by Mary South
I couldn't believe my luck. I had all but given up on the idea of outdoor space as I researched trawlers. Even the very expensive ones had tiny rear cockpits-on smaller boats designers almost always preferred to utilize every square inch to maximize the accommodations.
Much as I might want to be sunbathing, the pilothouse would be where I'd spend most of my time underway and I loved Shady Lady's. It was shippy, with a forward rake to its big view. The instruments were all aligned overhead on a cleverly hinged shelf that folded down for access to the wires at the back. The electronics weren't new and they weren't fancy, but there seemed to be plenty of them. It was hard to say what was missing since I couldn't even identify most of the equipment. But I liked the white chart table that was topped by a cabinet with four mahogany-stained flat drawers for holding paper charts. There was an upholstered bench with a toggle switch on the armrest that Skip explained you could use like a joystick to maneuver the boat around crab pots and other obstacles without having to get up and adjust the autopilot.
The helm was a stainless steel wheel to starboard, just above
the steps to the salon.
If the pilothouse had excited me, the salon left me speechless. There were seven 23-inch portholes with tempered glass and aluminum bolts and hardware. (Most boats I had seen had portholes of 9 inches or less, if they had any at all. The trend was toward larger, squarer, picture windows.) The interior felt bright and spacious, with more than 6½ feet between the cabin sole and the painted steel beams that ran overhead. Usually, interiors turned out to be smaller than they looked in website photos, but I was amazed by the size of the salon. In the forward port corner was a galley with a stainless steel sink, a small wood-topped cutting counter and a full-size gas stove. A big cabinet with reach-down refrigerator compartments bordered one side, and perpendicular to that was a long countertop, with storage underneath.
Behind the counter was the sitting area: nothing fancy-a varnished trestle table with a matching bench on one side and an upholstered settee on the other. The white surfaces with dark wood drawer fronts and trim (known as "Herreshoff style" in boating circles) continued throughout the boat and did a lot to keep things cheerful.
At the forward end of the salon, a short flight of stairs led down to the guestroom. It had a double berth and a small head on the port side and a single berth on the starboard side. Overhead was a big square hatch that propped wide open for sunlight and air. The portholes down here were somewhat smaller but still very big.
If you turned and faced the stern, you were in front of another doorway with metal steps that went down into the engine room. Because Shady Lady had a box keel, the engine sat down very low, providing extra space and stability. You could walk all the way around the engine, which was a very basic Ford NorEast 135 horsepower diesel. Of course, I knew absolutely nothing about anything in this engine room at the time and planned to have an expert survey it for me. In the meantime, Skip showed me all of the well-thought-out details and explained that this was an excellent diesel to have because parts were readily available for it anywhere in the world. Everything on this boat seemed to be about simplicity and good design.
I had looked at enough boats to know that the average engine "room" was hidden under a hatch in the salon sole. Once you pulled up a bunch of heavy floor panels, you faced the unappetizing prospect of crawling down into a tiny dark hole with a big hot engine and no room for maneuvering. That was what an engine room looked like. This one was bigger and brighter (and probably cleaner) than my first apartment in New York City.
We passed back through the salon and down the steps to the master stateroom in the stern. On the starboard wall was a white countertop above a series of built-in varnished drawers. There was a queen-size bed with room to walk around on either side. On the wall at the foot of the bed was more storage: two dark varnished cupboards on either side of a matching bookcase. A countertop and sink lined the port wall, with a toilet tucked away behind a small privacy wall. At the other end was a steel shower stall with a built-in bench. Big portholes everywhere.
I was beside myself. This boat appeared to have almost everything I wanted, even though I had long since concluded that it was going to be impossible to find at any price.
I shot a roll of photos and then Skip locked up. We sat down at the small lakeside concession stand, and I started filling out the necessary paperwork for making an offer. I didn't even need to think it over. What I knew about boats was very little, but I had fallen in love at first sight. This was my boat. I had to get it. There would be a survey before our deal closed, and that would give me an opportunity to back out if my beloved was revealed to be a crazy waste of money.
Skip had some fried conch and a Heineken as he walked me through the forms. I was too wound up to eat, but I was not about to stand by and witness the tragic spectacle of a man drinking alone. My beer was icy cold, the day was swelteringly hot and I was happy as a clam.
I flew home, and two days later, my belongings were gone, I was no longer a homeowner and I had made a deal on the boat of my dreams.
P EO P L E O F T E N A S K M E , why this adventure, why a boat and a life on the water? There's a popular belief that those who go down to the sea in ships must do so because they were born to it-or because they were exposed to it so young that they caught it, like some kind of virus.
In my case, I have no single, logical explanation, though I can offer up a host of coincidences. I have lived near the ocean, off and on, throughout my life. I crossed the Atlantic by ship several times in my youth. My first crush was on a Russian sailor and my second on an Irish fisherman. And then there's blood: my grandfather's brother was an admiral in the navy. And my grandfather, who retired as brigadier general in the Marine Corps, was the naval attaché to Brazil for a time and, after his retirement, a public relations director for the famed Moore-McCormack ocean liners. Hard to say what's cause and what's effect. But I often find myself marveling at the intersection of (an often unknown) past and the present in my life. Finding my boat on Lake Okeechobee is an example. Some people call this coincidence, or synchronicity, or serendipity. Call it what you will, but the older I get, the harder I find it to believe that anything is entirely accidental.
