Kirsten Tapley, 6, of Morgan Hill, got a rare treat when she
rode with the California Delta river route mail carrier, Rick
Stelzriede, on Aug. 3 while he delivered mail on rivers and
canals.
By Gene Beley
Kirsten Tapley, 6, of Morgan Hill, got a rare treat when she rode with the California Delta river route mail carrier, Rick Stelzriede, on Aug. 3 while he delivered mail on rivers and canals. He put her up front of the boat that has special shock absorbers built in to the seats that cushion big wave impacts as they zipped around to various islands and outposts.
One stop was to a barge and houseboat on the San Joaquin River, inhabited by Bill Conner, 80, who used to own the famous Lost Isle. After they sold Lost Isle many years ago, his wife moved back to town “and left me out here to suffer,” Conner chuckled. Now Conner uses a small boat and outboard motor to shuffle over to Windmill Cove, owned by a former Morgan Hill man, Dave Theis, to jump his old clunker car to go visit his girlfriend on weekends in San Francisco.
At another stop, Bullfrog Landing, a big brown Labrador dog named Bear greeted the mail carrier. St. Francis Yacht Club’s private island is another regular stop and it was jammed with big, expensive yachts where one would never know there was any kind of recession in this country
The river route is one of 61 water routes in the United States and the only one in California. There are about 10 to 13 stops Stelzriede has to make spread out over a vast area of the Delta waterways. When Kirsten Tapley accompanied her grandfather, Gene Beley, working on a magazine assignment for a boating magazine, it was a beautiful, sunny, Delta August day in the low 90s. But it can get very dicey in the wintertime, especially crossing Frank’s Tract on the edge of Bethel Island, Stelzriede said. The fall fog seldom rises before noon, which slows him down too. Yet, he smiled his big smile when he said, “I love my job.” And there are thousands of boaters who are envious of this man who gets paid to go boating six days a week and even gets an increase in allowance when gas prices rise.
Gene Beley is the former publisher of the South County tabloid newspaper, Country News, which he founded in 1989.
