Wooden Boat Widow Blues-  The Sequel

 

By Deborah Patton.

 

 

When I wrote about my agonies and infrequent ecstasies of being a wooden boat owner’s wife three years ago, I thought my woes were over.  As it turned out, they were simply on a hiatus. 

 

Things had been going along fairly smoothly, an oxymoron in the wooden boat world.  However, after a rough two years getting our 1960 Chris-Craft 21’ Continental working, my husband finally learning how to tie knots, finding a mechanic that wasn’t gouging us and actually having one whole summer vacation with the kids with a fully operational boat, I thought we were on the road to Nirvana.  Well, that was not to be the case.

 

My first clue was July Fourth holiday.  Our two kids, Max and Sam, were at camp in Minnesota and my husband and I had planned to spend a long weekend in Bolton Landing on Lake George for the town’s 200th birthday.  We would take the boat so we could watch the fireworks in nautical comfort, use it for transport for hiking expeditions to the trailheads accessible only by water, and cruise around calmly without the bedlam of two young children competing for driver’s privileges.  I was scheduled to take the Amtrak Adirondack Express from Penn Station.  My husband would have already landed in Bolton with the boat and our dog, Patches.  I had laid down the law several years ago that I refuse to drive up to the lake, pick up the boat en route, and haul it north.  After hours of sitting in a bug-infested field watching him talk endlessly to his mechanic, I realized it was better for my mental health to avoid the experience entirely.  Ditto on bringing the boat back.  The kids and I now take the train home at the end of every summer.  Jon and Patches are on their own.

 

Anyway, I was suspicious about the boat being ready for the summer because as the Fourth approached, Jon was spending a disproportionate amount of time overseeing his mechanics tune Ð up the Chris-Craft.  I had a feeling that the boat wasn’t ready and I was getting a lot of spin and backpedaling from my husband as to why.  In fact, when he called the night before I was to arrive, he mumbled something about ignition problems.

 

I arrived fresh, optimistic and looking forward to an adult mini-vacation and as much romance as a boat-focused weekend could muster.  When I met him at the station, I asked him how the boat was running.  He managed to avoid answering the question all the way to Lake George.  When we pulled into the lodge where we were staying, I jumped out of my seat and barked “So where’s the boat?”  I had a tangible premonition that we would be spending the weekend ashore, land locked without transportation.  He pointed and proudly said, “Right there.  That’s our new boat.” 

 

“What new boat?” I snapped. 

 

“Oh, the boat I bought the boys for their birthdays,” came the response. 

 

“Another boat?  A new boat?  We now own two speedboats and a canoe, and we live in an apartment in New York City?  What are you talking about?” I screamed.

 

“Hey look, it’s a ’65 Glasspar G-3 and it’s so sweet. It’s a perfect ski boat for the boys.” 

My husband never gives up. 

 

“How does it run?” I asked skeptically.

 

“Well, it starts fine.  It’s in mint condition.  It’s lived in the first owner’s garage for seventeen years.” 

 

“Where’d you buy it?” I asked nearly incoherent at that point. 

 

“Through the Internet,” he beamed.

 

“You mean you bought a boat over the Internet and you’ve never put it in the water?  Are you totally crazy?  What did you pay for this?  Where’s my big boat?” 

 

And so it went for the next half hour, while I pointed out to him that it was his job to manage the mechanics and be sure that they did their jobs so that our boat would be ready on time.  They only had twelve months to screw around with the thing.  And here it was, the next summer and the boat was still on blocks in Poughkeepsie.  It was unfathomable.

 

“The boat worked fine last summer, I said, “what happened to it?”

 

It turns out that Jon had the bright idea to completely rebuild the engine.  The only problem was that it was still disassembled in the shop.  I was furious.  Living with a boat-obsessed man was one thing, but dragging me way up for a lake vacation and not having the boat, finding out that we owned a new boat and getting no realistic satisfaction from my husband was just too much.  I was on the verge of getting on the train and returning to the city.

 

“Come on, let’s put it in the water and try it out,” he urged.