And it was comforting to remind myself of this belief as I waded into the grueling process of making the Shady Lady mine. Though the owner and I came to an agreement on the price very quickly, I was unprepared for how difficult it would be to get financing. I had about 50 percent of the boat's purchase price to put down in cash, but I immediately ran into other obstacles that threatened my deal.
First, I went to a specialized marine broker, who shops for money for boat purchases much the way a mortgage broker does for home buyers. She was kind but very discouraging. The fact that the Shady Lady was not a production boat but a custom build was a big strike against her in a lender's book. Boat lenders, like banks, look for "comparables" when you're applying for a mortgage. Obviously, if you're not getting a brand-name boat that thousands of other people also own, the lender doesn't have any similar boats to evaluate it against.
This prejudice was a frustrating discovery because the Shady Lady was as seaworthy as they come-her steel hull was much less prone to damage in collisions with rocks, docks or other boats than a wooden or fiberglass vessel. And as long as you're willing to fight a tireless crusade against rust, steel is remarkably impervious to the harsh home offered by the sea. That's why almost all commercial ships are custom-made of steel. But, let's face it, common sense is anathema to the bureaucratic decision-making process.
Last but not least amongst my prospective stumbling blocks, the broker warned me, boats are considered luxury purchases, and because they are mobile, lenders require very high, if not perfect, credit scores and substantial extra assets in the bank as additional assurance that you're not some fly-by-night. With my collateral assets sold and my new self-employed status, I was pretty much a boat lender's worst nightmare. She suggested I go directl
y to my local bank. I felt like a patient who has just been given a specialist's phone number in sympathetic tones that implied "Poor thing. Let her at least go through the motions." I suspected the diagnosis would be terminal. It was.
Now I was worried. I was running out of options-I might have to let this deal go and start over. I knew, too, that the kind of boat I could buy for half the price of the Shady Lady was going to be much less than half the boat.
With absolutely no confidence at all, I told the boat broker of my difficulties and asked if the owner would consider holding the loan for me, in return for 10 percent interest. (With my usual economic savvy, I pulled the 10 percent number out of thin air-it seemed worth his while but was still less than what a major bank might charge.) Much to my surprise-and immense relief-he agreed to my proposal and we set a closing date.
But that didn't mean my troubles were over. Oh, no. There was still the survey to come, and then I had to get marine insurance. The fun was just beginning.
CHAPTER THRE E
Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.
-PROVERB
A month before my boat closing, and a week after my house closing, I returned from a short, sunny vacation in Brazil to a late March snowstorm in New York. The dirt road to my brother's Connecticut barn where all my belongings were stored was impassable, which meant that all of the careful packing I had done for the boat had been pointless. That would teach me to deviate from the trusted Hefty-bag method. Armed with only the duffel I had packed for my beach getaway-which contained a pair of sandals, a pair of moccasins, a bathing suit, suntan lotion, two pairs of khakis, two sarongs, four men's button-downs, an assortment of baseball caps and several cups worth of sand-I piled my two trusty canine companions, Samba and Heck, into the car and we left for Florida. My classes at the Chapman School of Seamanship would start in a week, and I needed to get down there a few days before that to find a temporary apartment and rush the boat closing along.
The drive south was more fun than I'd expected. It was exciting to be watching my old life wind away in the rearview mirror as I sped toward the beginning of my new one. I made the trip in two days, with overnight stops in North Carolina and Georgia. The I-95 corridor was bleak, though. Every exit trumpeted its dreary offerings of Comfort Inn, Motel Six, Red Roof Inn, Denny's and McDonald's. The food was always lousy, the coffee was watery swill, the ambiance was pure plastic with a Muzak overlay, the rooms were always dark and airless with low ceilings and ugly mauve bedspreads. The irony, of course, was that I never went to these establishments, so being forced to frequent them was a form of exotic, if cheerless, travel for me.
Not that I am a snob-at least, not in the traditional sense. I grew up in a family with great taste and very little money. In tenth grade, all I wanted was to live in a vinyl-clad split-level with wall-to-wall carpet, like everyone else. But the house we moved into that year wasn't much to look at-unless you squinted. Very hard. Three stories tall in the front, with four square towers, the faded clapboard front of the rundown manse was connected to an older, simpler wing from the 1700s.
The entire house had faded to the color of a winter sky, but it was strangled in green vines. My parents fell instantly in love with the place, and several phone calls later, we moved in to what was known locally as the Campbell Mansion. The owner's great grandparents had modeled it after their ancestral castle in Scotland. Despite the fact that it had a small fountain in a side yard, a many-mullioned sunroom with a tilting terra-cotta floor, a parquetry-floored ballroom and twenty-four other rooms, I never failed to giggle that year when someone referred to our house as "the mansion." It had character, for sure, but the floors all sloped. In the winter, we sealed off most of the house and stayed in the back wing, where the inside of the windows were often covered with frost.
