A young woman finds her man — and her boat
Issue 53 : Mar/Apr 2007
I was 24 years old and in love with the bosun of the Victory chines a three-masted schooner sailing out of Rockland, Maine. I had moved myself and my sister to a cottage, which lacked indoor plumbing, on the coast of Maine. This was necessary in order to be near my sailor the one night a week that he was in port. The summer had been idyllic, but August had arrived and I was due at my new teaching position in North Carolina in less than a month. His time on the Chimes wouldn’t end until October. The angst at a two-month separation was overwhelming, but we were trying to devise a solution. Perhaps he could switch to a tall ship headed south. Maybe he could get in on a delivery. We seemed unable to conjure any possible scenario in which he did not arrive by water.
Suddenly, it hit him: “I’ll just buy my own boat and sail her to you. Then when you finish teaching, we’ll sail to South America together!” I smiled with the confidence that my instincts about this man’s brilliance were dead on. It was the perfect plan, oozing with romance, independence, and ad- venture. And so, having developed the perfect plan, we started the quest for the perfect boat.
We had both worked only on wooden boats, mostly old wooden boats, and were of the mind that you should stick with what you know. Being in Maine, we turned to the wellspring of desired goods. There, the unassuming publication, about 8 inches tall, that graces the countertop of every gas station is, of course, Uncle Henry’s. It is where you turn to search for used cars, rare coins, guinea hens, and old wooden boats. We spent our days apart independently circling ads. We would then compare them when we were reunited. His choices had phrases like “project boat” and “hull nearly complete.” This, as I was hoping for a short separation, concerned me. I wanted at least two masts and was drawn to ads with “ready to circumnavigate” in bold type. Seeing as the financial investment would be his alone, this concerned him.
Last weekend
Then it appeared. The modest ad read, “Canadian yawl. Cedar-on-oak. 35 feet. Cohasset, Maine.” So it was that on our last summer weekend together we went to meet Seguin.
We drove through the night to Boston’s south shore, checked into the only hotel on Nantasket Beach, and crashed. The next morning we tracked down the yard where she was laid up. A small unpaved parking lot of boats, tucked behind a coffee shop and florist, matched the address. The boatyard owner pointed and we followed.
There she was.
Swaddled tightly in layers of faded blue tarps held together by bungee cords was the 62-year-old Nova Scotian-built yawl we were here to meet. I was overcome. I gripped Justin’s hand and whispered, “She has a bowsprit and a boomkin! I want her!” I imagine new parents must feel similarly. The joy and love you feel at that initial meeting blinds you to any flaws. And believe me, there were flaws. Her mizzen lay in the weeds with some discarded boat stands. Her main mast was lashed to the cabintop and a series of supports cluttering the deck. You had to shimmy past it to enter the cabin. Her decks were an attempt at the traditional “buff” color, though much closer to a disturbing tangerine shade. The paint and varnish were peeling, a stanchion was missing, and she’d been out of the water for two years.
I squeezed under the tarps and, on hands and knees, crawled across the deck to the main hatch. The tarps kept out nearly all natural light. Thus, our introduction to the interior came via the sporadic beam of an old flashlight dug out of the back of the car. She had traditional round portholes, a copper sink with a bronze hand pump, and a tremendous amount of custom oak carpentry. Simply put, she had more charm than I was prepared for.
Cultivating the dream
I weaseled back on deck and sat beside the tiller. Justin was pulling up floorboards looking for rot and suspicious repair work. I wasn’t ready for reality. Since learning to sail during my first year of college I had been cultivating the dream of sailing off into the sunset with the man I loved. Now I was possibly on the boat with, possibly, the man. It was simultaneously intoxicating and intimidating to feel my longtime fantasy morphing into something tangible. I gripped the tiller and imagined, as I had so many times before, taking off on that much-anticipated cruising adventure. This time the boat was in focus. I could read the nameboard and see the sailplan. The hull was white with a dark green stripe. As I said, she had a bowsprit and a boomkin. Yet, there were still a few blurry corners in this dream. It was time for more complex focusing. It was time to clarify the person sitting beside me.
I looked down into the cabin at Justin, who was sticking his knife into floor timbers. He must have felt my gaze because he turned to look up at me. His inspection actions were methodical, even cautious, but in his eyes I saw that she had charmed him too.
I called him to the companionway. Balancing my camera on a sawhorse in the cockpit, I set the timer. Justin held out his arm, and I slid in beside him. The flash lit up the deck and our faces. He pulled me to him and gave me a kiss.
And I knew. I knew that I had just been photographed with the man I would marry aboard the first boat we would own.
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