 

This boat looked like a toy boat, it was so small.  When Jon was in the thing he looked just like Mr. Pig in Richard Scarry’s children’s book, Busytown.  His head loomed above the windshield and the whole boat listed to starboard when he was in the driver’s seat.

 

I did manage to come around, however.  The boat actually ran.  In fact, it went really fast.  The only drawback was it was even smaller than our first boat, a 17-foot 1960 Chris-Craft Ski Boat Ð a problem.  It was simply too small for the big water of Lake George.  This little Glasspar bobbed around like a cork in the water.  And in the middle of the lake when the wind came up in the late afternoon, it was like being on a carnival ride.  But, it was my ticket to the fireworks and the other side of the lake ... and I had to admit that I enjoyed running it at full tilt.

 

And then there was our annual summer vacation a month later. Jon brought the big boat up, assured that it was running fine.  It was a full-house summer with my brother visiting from St. Louis and our niece on a visit from Oregon.  There was no way we’d get though the summer without the big boat.  There were six of us plus the dog.

 

I launched the boat filled with my husband, brother and Max.  They powered slowly out beyond the no-wake zone, and sped up in a cloud of smoke.  Smoke?  There isn’t supposed to be any smoke, I thought, as Sam and I drove back to our cottage.  An hour passed.  No boat.  No husband.  It was slowly dawning on me that we could well be having another summer vacation with a disabled wooden boat at the dock.

 

I got the call to return to Norowal Marina with the trailer.  They brought the boat back to the house where Jon was theoretically planning to repair it himself.  Now, I had been down this road before, and was reasonably certain this was going to be a bust.  My husband is a marketing expert, not a mechanic. 

 

After endless days of Jon and my brother sequestered with the boat, my children frustrated because the small boat wasn’t powerful enough to ski well, and dog and children always underfoot and screaming, I thought I was going mad. 

 

Time for me to get involved.

 

“Jon, call that sacred mechanic of yours and get his butt up here now to fix his damned engine or I’m leaving and you can entertain everyone for the rest of the summer.”

 

That did it.

 

We went back to Norowal, launched the boat and towed it back to our dock so that the mechanic could work on it dockside.

 

Our mechanic arrived with his girlfriend, her son, and an enormous Allison racing engine (his specialty) in tow.  He said he felt terrible, and promised to fix the boat in a couple of hours.  The mechanic is a mythic sort of a guy.  Not very tall, but very big.  He looks like a cheerful gnome with a big belly and short, sturdy legs.  I think he must weigh at least 250 pounds, at 5’7”.  Standing next to my 6’3” husband, they look like a cartoon pair.

 

Jon drove back and forth to the marine parts store in Glens Falls, a good 30 minutes south, to procure new parts.  The mechanic rewired.  He tinkered.  He pondered.  He installed a new coil.  Voila.  The engine roared to life, but in a heartbeat, we heard the dissonant sound of knocking.  And that was that. 

 

Then, the final insult:  the boat began to sink.  We watched in amazement.

 

The mechanic noticed it first and started screaming in his best Marine officer style to beach the boat, get the bilge pump started, plug in a dockside bilge pump, and pump the thing before it touched bottom.  It was the worst kind of bad dream.  In a weak moment, I was beginning to feel sorry for Jon.

 

Once they pumped the water out, they had to cajole the resort next door to let them put the boat in their boathouse to hoist it out of the water so that the mechanic could seal the gaskets around the exhaust pipe hull-through where the leak had started.  We found a forgiving dock boy to let us use the hoist.  Unfortunately for him, he got fired the next day for helping us.  Apparently the resort and our landlords were having an ongoing dispute and he was seen as an accessory to the crime.

 

More hours passed.  We were going to run out of sunlight.  The leak was fixed but the engine was kaput for the season. I was barely on speaking terms with the mechanic at that point, I was so angry that he had screwed up my vacation.

 

But what’s a wooden boat wife to do?  I invited them for dinner before they drove back to Poughkeepsie.  We had a great evening.

 

But anyone who knows me knows that I keep score.  And Jon owed me way big time at that point.

