Sagadahoc Story #58: 9/20/98

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. 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. 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.

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.