Skipper at the boatyard. Photo courtesy Mark Barrett
August 2024
By Mark Barrett
Skipper was 15 years old when we had him put down. He was suffering from several ailments, including severe hip dysplasia, a condition common in golden retrievers. He was too weak to come to work with me at the boatyard for the last two years of his life, but on the day of his final appointment at the vet I asked my wife to bring him by one last time so he could say goodbye to all his old friends on the crew.
It was early afternoon when she pulled into the boatyard in her SUV. Skipper was laid out on his side in the way-back. When I opened the hatchback, he lifted his head and sniffed the air. He must have recognized all the old smells, but especially those emanating from the kitchen door of the Chart Room Restaurant, the iconic eating and drinking establishment on the property. Much to my surprise, he struggled to his feet, climbed down from the back of the car, and loped unsteadily towards that back door where for so many years members of the waitstaff had slipped him scraps of food. His old legs gave out before he could get there and he collapsed onto his side on a small patch of grass. There he lay, unable to rise.
Boatyard workers are generally a pretty tough bunch, thick skinned and not prone to outward emotional displays. It was not so on that day, as one-by-one they knelt next to Skipper on that patch of grass and stroked his head gently and said their final goodbyes to the old boatyard dog. More than a few of the guys were wiping tears from their eyes as they stood up and walked away.
Skipper came to be the boatyard dog by accident. I took him to work one day when he couldn’t stay at home for some reason. The boss, John Burman, saw him in my car and said, “Hey, Mark, why don’t you let the poor dog out so he can run around?”
“Really?” I said.
“Sure, why not? It’s been a long time since we’ve had a boatyard dog around here. Let’s see how he performs the job.”
What is the job of a boatyard dog, anyway? Mainly to provide companionship, I suppose, like most dogs, but not just for one person or one family. A real boatyard dog is a friend for the whole crew and all the customers. Skipper performed that job, and took it one step further, also befriending the frequent transient boaters who stopped at Kingman Yacht Center, in Cataumet, Mass. every summer on their way up and down the New England Coast. The first words spoken by the many repeat transients as soon as they landed at the dock were, “Hey, is that dog Skipper still around?” Soon enough he would arrive to greet them in the hopes of getting a pat on the head – or maybe something to eat.
In spite of his lanky build, which he maintained for his entire life, Skipper was a voracious eater and an inveterate beggar. Not only was he a beggar, but he was also a very clever and highly skilled food thief. I think the very first person to learn that lesson was the old, cranky parts manager, Joe Souza, who has now long since gone himself to that parts room in the sky. Skipper was in his first few days of roaming free around the yard when he got Joe’s lunch. Joe told the story often and always with a tone of amazement and awe in his voice.
“I got up and went down one of the aisles to look for a part, and I’m coming back, and there’s that damn dog,” Joe would say, shaking his head. “He’s over there pulling my sandwich right off the desk. I swear to God, he wolfed it down in three seconds flat. The whole sandwich! He inhaled it!”
Skipper had a daily routine. The first place he would head in the morning as soon as I let him out of my car was the houseboat in a slip in the back basin. A woman named Laurie lived aboard and was one of Skipper’s best friends. She always had dog biscuits for him. After that early morning visit, he would head for the tiny convenience store on the property and wait for Frank to arrive, the retired schoolteacher who owned the shop back in those days. There Skipper would beg relentlessly until he received half a plain donut, a stale one from the day before, but he didn’t care about that. After that he might go down to the little beach next to the main docks and chase some ducks or go for a swim. Then it was on to roaming the office building, upstairs and down, and the ship’s store, and all over the yard and docks looking for any unattended food. (I did feed him every day, in case you were wondering, but it had no discernible effect on his stealing and begging habits.) If the Chart Room was open for the season, he would regularly stop by the back door to the kitchen where Wendy or Ally, two women on the waitstaff who particularly loved him, would slip him something good, like sliced turkey or an occasional prime rib bone, his favorite.
Eventually, everybody who worked in the offices or the yard knew to guard their lunch, so Skipper was forced to prey on the subcontractors who were new to the boatyard. On more than one occasion he found me wherever I was working and dropped something at my feet, like a brown lunch bag or a plastic bag with a sandwich in it that he had removed from a subcontractor’s cooler somewhere. The expression on Skipper’s face said, “Hey, look what I found just lying around. Is it alright if I eat this?”
A subcontractor named Mark Reilly had the contract to do the shrink-wrapping of all the boats in the fall. Since it was seasonal work, he had a different crew helping him almost every year, and it wasn’t always easy to find people to do that kind of work, so he wasn’t too picky about who he hired. Sometimes he hired ex-cons or parolees. Mark approached me in one of the sheds one day where I was working. He had a big grin on his face.
“You should have seen what Skipper just did,” he said. “This guy I hired is so happy to be out of jail, so happy to have a job, right? First day on the job and he’s on his lunch break, and he’s standing there with me looking out over the water, holding half an Italian sub in his hand, and he says, ‘Look at that. Look at how beautiful the water looks.’ And right then, while the guy’s gazing at the beautiful scenery after being in jail for however long, here comes Skipper from behind, and he snatches the sub right out of the guy’s hand and takes off like a shot. You should have seen this guy chasing after him!”
“Did he catch him?” I said. “Did he get his sandwich back?”
“Hell no! You’re not going to catch that dog!”