 

So the six of us were stuck with that tiny Glasspar.  It was fast, but wasn’t powerful enough to pull up my brother on skis.  We used it to go on a hiking outing at Tongue Mountain.  I can tell you that six people and a dog in that boat was pushing its limits. 

 

And then it got worse.

 

On the way back from our hiking trip, the motor suddenly lost power.  We were out in the middle of the lake putting along at about two miles an hour.  It took us 90 minutes to make a 10-minute trip down the lake.  I thought we’d go faster if Patches towed us. 

 

This was the final straw.  Two broken boats.  A houseful of people.  Always hungry.  Always with dirty laundry.  Always needing something.   I was five minutes away from packing it in and going back to New York City for the rest of the summer. 

 

Somehow they bribed me into staying. I think they took me out for dinner as bait.

 

It turned out the propeller had hit a rock the day before, and had finally given up.  Unbelievably, Chic’s Marina had a vintage 35-year old prop to fit the 1968 Mercury outboard.  It was even better than the original prop.  Suddenly the boat flew like a bat out of hell.  Max got up on skis for the first time, and Sam spent afternoons being towed around on a tube, riding it like a bronco. 

 

And I managed to get through the end of the vacation without murdering anyone.  The kids and I went back on the train and Jon hauled the useless Continental back to the boatyard.  He was then to go back to the lake, pick up the little boat and drop it off the next day.

 

We got our pictures back a few days later.  As usual, the lake looked better than divine.  The boys looked so happy.  My brother looked rested.  There weren’t any pictures of me, thank God.  As we poured though all the sentimental scenes of our vacation, as usual the idea of it looked a hell of a lot better than the reality of it.  A week later my bother sent a box of pictures he took.  Again, more nostalgia.  It was a series of Kodacolor moments of my whole excruciating experience. 

 

And then we noticed something.  There was a picture of the mechanic working on our boat.  He was poised in the stern on the port side, his girth glistening in the sunlight, the boat listing impressively under his weight.  And there it was.  The portside exhaust pipe was submerged underwater, exposing the failed gasket.  The mystery of the sinking was now solved.

 

So it’s not over until it’s over.  We had one more summer to get through.  Jon and I went to the lake for our traditional Fourth of July vacation .  Amazingly, the Miss Deborah was working again, engine newly repaired.  But all good things come to an end with us, and we realized by the end of the weekend that the boat was leaking significant amounts of oil from somewhere.  So it was back to the new mechanic for repair before our August family vacation.

 

I managed to get through the normal getting-ready-for-the-lake drama with the children, had mastered the Adirondack Express system of bypassing the four-hour drive, and arrived at the cabin, once again, eager, optimistic and looking forward to two weeks on the water.

 

The Glasspar was already launched and Jon told us that he was planning to pick up the Miss Deborah in a few days.  The new mechanic was on deadline re-installing the rebuilt Chris-Craft 430 engine.  We sent Jon off to retrieve the boat, fully expecting him to join us for dinner that evening.  We waited.  And waited.  And waited.  He knew what the stakes were in bringing that boat home alive.  It was literally a case of conjugal bliss or complete denial.  That’s what our vacation relationship had devolved into.  Not to mention the fact that I had invited one of my best friends and her boyfriend up for the weekend with promises of boat rides, picnics and island hikes.  There was no way all of us would fit into the little boat.  By midnight I was beyond furious.  No husband.  No boat.  No hope.  I finally fell asleep and was vaguely aware of his return somewhere in the middle of the night.

 

Day breaks.  We’re all set to get onto the lake.  With the Glasspar, we were pretty much reduced to hugging the shore to prevent us from bobbing around uncontrollably.  We all piled into the car to play our habitual early morning tennis game.  We drove by the landing where we park the boat trailers.  There was a boat there, but it wasn’t ours.  It looked like a large white fishing boat.  I slammed on the brakes, and jumped out of the car in disbelief.

 

“What happened? Where’s my boat?  What’s this ugly ferry boat?”

 

He replied with great enthusiasm, “It’s our new boat!”

 

“What do you mean, new boat?  We now own three boats and a canoe?” 

 

And it dawned on me.  The Miss Deborah never worked.  He couldn’t come back without a boat, so he bought another one instead.  Unbelievable.  The boys, on the other hand, were enthralled with this 1966 Chris-Craft 22’ Sea Skiff. 

