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News & Features
The double rescue
By Capt. Mike Martel
For Points East
Following long the winding, narrow road that edged ever closer to the shore, I constantly scanned and scoured the land with my gaze, looking for my old boat, thinking that it would stand out against the background, jump out against the greenery in such a way that she could not be missed, for I knew that I would recognize her in an instant. I was filled with anxiety and apprehension. She would call out to me in some way, I thought naively. I had been many hours in the truck now, and although my body was stiff and aching from the long ride, I felt nervously energized.
I had been told by the marina owner over the phone that my old boat was in poor condition, weathered, going to hell. I remember that first phone call from him, and felt my heart sink within me as I listened; yet hungry as I was for details, there were few. He was not a man of many words or florid description, as many working watermen of Maryland's Eastern Shore, who have a surprisingly great deal in common with Maine Yankees, are not. Yet it was just such a clinical, detailed description that I yearned for.
My old gaff yawl, which I had sold, had been abandoned three years earlier by its new owner after only one season in the water, left up on the hard at a small marina in a town called Rock Hall on the tranquil, sleepy western side of the Chesapeake. It was a long way from her former home in Rhode Island waters, and even farther from the cold waters of Thomaston, Maine, where she had been built and launched in 1931.
Now I drove past lovely green fields of corn and soybeans, tin-roofed farmhouses and barns, occasionally glimpsing the water of the bay – now here a boat, now there a boat, a yacht club, a little marina. Almost there, I thought, nearly eight hours and 400 miles after leaving my home early that morning. The yard owner was going to auction her off, or cut her up for scrap value to pay off the accumulated storage fees that the new owner had never paid.
I had the opportunity, now, to reclaim her, nearly four years after I had sold her to a foppish, geeky snot from Philadelphia who had an old-money name, lots of superior attitude, but no soul and no inclination to dirty his fingernails. He was someone who, I found out later, didn't know a cleat from a computer, didn't know varnish from chardonnay, and had less affinity for wood than for a petit-four. And for all his arrogance, he had no money, or if he did, at least he wouldn't part with any of it to pay his boat's bills or to maintain it after he was through with his initial flirtation with her and the novelty of being a classic wooden-boat owner.
Now he had become bored with her, or had not the will to care for her properly, if indeed he ever had. Perhaps he had become tired of his little yo-ho-ho fantasy and Disney-like image of being a hairy-chested sailor. When he had bought the boat, he had brought his teenage daughter along for the first little cruise around the harbor, the daughter of his estranged first wife, a sweet young girl who adored her father. "Dad, this boat is sooo you!" she had crooned. So he had bought it. But in truth it was sooo not him at all.
I had been out in my garden, tending my tomatoes and planting Indian corn when wife Denise received an odd phone call from a stranger in Maryland. "You'd better take this" she called to me. "It's from a boatyard in Maryland. It's about Privateer. The man says that he found your name and address in some old papers aboard the boat. He hasn't been able to reach – what was that guy's name – who abandoned the boat a few years ago." I brushed the soft, crumbly loam from my hands.
Oddly enough, I'd had dreams about the boat recently. I have always dreamed about my boats after I have parted company with them, for some odd reason. The first big boat that I rebuilt and restored with much sweat, treasure and time was a twin-screw wooden motorboat from the 1950s. After I sold it, and then years later after she was abandoned by the owner and broken up by the yard where he had left her, I began having dreams about her.
In some of the dreams she was mine and whole again, and I was cruising with her, sometimes on familiar waters, sometimes far out in strange places that I had never seen. Perhaps that is a glimpse of the land and seascape of heaven, for people and for boats, where we all go to cruise when we die. Sometimes, in the dreams, the old cruiser would be apart, her hull open, disconnected wiring and engine parts everywhere, but she was mine again to restore and rebuild, almost a hopeless case, with many things missing, but I was undaunted and ready to begin work, if only I could remember how to do it all, all over again.
In my latest dream, about my old gaff-yawl Privateer, I was on the foredeck, she was at sea and under way, and I was bringing her home, and she was mine again. She had not been well cared for, but she was not really in bad shape at all. A friend was towing me, and I cleated the towline on the bitts and exclaimed how solid the deck was, and that she would surely come through it all right; she had been well-built, and no one could ruin her, especially now that she was back in the hands of her master. I am still strong enough, I thought, though more than 14 years older than when I first received her, but I still know how to use my tools, adz and axe, chisel and saw, mallet and hammer. I will prevail.
It was a strange, vivid dream, and when I awoke, it was still darkest night, in the wee hours of the morning before sunrise, and I lay on my back for awhile thinking about the dream, looking for meaning, and remembering, oddly, the place in Joshua Slocum's "Sailing Alone around the World," where Captain Slocum is gravely ill, in a swoon from eating bad cheese and plums, while the Spray rides out a storm out on the open sea. In his delirium, Slocum thinks that he is dockside and that careless draymen are tossing skiffs onto the Spray's deck, when in actuality they are seas breaking over his little vessel. But he calls out, daring the perpetrators to do their worst, "You cannot hurt the Spray. She is strong!"
