We stopped in Alligator River Marina for the night on the 12th. It was very hot and humid again and we were looking forward to plugging into shore power and running our air conditioning. We had also stopped here on the way north. It’s about the only place to do so in this stretch of the ICW and it has water, power, laundry, showers and a gas station/convenience store/café.
Once we were tied up, we gathered laundry and MB hustled off to get that started. On the way she and some other people spotted a Momma black bear and her cub. On the way back from starting the laundry the bears had moved closer and the momma was dumpster diving for food. An employee was banging on the dumpster to get her out. Eventually she clamored out and she ran off across the road into a marsh on the other side. The baby ran in circles clearly upset to have lost sight of its mother and then ran off into the woods in the opposite direction.
We ate dinner in the little café since we didn’t want to cook on the boat and have the food smells entice the bears. While there we chatted with another cruising couple who happened to be from our home marina. We had also met them at one of our stops on the Chesapeake Bay a few weeks earlier. While eating, Mary Beth spotted the bear outside the café windows and she and the other couple took some pictures. The bear knew what we were doing in there and wanted a share of the spoils it seemed. She jumped up at the windows and sniffed. The staff shooed her away and she went back across the road into the marsh empty handed. There was still no sign of the cub. We found out the next day that she had returned and ripped the top off one of the dumpsters to get back inside it (staff had closed the doors), so she was quite a strong and resourceful bear.
The weather was looking a bit ominous as we finished dinner. There was no sign of the bears as we came back to the boat, and went below to enjoy the AC in our closed up and secure, or so we thought, boat. The roaring rain and wind woke MB up around 2am and she went out and zipped down the cockpit enclosure except for one small door so that we would still have access to the dock. After getting up a number of times during heavy rains to check things, I finally dropped into a deep sleep.
At about 3:45 in the morning Mary Beth was awakened by strange noises. She listened for a while trying to identify them and finally thought that the lines tying our boat to the pier might need adjusting. She got up and walked into the main cabin on her way out to the cockpit. What she saw was the cockpit doors (connecting the outside of the boat with the inside of the boat) partly open and a large dark, shadow moving in the cockpit. Then the shadow turned and the profile of a large bear came into focus. She had many thoughts racing through her mind ranging from “how cool is this, a bear on our boat”, to “OH MY GOSH, there is a bear on our boat!!! If she comes below, we are in big trouble!”, to “how are we going to get her off”. The bear was looking right at her and probably thinking: “finally, dinner is served”. I was awakened by MB making horrible loud noises with jumbled words. I heard through the fog of a deep sleep the words “bear” and “boat”, and I eventually rallied to get my feet on the floor and walk into the main cabin. These are words that really should not go together so my adrenaline had me wide awake quickly. I have to say that Mary Beth is normally very calm in a crisis, and if you need someone steady on a crisis team, she’s your woman. But this time she was rattled – she could not make a sentence, but the meaning of “bear, boat” was now clear to me.
The momma bear was in our cockpit and had the companionway doors partway open and was sniffing and looking around the main cabin with her head in the boat. In moments she could be down the three steps and inside the boat where all of the food is! “Food” being a very inclusive word and from the bear’s perspective no doubt including us. I started clapping my hands and yelling and she backed out allowing us to at least shut the doors. These doors, however, are not sturdy and would not keep out a bear, but we secured them as well as we could.
Now the question was, what do we have to scare this creature away? Our air horn is in the cockpit, so that’s not going to help us. We do have bear mace on board since it is a tool to repel borders, or at least really piss them off, so we dug that out, but if we had we used it, our boat would have needed serious cleaning to get the smell out. We also worried about how she would get out of the cockpit since there was just that one small enclosure door left open and she was a pretty large creature! I did briefly think about getting my trumpet out and blowing that to scare her. While we were debating what to do, she quietly disappeared from the cockpit.
The next big question was, if she’s not in the cockpit, where is she? This is a very important question you must agree when dealing with a large predator who appears to be very hungry. I decided to lift the overhead hatch in the main cabin so that I could poke my head up and take a quick look. I lowered the screen and unlocked the latch and just as I was starting to push up the hatch, a massive dark paw stepped on it and all light from outside was blocked. I couldn’t believe that that hatch did not shatter with her weight on it. I think my heart may have stopped. If I had been just an instant faster and had poked my head out she would have stepped on my head and her mouth would have been within inches of me! At least we now knew that she was still on the boat. For some time we could still hear noises and feel the boat shifting a bit now and then as she moved around so we were sure that she was still with us.
Maybe 15 minutes later things were quiet, but we had no safe way to verify that she was gone. Finally, I made quick updates to my will, kissed Mary Beth goodbye, and stepped into the cockpit to take a look at the rest of the deck. Happily Momma Bear was nowhere to be seen. With bear mace and air horn close at hand now and the companionway door secured with an extra bar, we got back in bed and did eventually get back to sleep.
Interestingly we both got the impression that she was at heart a gentle soul. She moved slowly about the boat, did not intentionally tear anything up, and while clearly hungry, she never really got aggressive. By the light of day we were pleased to see that the damage was minimal. One zipper on the enclosure damaged, some dirt on the boat, a paw print and some claw marks on one enclosure panel where she must have tried to go through the clear plastic, and our binocular case in a “some assembly required” state. It could have been a lot worse (i.e., our blood could have been everywhere). We have a lot of food aboard and I’m sure to a bear used to dumpster diving our boat smelled really, really good. If she had pressed her advantage and come below, the only thing we really could have done would be to retreat to the forward head, close the door and wait until morning and then yell for help. I would have been really pissed if she’d found my dark chocolate stash.
We are thinking that we have had an experience that very few cruisers have shared, maybe none! How many sailors can say they have had a wild grown bear on their boats? We are hoping she found some food and was reunited with her little cub before the night was out. All’s well that ends well!
David and Mary Beth (still clutching our bear mace)