not on amazone
BY SUSAN PETERSON GATELEY (ARIEL ASSOCIATES/WHISKEY HILL PRESS; 150 PAGES; $12.50+$2.00 POSTAGE AND HANDLING FROM THE AUTHOR’S ONLINE STORE.
REVIEW BY CAROLYN CORBETT
LAKE SHORE, MINNESOTA
Susan Peterson Gateley’s memoir is the story of desiring, acquiring, and sailing Sara B, a wooden gaff-rigged schooner. Gateley and her husband bought the schooner, complete with two masts and five sails, on eBay in 2004, after a road trip to view the boat in person.
They lived “on the edge” with Sara B in a number of ways. They were on the edge socio-economically as self-employed Schedule C filers with a small business and a needy boat. They were on the geographic edge — the shoreline of Lake Ontario. And Sara B herself was on the edge at the time they met her, kept afloat by two bilge pumps and “the tenuous force that owners of old wooden boats call “memory” that still held her aged timbers together.”
That first season, Sara B’s owners considered their eBay purchase to be either a gift or a curse, depending on the day. “No matter whether it was a good or a bad day, our relationship with her had an intensity far beyond the norm for boats and boat owners. The frequent swings between euphoria (when we were sailing her) and despair (when we were working on her, which was most of the time) were wearing, to say the least.”
By 2011 there were half a dozen “associates” contributing time or money to Sara B’s upkeep and, eventually, the decision was reached to cover the classic woodie with fiberglass, creating a leak-free hull. They had qualms about doing so, but it cost less than 5% of what a traditional rebuild would have cost, and they went for it, figuring that Sara B, with her new cover of plastic, could well outlive them.
Susan intersperses Sara B’s story with forays into history: the HMS Ontario; Oswego, claimed to be the oldest freshwater port; New York’s waterfront and the Hudson; and the shipwrecks (and the wreck of a B24 bomber) in Mexico Bay on Lake Ontario. The book also features black and white pictures of the beautiful little schooner. It tells a good story, though it could benefit from some punctuation editing.
