An old gaffer waits patiently for a love affair
Issue 56 : Sept/Oct 2007
Here’s a good old boat in my marina. She turned up maybe a year ago. For the first couple of months she was there, I kept a pretty good eye on her, curious to meet her owner and eager to know more about her. She’s just the kind of boat that I instantly fall in love with: heavily built, yet graceful in a solid sort of way, and showing signs of having been traveling recently. She’s wooden, of course, a double-ender with flush decks and a pinky stern, good solid deck hardware and, best of all, a gaffer. Why I’m drawn to these old boats is simply one of those mysteries that I’ve come to accept. Many consider them, with some good reason, to be little more than interesting relics, but I love them. I’ve always said that someday I’ll own a gaffer. Past 70 now, I find myself wondering if that halyard tackle would be adequate if she were mine or if I’d have to rig additional purchase. Mind you, I’m not in the market for a boat. I still have lots to do on Persistence, another old woody of about the same size and the same era but a different sort of boat altogether.
For several months no one showed up around the old girl and the harbor-master didn’t know anything. “Some guy paid a year’s moorage and left an address in California,” was all she said.
Wendy and I went cruising for a couple of months. When we got back I noticed that the gaffer’s mast was out and lying on the sidedeck, along with the gaff and main boom. The mast was just lying there, unsupported in the middle and already sagging to meet the deck. The shrouds and forestay had been left in an untidy snarl on the foredeck. A peek through a port revealed that the sails had been stuffed willy-nilly down the main hatch and had landed in a heap over the settees and table. I began to watch even more closely for signs of anyone coming around her. No one did.
Jaunty cap
During the winter the snow lay mounded on her rails and the big anchor winch wore a jaunty cap. When the thaws came, black soggy wads of baggywrinkle sagged on the careless coils of rigging and held water for weeks, turning green on their shady sides. She’s still there and she has set me to thinking about these old boats and our connections with them. I’ve decided, my particular old gaffer not-withstanding, that it’s always about love. It may be that her owner has lost his dream . . . or maybe lived it and then moved on to another love.
It comforts me to think that this good old boat in my marina is just waiting for the next young sailors who can squint their eyes at her and get a vivid image of how she could be . . . who can imbue her with their dream. Likely that picture in their minds will be a far cry from what the rest of us will call realistic but, after all, isn’t love almost always about seeing something that most of the others have missed? Maybe it will be a couple, looking like Wendy and I looked when we stood on that dock in the Seattle winter rain looking at Persistence for the fourth — or sixth — time. Her varnish was peeling off in strips. Green foulness gleamed phosphorescently from every crack and crevice. Living plants grew from the cracks on her deck.
“Oh,” my dear wife said, “she looks so terrible . . . we’d better hurry up and buy her.” So the old gaffer waits, growing more of that black-green stuff on her shady side. The hull grass is getting longer now that warm weather is here. From the looks of her, someone did a pretty good job of building her. The planking is still tight. She’ll be all right for another few years at least — though it may already be too late to straighten that sag out of the mast. She’s probably waited before, like Persistence waited for us.
Reassure them
But I wish I could meet them now — those young sailors who are coming — so I could tell them about the old boat in my marina. I’d reassure them that they could do it. If it’s a female dreamer, does she think she needs a guy first? If a male dreamer, does he lack the funds? Do they not know how to begin? I’d tell them about my experiences and how, bit by bit, I learned about old boats.
Right off, I probably couldn’t tell them what I’ve learned from those old boats; that would come later. But I’d surely tell them stories about the people who will come along the dock minutes after they have tied up to tell them their stories and ask for theirs.
I’m an optimist. They’ll be along, that serious person or couple with the distant look in their eyes. They need her. She needs them.
Brooke Elgie and his wife, Wendy Stern, have cruised the “upper left corner” of North America for many years. They primarily cruise in Alaska, where they have adopted the town of Tenakee Springs and are building a home.
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