Mine was a prophetic dream, I guessed; strong dreams often are, even if their meanings are, at the time, utterly obscure. But this one made me uneasy, and I could not go back to sleep again until after the gray first light of dawn had begun to filter through the window blinds.
Now, at last, I drove across the white crushed stone of the marina and past the tidy office buildings, storage sheds, and shower stalls to the back lot where a sad lot of boats stood, in the high season, up on poppets, high up on a bank overlooking the muddy Chester River. I saw my boat up on stands, too, still and patient and waiting for me.
She looked in form like she always had, as though she had been in my backyard only yesterday, such was the overwhelming rush of familiarity. I pulled up to the end of the driveway, got out of the truck, and just stood there, looking at her from a little distance, feeling waves of emotion rising up within me, which took all of my will to keep down lest they should rise unchecked, pour forth, and flood over all.
Her paint was faded, the colors washed out and run together, oxidized and weathered by the hot Maryland sun She looked much like a pastel inexpertly smudged, or a watercolor blended and faded from being showered by tears. Yet her high prow pointed out over the water, her bowsprit was still in place, and she looked proud and defiant, no hint of surrender, not asking for pity, no blame, no assignation of guilt, with all the quiet dignity and patience that only an inanimate object can have. These other things, after all, we assign to, or impose upon, ourselves.
And as I stood there in the shimmering heat of the summer afternoon, not yet approaching, eyeing her from a distance, as firmly as she was propped up on the ground, she began to pitch and swim again in my sight as feelings welled up within me. It was as though she were out on the sea again. I walked over to my old boat and rested my hand on her solid rudder. "You are going home" I said.
A rickety ladder nearby allowed me to climb aboard. The cabin was a mess. Mud wasps had entered through an open port and built little ugly nests in odd places, but it was a small port so not much else had come in. "There is much work to do," I heard myself saying, to myself and to the boat. It was terribly hot in the close cabin, and soon I was soaked with perspiration. But I knew all would be well, now. I had come to set in motion that which would bring my boat home again, and fate full circle.
He had not been able to destroy her, through neglect. Like Spray, my Privateer was strong. Paint was sadly peeling inside, but her sails were there, her fenders and lines and cushions and, remarkably, virtually everything else, from parrel beads to blocks, even her sweet bronze bell.
The electrical panel had been partially disassembled; a new alternator was mounted on the engine. "He did something else wrong," I muttered. I'd heard, after he took the boat down to the Chesapeake, that he had broken the mizzen gaff or boom. These were missing, nowhere to be seen. "But I can make new spars," I said aloud, to myself, and perhaps to the boat, reassuringly.
I realized, then, from the way that I felt inside, that this was, and is, more than just a boat. I had not realized it until after she had been sold and was gone. Why? Perhaps it is the work that must go into restoring a boat, and then realizing the dream of sailing her. Maybe it is because each time we are cut or injured working the wood, and spill a little blood, we realize that the cost is now complete; one has given in all ways. Perhaps we begin to identify with the boat, and with each screw driven, each plank refastened, a part of ourselves becomes bonded as well to the frames.
This is why I will say, and warn others, about a lesson sorely learned, but perhaps not learned too late: You must never, ever sell, or willingly relinquish, anything to which a part of your soul is inseparably bound. If you do so, you will hunger to retrieve it ever afterward, until it is restored to you. Sometimes, our lives and the fate of things – as well as other people – are inexplicably intertwined. When they are no longer apart, both become whole again.
So I closed her up and went to the marina office to meet the yard owner, to write a check, to secure her release and complete the tedious pages of paperwork, and to arrange trucking, since she was not in proper condition for a sea-journey of hundreds of miles. It would take every resource that I had, but that did not concern me. This was the pearl of great price, and I was ready to sell all that I had in order to obtain it.
I stayed overnight in Rock Hall at a neat little motor lodge down by the harbor, and listened to a band play Jimmy Buffett tunes on the dock next to the Watermen's crab house restaurant. There was an outdoor bar, with a big crowd of friendly locals, and I drank too much cool beer while I daydreamed and watched the many boats coming in off the placid Chesapeake. Their red and green running lights glowed in the gathering dusk as they pushed gentle bow waves through the shimmering water that reflected the golden glow of shoreside lights across the narrow river entrance.
The moon was rising over the bay, and the night was warm and pleasant. I saw Doug, the marina owner at the bar with his wife and friends, and he kindly bought me a drink and paid me a compliment. I saw him speak to his wife, and I knew that he was telling her that I was the one who had come to take the boat home and fix her up.
Later, before I went back to my room to sleep, I walked down to a quiet place on the pier, and felt at peace, connected to my past, my memories of many things flowing together in a steady current down the years of my life like the brackish river flowing seaward beneath my feet. All was in motion again, headed for the open water, and I felt happy to have a part of myself back.
Capt. Mike Martel grew up on Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay, and has swallowed enough of it to truly be part of his environment. He lives in Bristol, R.I., with his wife Denise and son Tom. His other two older children, now grown, have moved southward to warmer climes, and – perhaps understandably – inland. Privateer was built in 1930 at the R.E. McLain & Sons yard in Thomaston, Maine, to a 1929 John Alden design.
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