That wasn’t the first or last time I felt obligated to reimburse somebody because of Skipper’s thieving ways. When he was bad, I tied him up in one of the sheds and sent him to his chair. (It hadn’t always been his chair, but after he sat in it a few times when he was soaking wet, nobody else wanted to sit there.) Skipper hated being tied up, and he knew he was being punished, but nothing I tried ever broke him of his thieving ways.
Frank had a similar story to Mark’s. One morning he sold a family of transient boaters coffee and donuts, and while they were heading back across the parking lot to the docks and their boat, one of their kids, maybe six or seven years old, was carelessly dangling a donut as he walked. Frank watched from the store window as Skipper snuck up from behind, waited for his chance and then quickly snatched the donut right out of the kid’s hand and took off. “You should have heard that kid yell,” Frank said. “He was screaming like a banshee. ‘Hey! Hey! That dog stole my donut! That dog stole my donut!’ I laughed so hard I almost peed in my pants.”
Transient boaters were easy prey. I once observed Skipper in action from up at the dock house while he casually followed some transients down the ramp and onto the fuel dock and out to their boat which was tied up at the T-dock on the end. They had two dock carts full of provisions and were preparing to shove off and continue on their summer cruise. Skipper waited until they were out of sight down below, then he carefully removed a loaf of French bread from the cart and started back up the dock with it. It was sticking out of his mouth a good foot on either side of his head. Can dogs tiptoe? Because that’s what it looked like he was doing. I immediately ran down there and met him before he got to the foot of the ramp. He had that familiar guilty look on his face. I took the loaf of bread from him, a baguette I guess it’s called, which he only reluctantly released, and put it back in their cart. Nobody saw a thing.
There are many dangers for a dog in a boatyard, with forklifts and trailers and other heavy equipment moving around, not to mention hazardous materials and chemicals a dog might breathe in or ingest. Luckily Skipper never had an issue with anything like that. However, he did follow a couple of customers off the property one day when they walked with their own dog up to the small grocery store about a mile away, an adventure that did not turn out well. Their dog was on a leash, and obviously Skipper wasn’t. According to their account, Skipper saw a squirrel across the road and chased after it. When he darted out into the road, he got hit by a car, or more correctly, he ran smack into the side of a moving car.
They called the marina, and I got the call over the radio and jumped in my car and rushed up there. I found Skipper lying on the grass in someone’s front yard. At first, I thought he was dead, but he raised his head for a second, looked at me, and then put it back down and closed his eyes. I carried his limp body to my car and rushed to a nearby animal hospital, which thankfully was only 10 minutes away. They kept him there for the day and checked him out. He eventually woke up and he had a big lump on his head, but nothing was broken. In a day or two he was back to his old self. A few days later a woman pulled into the boat yard and pointed out the big dent Skipper’s head had made in the side of her car. She demanded that I pay the $500 deductible on her insurance, since Skipper was off his leash. I reluctantly forked it over. (Most of the time I tried to avoid admitting he was my dog, but I had to fess up that time.) Skipper learned his lesson from that incident. He associated leaving the boatyard with a bad headache and he never wandered off the property again.
There is no question that having a dog around a boatyard is good for morale. Research has shown that petting a dog has a calming, therapeutic effect and can actually lower blood pressure in the person doing the petting. Skipper was happy to provide that service around the boatyard at any time, but one instance stands out in my mind. There had been an accident at sea where an elderly couple sailing a 36-foot sailboat made an unfortunate navigational error. During a bad blow on Buzzards Bay, when the seas were very rough, they mistakenly cut inside Red #2 at the tip of Scraggy Neck and put their boat up on the rocks at Southwest Ledge. The boat got hung up on the ledge for a while and took a terrible pounding in the waves. The hull was heavily damaged, but luckily the boat didn’t get holed and sink. They were able to get out a distress call and finally they got dragged off the ledge by Sea Tow and towed into the dock at our marina. The boat was in shambles when it arrived, with the sails down all over the deck and lines tangled everywhere. They were both badly shaken by the incident, maybe even in shock. The husband’s arms were cut up and there was blood all over his white shirt. I was involved in helping the boat land and helping them off the boat and up to the chairs outside the dock house so they could sit down and gather themselves. When I say elderly, I mean they were in their late seventies or early eighties. It had to have been a harrowing experience.
Skipper was right there on the scene. He sat at the woman’s feet and put his head down on her lap. She stroked his head and talked to him in that high-pitched voice people use with dogs and babies. “Oh, what a nice, sweet boy you are,” she kept saying. There is no doubt that Skipper helped calm her down and relieve some of the stress she was experiencing. I like to think that Skipper sensed how shaken and upset she was, and he wanted to help her. Either that, or she had dog biscuits in her pocket, and he smelled them.
Toward the end of Skipper’s tenure, a couple of the other employees, Johnny DiCarlo and Matt LaValley, brought their own puppies to the yard. Matt brought a husky named Sinatra and Johnny brought a lab named Bruschi, named after the great Patriots linebacker at the time. When Skipper was gone, Bruschi took over the job as the official boatyard dog. He also had a long, storied career in that role, which is a whole other chapter, but now Bruschi is gone, too. Hopefully there is another boatyard dog to follow in his footsteps, and another, and another.
Every boatyard should have one.
Frequent contributor Mark Barrett is a yacht broker at Cape Yachts in Dartmouth, Mass., and he lives in Sandwich, on Cape Cod. Mark and his cruising partner Diana sail their 1988 Freedom 30 Scout out of Red Brook Harbor, in Buzzards Bay.
