.

Miss Lavinia Pickerell is an unlikely heroiine: prim, spinsterly, angular and stiff, wearing old‑fashioned clothes and an outlandish hat, and devoted to her pet cow, she nevertheless manages to inadvertently stowaway on a rocket to Mars in her first adventure. But with her common-sense, practicality, and unflappable demeanor she manages to bring each adventure to a satisfactory conclusion. She is every child’s favorite maiden aunt, and is possibly modeled after MacGregor herself… MacGregor included valid scientific facts in her Miss Pickerel books. Some of the topics she addressed were weightlessness in space travel, atomic energy and carbon-14 dating, nuclear-powered submarines and the continental shelf, the “bends” affecting divers who surface too rapidly, and many others. (Wikipedia)

The first time I read it was when I was big into bodyboarding, so the idea of an old grandmother in a wetsuit, paddling out to a supertanker was quite profound to me. It made me think it was possible for me to do it too! This was only reinforced when I moved to the Chesapeake Bay in my teens, and spent every day watching the tankers anchored offshore at low tide, waiting to make their way to the Norfolk Terminals. The visual illusion of these monstrous vessels of steel, which seemed to be no greater than a hundred yards offshore, would make my mind drift to the possibility of swimming or paddling out to them like good ol’ Miss Pickerell, just to see if it was possible.

When I see huge seafaring vessels near the shore, like the beached barge that is bearing down on the Sandbridge fishing pier, my mind instantly transports back to that book, and the reality of kickboarding my way out to see if I can touch it.