by Dwain Hebda

The Glory Daze sits on the surface of the water like a missile with fins. The streamlined red, white and blue Liberator catamaran harnessing a 300-horse Mercury outboard fairly screams summertime fun. White stars hug her sleek lines and even the metallic blue steering wheel gleams. 

“It’s patriotic, more or less,” said Eddie Calvert, the skipper of this craft. “I love those types of boats because they run well, they handle well in the water, you can run faster and safer. It’s much easier to drive and much easier to handle at high speeds.”

Calvert loves it on the water and spends as much time there in the summertime as he can, which considering he is retired, is quite a bit. A resident of Sherwood, he’s particularly fond of the Arkansas River and he’s logged the miles to prove it.

“I go to the lakes also and I enjoy that, too, but the river is so much more convenient for me living where I do,” he said. “The thing about the river as opposed to the lake is, at the river you’re unlimited as to where you can go. In fact, I’ve been almost the entire navigable length of the Arkansas River, over 400 miles in the past few years, camping along the way.

“We enjoy going to a place where you can run the boats and also get out of the boat on a sandbar rather than just sit in the water all day like you would at the lake.”

Calvert grew up in Warren. While attending UA Monticello, he started going out with friends on the Ouachita River around Moro Bay, learning to water ski and navigate the channel. 

“After that, I moved up here to North Little Rock and got a boat,” he said. “I started going to the Arkansas River and I’ve been going ever since.”

Along the way, Calvert developed a circle of friends who are as appreciative of time on the water or lounging on a sandbar as he is. Some of them are hardcore, former racers who still goose their sleek crafts up past 100 miles per hour now and again. He estimates the fastest ride he ever experienced was around 130 in a friend’s boat.

But that doesn’t mean the 71-year-old doesn’t love to get the most out of what the Glory Daze has to offer – a little over 100 miles per hour.

“A lot of the group that I hang out with love high-performance boats. Most of those boats are a little different than what the normal boat is that you’d see out on the lake,” he said. “The less boat you have in the water, the less drag and the faster you’ll go. When those boats are running wide open, there is very little in the water. Like on my boat, the prop shaft is actually level with the bottom of the boat or higher. So when you’re running wide open, only the bottom half of the prop is actually in the water.”

As Calvert tells you this, you hear the roar of the engine in his voice, taste the wind whipping up your adrenaline, feel the spray split from the mirrored-glass surface underneath you. He grins.

“It’s a thrill,” he said.

Calvert and his crew of like-minded friends – river rats with a taste for speed – turn the river into a party from May to October. Sometimes they take planned day trips south to Pine Bluff or north toward Conway. But mostly the merry band stakes out a sandbar and lets the good times roll from there, grilling and chilling.

“Most of the time we spend in what we call the Little Rock pool, which is below Murray Lock and Dam in the Little Rock area,” he said. “There are some sandbars down there where we hang out across from Burns Park. Sometimes we go through the lock at Murray and go upriver between Little Rock and Conway. There’s some really huge sandbars and it’s the same way down south of Little Rock below Terry Lock and Dam.”

It’s a little surprising to hear him readily share his favorite haunts – some longtimers get a little prickly about sharing their choice spot, especially given how river traffic has increased in recent years. Calvert doesn’t necessarily subscribe to that, enjoying the social aspect of boating as he does. That said, there are rules of the river that he’d like everyone to understand, rules he’s taught his son and is teaching his grandson.

In 40-plus years of riding the waves and cruising the current, Calvert has yet to tire of the river, from the scenery on the riverbank to the spectacle of sunset on the water. He’s even compiled a bucket list of trips he’d like to take, trips so big and audacious they are more than the Glory Daze can handle. 

“I would like to be able to run down the Arkansas, hit the Mississippi and go down and get in the intercoastal waterway,” he said. “You can go west or east on the intercoastal waterway, or go up the Mississippi and run some of those other rivers. But to do that, you need a bigger boat than what I have.”

Even if he never does all that, Calvert will always have the Arkansas River and summertime. And where those two conjoin, he’s renewed; running in the pack with friends, outracing tomorrow, creasing starlight foam in the wake of time.