 

“Look Mom, lots of room for you and everyone, a real big-water boat.”  They were climbing all over the thing, testing out whatever gadgets they could get their hands on.

 

This clearly was the ultimate challenge for me.  It must be some cosmic test to see how much I could take.  Our boating experience had now entered the realm of the absurd.

 

“How does it run?  Did you put it in the water?” I asked.

 

“The engine started right up.  It’s in mint condition,” he assured me.

 

But I had been here before.  And all too recently.  After tennis we launched the Sea Skiff with two overly enthusiastic boys beating each other up for driving rights.  I took the trailer back to the house, brooding.  They beat me to the dock and everyone convinced me that it not only ran well, it was big enough to give us a smooth ride in the middle of the lake.  Things were looking up.  The only problem was that this boat truly looked like a fishing scow.  I longed for my stylish Continental with its retro tailfins and flamboyant upholstery.

 

We took off for the day to pick up our friends who were staying nearby.  The boat sped along and we made a grand entrance with cheering children, barking dog and provisions for a bountiful picnic across the lake at Commission Point.  As we made our way over to the Point, I detected a faint knocking sound coming from the engine box.  Not a loud banging, but a persistent one.  We picnicked, we hiked, we spent a lovely day in the sun.  On the return, Jon had a little trouble starting the engine.  Or restarting it when we stalled in the middle of the lake.  It didn’t take any sixth sense for me to figure out that we were in for trouble.  As we chugged along, the engine suddenly shuttered, and rattled like there was a loose part tumbling around inside the engine.  As it turned out, there was.  A broken connecting rod destroyed everything it touched inside the engine.  And that was that.

 

I really had to feel sorry for Jon.  He hailed a tow, called the previous owner in Florida (they’re always in Florida) and had to eat crow in front of all of us. 

 

“Well at least he agreed to pay for a new engine,” was all he could say. The fishing scow joined the Miss Deborah in dry dock.

 

So we spent the rest of the summer squeezing into the G-3.  Max demonstrated his new wakeboarding skills, Sam tubed incessantly, and I pretty much read the entire library while stationed on the dock.  We did make one trip to the far side of the lake for a picnic.  As the gods would have it, it was the one day that summer that a major electrical storm hit the area.  I started to get nervous when I saw all the other boat owners batten down their boat awnings and covers, on their much larger boats, I might add.  I looked at the boys and said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”  Your worst nightmare as a mother is to have her entire family on a tiny boat in the middle of the lake during a lightning storm.

 

We got pounded.  The rain was so thick it was a wall of water.  Stinging, freezing cold, and mixed with hail.  We could barely see in front of the bow.  It was unreal.  Lightning flashing, thunder loud enough to deafen us, and my family bobbing around, drenched by those oncoming tsunami waves.  Cautiously, but with great intention, we powered through the waves to get back to our bay. Jon slowed down for the no wake zone and we all yelled at him to gun it to get us out of danger.  After all, who in their right mind was going to complain about a wake?

 

We made it to the dock, and I’ll never forget our younger son, Sam, standing up behind the front seat laughing hysterically and singing “I’ve waited my whole life for this!  This is the best birthday present I could ever have.”  He’s the one who rides the Cyclone at Coney Island three times in a row.

 

We’re now on our third engine mechanic.  This time it’s the renowned David Van Ness of New Jersey, who knows a thing or two about rebuilding engines.  Apparently, if I’m to believe anyone anymore, both boat engines are completed and ready to go for this summer.  It is completely counterintuitive to me that we will have three boats at the dock this August.  But I’m getting a glimmer of an idea that one’s going to be dedicated exclusively for my use.  I’ll be able to race off into the sunset, Dewars in hand, without the distraction of children, dog, guests, or husband.  It will be my escape plan to float in the boat—all alone.  And I’m not worried.  I’ve got my cell phone and I’ve become a whiz at getting Good Samaritans to rescue me at sea.  Who knows, this could be the start of a new love affair.  Just me and the Miss Deborah, life imitating art.