My dreams of suburbia died a slow, bitter death after the first three days at the new place. The entire family spent this time hacking away the ivy from the windows, so that the kitchen could see light for the first time in decades. But, I have to hand it to my parents-within a month we had refinished all the floors, painted all the walls white, hung art, unboxed books and rolled out the threadbare orientals. And it was beautiful. My friends, most of whom lived in stuffy, overheated houses with fake wood paneling, would come to my house where something homemade was always cooking and classical music played, and say with reverence, "Wow. I wish I lived in a place like this. Your parents are so cool."
It was true, in retrospect. Mom and Dad never worried about conforming, and despite an income that made raising four kids quite a feat, they made sure they spent their money wisely: we almost never went to the movies or out to dinner, which other families seemed to do all the time. Instead, we'd be commanded to entertain ourselves. As we got older, we entertained them instead, with art shows and short plays, where we charged a small admission fee (naturally).
In our house, new clothes usually happened once a year, right before school started. I later realized how many of our exotic and delicious meals cost only a few dollars to assemble. Arroz con pollo. Feijoada. Beef stroganoff. Chili con carne. And always a big salad. My parents somehow squirreled away enough to take us all to Europe and back by ship, twice. In fact, the first meal I ever remember eating "out" was the second seating for dinner in the dining room of the SS Mikhail Lermontov when I was 11.
So, force me to choose between cheap and beautiful and I will always be impractical. But thanks to my parents, I know that, with imagination, the one doesn't always exclude the other.
This was not a concept that the Studio Six corporation embraced. My efficiency unit in West Palm Beach was about as sterile and dull as they come. But for $75 a night, I had a room with a tiny kitchen where my Jack Russells were welcomed, and when I took them for walks, we stepped on thick Bermuda grass lawns, gazed at tall royal palms and basked in the Florida sunshine. It was a fine stop-gap until my housing dilemma resolved itself.
The first day of school fell on the last Monday of March. I drove 40 miles north to Stuart and sat in a fluorescent-lit room with low acoustic ceiling tiles and a clock that ticked like a dripping faucet. There were nautical charts on the walls, and near the window, there was an overhead projector on top of a cart stacked with nautical teaching aids. A desktop lectern at the front of the class displayed a small yellow sign that said: "Leave this classroom as you would leave a boat." (After we had experienced the fleet of teaching boats, we would joke that this could be interpreted as an invitation to trash the place.)
There were fourteen of us enrolled for the spring 2004 professional mariner training program at the Chapman School. At orientation, as I looked around the room, I felt my heart sinking ever so slightly. We had just heard a welcoming speech from a school administrator that I had found. . .well, a little bit bizarre.
A spryly elfin woman with a bowl haircut, she had been instrumental in the school since its founding. After a rambling introduction on the history of Chapman, she segued into a self-aggrandizing speech about her tireless efforts on behalf of the school. With a lot of hard work and exhausting fund-raising efforts-which mostly happened at Chapman as a by-product of selling off donated boats-she had arranged for Chapman to purchase the adjacent boatyard to add to its campus. But not, she told us, before she had made a deal with the Lord: if He would allow her to somehow swing the purchase, she promised Him she would start a boating program for high school students. After this "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" arrangement with the Almighty, the purchase happened so easily that it was "eerie" and she felt honor-bound to keep her commitment.
While this speech initially set off some alarm bells about what kind of crackpot school I had committed myself to, at least it answered some of the questions that had nagged at philosophical minds since the beginning of time. Why was the world plagued by disease, hunger, war and injustice? Obviously, God's little-guessed preoccupation with safe boating for high school students had distracted him from the nastier ethnic cleansing situat
ions around the globe. This woman seemed a little bit wacky. So on my very first morning of school, the thought that would haunt me for months to come first flitted into my mind: Had I just flushed $6,000 and nine weeks of my life down the drain?
It was hard to gauge my fellow students' reactions. We were a motley crew, ranging in age from about 18 to 65, most with previous boating experience. The class had only three women, all in our forties. Half of my fellow students were young men in baggy shorts and backward baseball caps, launching careers in the marine industry. The middle-age students were either early retirees about to change their lifestyles or. . .whatever the hell I was. After hearing each classmate introduce himself, I found it hard to believe we had enough in common to form fast friendships. But that was okay. I was here to learn, and the Chapman School of Seamanship was reputed to be one of the best schools of its kind.
The curriculum certainly appeared exhaustive. We were about to embark on courses covering marine engines, marine electronics, marlinspike (knotsmanship, essentially), boat maintenance, boat handling, chart navigation, seamanship, emergency first aid, marine weather, boat systems and Coast Guard rules. Classes would start at 8:30 A.M. and would each be two hours long, with a one-hour break for lunch. Though we were scheduled for three classes per day, we almost always had study hall or an extra class after that, so our school day really ended at 5:30-unless you counted homework.
It had been a long time since I had sat in a classroom, but it never occurred to me to worry. I had always been one of those students that the hard workers hated, with reason. Good grades came easily to me. My very lax study habits and very lucky retentive abilities no doubt developed as a by-product of my quirky childhood.