I
would work on my boat all winter and have it ready to be painted in the
spring. One year, the boat was ready but
could not be painted until the temperature was about 55 degrees, so I was
looking for a project. On the other side
of the parking lot, where my boat was up on blocks, there was a warehouse. The business inside made wooden blocks with the alphabet on them
and toys for young children. They made
them out of a high grade oak. They had large planks delivered and then cut them
down to the size they needed. Their
dumpster was full of strips of oak. I
put a whole pile of these strips in my truck and took them to the firehouse. I
had built a shop in the basement of the firehouse so I could keep busy in
between runs. The strips were going to become a lobster trap.
Just
outside the harbor where I was docked in Connecticut was a huge area full of
rocks and an island called Rock Island just before getting into the deeper water
of Long Island Sound. I would often see
lobstermen pulling up traps full of lobsters.
I decided to make one large trap instead of 3 or 4 regular size ones. With one trap I didn’t need a license. I built this really large trap and put 2
cement blocks in it.
In
the spring, my wife and I were going out on the boat for a week. Our plan was to stop at Rock Island, pick up
some rocks that we may need to sink the trap and throw it overboard. When we returned from our vacation, we
planned to pull the trap and hopefully take home a bunch of lobsters.
Well,
we put the trap in the water near Rock Island - but it wouldn’t sink. We added more rocks - still wouldn’t
sink. We carefully tied the boat onto
the island and filled up the back of the boat with even more rocks. We went out to the trap and added more -- still
it wouldn’t sink. At its heaviest, it
would only sink about an inch below the water. As luck would have it, the Coast
Guard came by and told us we couldn’t leave the trap where it was. It was a menace to navigation. We spent the next hour and a half unloading
the rocks and the cement blocks into the water.
We pulled the trap into the boat, my wife put a beach towel over it and
declared it a coffee table for the trip.
The
first part of the week we went fishing, dug clams, and picked mussels off the
large rocks in Eton’s Neck, Long Island.
We now had all the food we needed and lots of wine with us. We decided to go to a yacht club on the Connecticut
side of Long Island sound, take hot showers (which our boat lacked), and go out
to a nice dinner. The club’s restaurant
was booked solid so we decided to eat on the boat. Since we had electricity on the slip, we
hooked up a small TV and put it on the lobster trap-now-table. I started up a grill that hung outside the
transom. We grilled fish, steamed
mussels, and opened raw clams while drinking wine and watching TV. A large group of people, all dressed up and
going to dinner at the club, had just come off a huge 60’ yacht. As they passed our boat, one woman said to us
“Some people really know how to live.” I’m sure we had just as good a time, if not
better, than they did!
When
we returned from our mini-vacation to our boat slip in Connecticut, my friend
Mike was working on his boat. Mike and I
carried the trap on shore and placed it back on the dumpster.
Mike’s
boat was a little larger than mine and was moored close to our boat. It was a great location but it was getting
expensive to keep our boats there. I
told him that I had found a yacht club on City Island that was a lot cheaper
and closer to home. Mike was interested
so we both applied. After we were
accepted into the club, we were told that we had to apply to the Coast Guard
for a permit to moor our boats in the harbor.
They had a map and showed us where we could place our mooring
anchor. The anchor that was required
weighed 300 lbs. and was shaped like a mushroom. Two past members of the club sold
us their anchors. We also needed 25’ of
2” heavy chain and 30’ of light chain. Someone
told us we could buy this chain in a warehouse near Fulton Fish Market. They installed elevators and the chain they
had was from old elevators. By the time
we had our anchor installed using the club’s tender boat,
it
was now late fall. We needed to get our boats
down to City Island from Connecticut and out of the water for winter
storage. The night before we were going
to move our boats, it snowed. My wife
drove us to Cos Cob, CT. Our boats were
the only ones still in the water and covered with snow. We brushed off the snow and started down Long
Island Sound to City Island. The trip
took 2 ½ hours. The sun eventually came out
and it turned out to be a beautiful day.
Mike decided half way there to put the boat’s top down. Later that day, after our boats had been
hauled onto land, he went to put the top back up. Seems it had been a little too cold when he
dropped the top and his plastic rear window had cracked in half.
We
spent all winter sanding our boats, especially the bottom. Even though we used anti-fouling paint,
barnacles still grew on the bottom. In
the spring, we painted the first coat of bottom paint, which was dark red. After it dried, we marked off the water line
and painted the hull white. Mike didn’t
want to buy a new roller for the white paint – he just cleaned off the red
bottom paint and rolled the hull. It
turned out pink. 95% of the boats in the
club were white so Mike’s pink boat really stood out. He liked it!
After it was launched and hooked to his mooring, it became quite a
tourist attraction. All summer, people
went out of their way to sail past the 27’ PINK boat! 
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