Sagadahoc Story #58: 9/20/98
The Tinge Begins.
The trees have been quiet, except for an occasional whispering.
Content to wriggle out their branches and spread new foliage where
the ice cropped them. The saturated greens of early summer have
long since faded, and a breeze turns the leaves' undersides into
a pale shivering. The big flora has been content to be background.
The flowers have done all the shouting.
Now the trees are beginning to dance in equinoxial winds, showing
off, and the tinge begins. Scarlets in the cold bottoms, along
the wets, where the trees have been stressed. Orange on a high
branch here. Russet on edge of a creek there. The great wakeup
call of the woods, flashing at the corners of your eyes. The tramp
with a paintbox rubbernecks in glee.
Time for fall sailing, too, with the marshes in reddened gold,
and the marsh hawks swooping. Peggy and I went out to empty the
teacher's head, and slid up on a gravelly beach, on the east side
of Center's Point. Went for the last bay swim of the year. Cool
in the dark brown waters under the trees. Wednesday, after installing the big crustacean, I took a piece of exterior plywood down to patch the transom.
Rowed out, cast the mooring, and gently motored up alongside the
SarahAnne, tied up at Jimmy's. There's power on the float at Jimmy's
to supply Delano's houseboat, and I was trying to get close to
the outlet. I lept aboard Bruce's rail and slammed my head on
the cabintop. Staggered back into Sharpie, teeth locked, stunned.
When I pried my jaws apart, a chuck of tooth fell in my hand.
What I get for messing with Bruce's karma.
Coming home the false transom in Sharpie's well disintegrated.
So rotten it crumbled away under the outboard. We nursed her upriver
to the mooring, and began thinking about boatbuilding, again.
Fifteen years in the weather is about what you can hope for from
red oak. The alternative is a dry boatshed, or fiberglas. Sharpie
is mostly rot from her well transom aft.
Bruce fell off a toot in early August, and bunged up his knee.
Swelled like a watermelon. A black watermelon. He was on his back
for a couple weeks, then hobbling with a crutch. Now he's on again,
off again, and not looking too swift. Needlesstosay, his eel gear
has had some long sets.
Just as well. There's been no eels. The elver fishery has been
a great success. In a handful of years they've caught up all the
seed stock. Brilliant. Another great success for fisheries development
and management. Jimmy hauled his boat and gear in August, and
put the works up for sale. Bruce brings in a few traps every time
he limps out. I'm still shaking my head, poking at a broken tooth.
Getting the plywood transom in proves to be a comedy of errors,
and I decide to postpone a trial run until the signs are more
propitious. By Friday the shaking trees and beckoning sunshine
have rattled my cage. Everything I lay hand to comes out backwards,
so I take Jo sailing. Just as a technical experiment, mind you.
Jo is momentarily unemployed. She's been working in the local
school system as an Ed Tech, following Ivy, her daughter from
school to school. One way to solve the daycare problem, but hard
on the spirit. Ed Tech is an excuse for underpaying and overworking
your staff, and Jo has been shunted from one job to another without
any regard for the skills she was hired for. A graphics designer
with years of computer expertise, Jo started out in the school
library, helping kids and staff with the technology, but she ended
up as just another warm body in the administrative shuffle. Don't
get me started on school administration.
Jo once spent time as crew on a Greenpeace vessel, and is an avid
sailor. When she and Brent met me at lunch it didn't take much
persuading, and there was a good breeze in the bay.
Sometimes, when someone else is at the tiller, you see a familiar
course in a new way. From Cathance Landing downriver, and across
the bay to The Chops, is Sharpie's world. We've sailed this estuary
in every combination of wind and tide for fifteen years. Know
where the eddies are, and the lees, the sandbanks and the backwinds.
Gotten so I can read the surface ruffles and the subtle shades
of brown water.
Sharpie, as you might expect of a boat I've built, is contrary.
To come about you cry out hard a-lee, and shove the tiller hard
a-weather. You sit on the lee rail until your ass gets wet. She
steers with an upright stick, like a Newfie trap skiff, and her
original configuration had this tiller running fore and aft. Forward
was a port turn, aft was starboard. Traditionally Newfoundlanders
only turn a boat sunwise, to the right, and Sharpie refused a
port turn her first two years. What you get for Newfie steering.
Now she's merely fickle. So Jo was having fun trying to con her.
Jo was also determined to make good at least 90 degrees from tack
to tack, but with the ebb running hard and a stiff wind behind
it, we were lucky to beat 180 degrees, and I was smiling at Jo's
stubbornness. And surprised at the minute details in my mental
map.
How the southwest wind piles up along Center's Point, right along
the edge of the shoal ground, just hard enough to coax up a few
degrees more to windward. Maybe make the point. How you can surf
on a reach, board up, across the bar that makes out toward the
Muddy. While everything else has changed about this landscape
since the European coming.. the woods clearcut and regrown, farms
come and gone, upriver silt in the channels, the wild rice and
the ducks dwindled away, eels going.. the winds and currents are
virtually unchanged. Invisible streams of energy in perpetual
replication. Local knowledge is the map of their confluence. How
they meet the fixed obstacles.
So I know that Weird Eddy hangs out in the corners of the channel,
waiting to knock off your hat, or knock down your inattention.
Or that you can sneak in the back door across the Muddy flats,
when the tide is foul. I know why there are iron spikes and rings
in certain ledges on the shore, because those are the places where
a sailboat has to wait for the flood. Now we crank the iron breeze.
Carefully, if you have a tender transom. We hadn't thought about
the clock once, and I dropped Jo off on the float just in time
for her to pick up Ivy. I limped out to the mooring.
Wearing out an old boat is as bad as losing an old dog. I keep
encountering Bagel's shade out in the woods, and it makes me loath
to ramble there. There are rocks I've left Sharpie's paint on,
and places where I know she will only wear, never tack. Will it
be the same to sail here in a different boat?
Then there's the enticement of new designs and freshcut cedar.
Capt. Ken is talking about building himself a lapstrake trailer
sailer Sharpie's size. A tight dry hull on wheels, in the dooryard
behind Ebba? The stuff of winter dreaming. Or maybe it's time
for the scow sloop David and I have jawed about for years. Another
traditional replica for Merrymeeting Bay, and beyond. Lucky thing
I didn't make Seven Eagles big enough to build boats in, or it
would be goodbye art studio, hello strongback. For now we'll enjoy
the colored season with CC on the bow of Sharpie. Fair winds to
you.
A scow sloop.
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