For Koshare, early spring came in December

Boston’s skyline framed by a dramatic sea and sky, and viewed from a yacht underway. Photo by Christopher Birch

March/April 2018

By Christopher Birch

There we were: In an engineless sailboat, in the Atlantic, in December. Paddling. Sea and sky were the same shade of slate. Light snow further blurred the boundaries between frozen, liquid and gas. Koshare’s faded dirty whiteness blended into the scene. We’d been paddling for hours, taking breaks from time to time to blow on our hands and watch the sea fill up with snow. It was day four of a 100-mile sailing trip, a voyage that could have been completed in less than 24 hours had the weather been better. The wait for wind, I concluded, was seasonally appropriate; there is supposed to be a lot of waiting in Advent. Morale was high despite the slow pace. The calm was a welcome change from the cold headwind that we had been fighting earlier in the day. The snow added an element of holiday cheer. The most significant mood-booster, no doubt, was the fact that we’d just crossed the halfway point in our trip.

Our paddling produced almost no boat speed, maybe half a knot. She was a heavy boat and there were only two of us. The paddles weren’t very good, a little short and made for rowing, not paddling. It gave us something to do, though, and the exercise was the only thing that had warmed us in days. At the top of my wish list was a single hot burner on which to brew coffee. I desperately wanted coffee, but there was no stove and there was no coffee. There also was no tea, or soup, or stew, or oatmeal, or eggs, or steak.

Matt purchased the boat for $1 from a marina in Hyannis, Mass., on the south coast of the Cape, where it had fallen into disrepair after being left unattended for years. The purchase-and-sale agreement stipulated that the boat, a 1973 Bristol 34, be removed from the marina property immediately. “This is going to be exciting!” Matt told me, “We’ll move the boat to Boston,” (where we both lived) “and I’ll have all winter to get her sorted out.” I agreed to help and down we went to Hyannis to get her. Yes, it was December, but it wasn’t that long of a trip, there wouldn’t be any Red Sox games to miss, and, because we both worked in the boating industry, we weren’t otherwise occupied with much of anything else.

I describe Koshare as engineless, but that’s not entirely true. A big and heavy looking engine squatted in the exact spot where you would expect to find one. It didn’t run, though, and that was par for the course with this boat. Not much of anything was in good working order. Vandals had gone through her and absconded with many components. There was no stove, no batteries, no electronics, no dodger and no bimini. Both of the halyard winches at the mast were gone. The spindles for both of the primary winches in the cockpit were still firmly bolted in place, but only one had a drum. Whenever we tacked Koshare, we first had to move that one drum over to the winch spindle on the other side of the cockpit. The nut that secured the steering wheel was missing, requiring the helmsman to maintain constant forward pressure on the wheel to prevent it from falling off. The most irksome aspect of the condition of the boat was her bottom. She hadn’t been cleaned or painted in five years, perhaps 10. One thing was for sure: The boat wasn’t race ready. I had no good way to gauge speed, but I doubt we ever topped three knots through the water or over the bottom during our 100-mile trip.

The Cape Cod Canal was out of the question, thanks to the condition of our engine, so we headed east out of Hyannis towards Pollock Rip. Then we turned north to run along the outside of the Cape, and finally northwest to Boston. It was a wet ride with plenty of water on deck thanks to spray, rain and snow. There was plenty of water belowdecks, too, thanks to an abundance of deck leaks. We found it pretty easy to keep the peanut butter dry. The lid on that Skippy jar produced a good tight seal. Absolutely everything else was wet. The nights were very dark, and long, too. Not for a moment was I anything other than very cold.

It was a satisfying trip, despite the challenges of winter. We were thrilled with the boat. She was rising like a phoenix and we felt good about our role in her rescue. The condition of a boat is always headed in one of two directions – she’s either getting better, or she’s getting worse. I’ve discovered that the key to my happiness in boating is to be associated with boats that are trending toward better days. I find that chapter in a boat’s life to be infinitely more joyous than the chapters where she’s suffering from neglect, and decaying as a result. For now at least, the sad chapters in this boat’s life were behind her and her future looked bright. This trip was the moment of change, and it was a rewarding thing to be a part of.

Pollock Rip is a shifty little alley between the southern tip of Monomoy Island and the northern tip of Nantucket Island. So shifty, in fact, the Feds struggle to mark it. There’s a lot of current and the sand out there is on the move. The rate portion of our time/rate/distance equation was unreliable. As a result, coordinating our transit with the tide charts and associated current predictions was a challenge. Ideally, you go through here with the current. We ended up doing the opposite. The wind was also at odds with the current and this created steep, breaking waves that stacked up to a considerable height. Pollock Rip is known to be a particularly foggy part of America. On the day of our visit, the channel lived up to reputation on this variable. We never did find some of the buoys, and our concerns about the depth made for a tense, and seemingly endless, passage. Matt swears he saw the bottom at one point in the trough of a wave. I’m not so sure he did. Either way, the very thought of being able to distinguish bottom features 15 miles away from any harbor was wildly disconcerting, especially in this season and in this boat.

Spring is the season of the boat. It’s a two-month holiday celebrating the rebirth of our floating savior. All the rituals of bottom painting, waxing, cleaning and tuning are joyously attended to with the confident understanding that the love will be returned in abundance during the summer ahead. For the past decade, Koshare had missed this holiday every year. The festive season would envelope the hearts and keels of all her neighbors and Koshare’s neglect would grow deeper. It was a long, cold time for this boat. Her calendar was stuck in winter and no one came to turn the page.

The outer Cape produced a string of lighthouses that crept past us to port. Neptune, Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter – each one was an anodyne little planet marking our long, slow route back to Earth. Lights orbiting on and off to march out the infinite beat of their independent calendars. Did you know that winter on Neptune lasts for more than 40 Earth years? The dark and the cold and the wet, rhythmic roll of the boat twisted and dulled all logic.

An oil tanker rounded the top of the Cape with us. She was the Kenyan and we were the overweight charity runner in this Boston Marathon. New Englanders like to burn oil in winter, and this big tanker looked eager to make it happen. That ship was the only company we had on our entire trip: no other boats, no sea life, no birds. All the whales and tuna had left the southwest corner of Stellwagen Bank, taking the whalewatch boats and the fishing fleet with them. The place was still there, but it was empty, waiting, like a summerhouse, shuttered for winter. It was very quiet, just us and the water and sometimes the wind.

We finally reached Boston Light at midnight, marking the start of the sixth day of our trip. (It was hard not to think of other times when at just about this point in the journey, I’d be sitting on a bar stool in Bermuda with a dark ’n’ stormy in hand). The tide was falling and the wind was strong and building out of the northwest. It would be upwind sailing all the way in. The end of this journey of rebirth wasn’t going to be easy. The familiar and narrow channels of the harbor required near constant tacking. We hauled that icy winch drum back and forth across the cockpit countless times. We cradled it the same way a running back carries a football, always afraid that we would fumble and lose it over the side. The lazy sheet would freeze stiff during its short naps. Working it back into action around the winch drum with frozen hands, tack after tack, was our grueling work that lasted that entire night.

Caring for a boat is the best way to show respect to those that designed her and built her. I once saw a boat get cut up with a chainsaw and tossed into a dumpster. It was a sad sight. Everyone had just given up on that boat. Our efforts out there with the one winch drum in the cold night wind and with the paddles in the snow was the right thing to do for her. It was a calendar oddity, but for this boat, early spring came in December.

Chris Birch is the proprietor of Birch Marine Inc. on Long Wharf in Boston where he has been building, maintaining and restoring boats for the past 34 years.