MY FIRST BOAT

 

One day while out on building inspection, I noticed an old boat in the back yard of a house.  An old high school friend of mine used to live there.  I knocked on the door and asked if he still did.  His mother answered the door and told me that he was still there, but he was at work.  He would be back after 6PM.  I came back that evening and it was great to see him and catch up on the last 6 years.  I asked about the old boat and said I was looking to buy one.  Turns out that someone at the marina where his dad kept his boat wanted to get rid of it and gave it to him.  His dad parked in the back yard – 2 years ago.  It was an 18’ plywood cabin cruiser with a 40HP Mercury engine on a trailer.  He said I could have it for $50.

First I had to see if my sister would let me work on it in her back yard.  She was in the middle of a divorce and her husband was removing his things from the garage.  She said I could put it in there.  Bob and I towed the boat into her driveway, but it was too tall (on the trailer) to fit into the garage.  So I built a cradle with wheels on it and put the boat onto the cradle – this way I could wheel it out onto the driveway to work on it and push it back into the garage at night.  I worked on that boat all winter.  I sanded the whole hull down to bare plywood, layered it with fiberglass resin and cloth, more resin, two coats of paint – it looked brand new!  Then I started on the inside cabin.  My sister remade the seats and sewed curtains for the windows.  

The outboard motor hadn’t been run in over 2 years, so I replaced all the parts that I could.  Even then it was a bear to start – 20-30 pulls before it started.  Once it started, it ran great but I tried really hard not to stall it.  I didn’t want to go through that process again. 

Memorial Day was a 3-day weekend and the beginning of summer out at the Hamptons.  Bob and I towed the boat out to a boat yard where we could launch it and drive it to the dock at our rented summer house. We used the boat all summer but it was very slow.  The 40HP outboard had to work really hard to move the boat now that it had the added weight of all that new fiberglass.  When the summer was over, we put the boat in storage at a marina.  I told the owner I wanted to sell the outboard and buy a larger one.  I found an 85HP Johnson motor with only 25 hours on it.  The owner had lost his job, sold his boat, and made me a good deal on the motor.  Bob and another friend, Frank, helped me load the motor into my car.  We took it to the firehouse to store it over the winter.  

The motor came with everything, even a gas tank.  I took all the parts out to the Hamptons and I would work on the boat whenever the weather was nice.  When it was done, Bob and Frank and I put the motor in my car, took it to a marina with a work slip and a wench.  We put the boat into the water and floated it over to the dock.  Frank wasn’t very mechanically inclined, so we sent him for lunch supplies and beer.  It took Bob and I about 2 hours to hook everything up.  Now all it took was one turn of the key and the engine started.  Thank God!  When Frank got back, we took the boat out into Peconic Bay for a cruise!  

We started out slowly, getting the feel of the new motor – then we went faster, faster until we were flying across the bay.  The wind picked up and seas became choppy.  We were bouncing and pounding on the waves so we backed down on the throttle.  Frank had gone down into the cabin to make sandwiches.  He started yelling that something was wrong – water was pouring into the cabin! He was in water up to his ankles.  I looked at the port side of the boat and the fiberglass was coming off.  We stopped the boat and watched the remaining fiberglass peel off that side and sink to the bottom of the bay.  We figured that one of the waves must have slammed the hull so badly that it split the keel wide open, the plywood underneath was delaminating, and the water got in between the plywood and fiberglass and peeled it right off the boat.  This $50 boat was a headache from day one and I knew I wasn’t putting any more time or effort into it! 

We decided to try to get the boat back to the marina and get the new engine off.  At least I could save something.  We crept back to the dock and unhooked all the wiring and controls.  By the time I was down to the last few connections, I was actually working with my hands underwater.  The dock master wanted that boat out of the slip before it sank there.  So did I!  We decided to paddle it out into the bay and let it sink.  I made sure to take the ID numbers off the one side of the boat that was still there.  I didn’t want anyone tracing this new “reef” back to me.  Frank wanted no part of this plan, so he took the motor and all the parts in my car back to the house.  

Bob and I paddled the boat out into the bay, drinking the beer as we went.  Well, the boat wasn’t sinking as fast as we would have liked.  The tide was going out and we hoped it would carry the boat to the inlet and out to sea.  But we were quickly losing the tide.  I went down into the cabin, the water was now up to my chest and it was cold!  I opened the forward cabin windows, the water started coming over the bow and into the cabin.  Bob and I moved up onto the cabin roof and we were leaning against the windshield – drinking beer and laughing at this strange “cruise” we were on.  Every now and then, we would hear air bubbles coming from the cabin and the boat would go down another 2 or 3 inches.  We finally made it to the end of the inlet.  There were 3 large boat slips with lots of docks out there and they were full of people – watching us and the sinking boat.  They decided to “help us out” and they called the Coast Guard. 

Now, we were trying to get out into the inlet to sink this thing.  We wanted it in deep water so it wouldn’t interfere with navigation channels.  We didn’t want the Coast Guard involved in this project.  Well, they showed up – told us to board their boat and they would tow us to the Coast Guard Station – NOT where we wanted to be.  During the towing process, the boat was taking on so much water and became so heavy, the engines on the Coast Guard’s boat began to overheat.  They told us to get back on my boat and they would send a tow boat out to get us.  Sure!  Now we were way too close to shore where a sunken boat was sure to cause problems.  We waited until they were out of sight and decided to swim to shore.  We had one six pack of beer left and we pushed it along as we swam to shore.  That’s when I learned that canned beer floats in salt water!  People were cheering when we got to shore.  We all watched as my boat sank – about 4 feet from the end of the dock.  Not exactly what we had planned.

The man who owned these docks also sold bait and tackle and lobsters in his store on Dune Road.  We didn’t want him to know who the boat belonged to, so we avoided as many people as we could and walked down Dune Road to hitchhike back to the beach.  I called my insurance company and they paid me $400 for my poor boat.  I figured I had made out pretty good.  

During that winter, Bob and I drove out to the inlet and bought some lobsters from that store on Dune Road.  We told the owner we had seen a boat sink last summer and wondered what happened to it.  He wasn’t a happy man.  Apparently when the large lobster boats returned from sea, they couldn’t pull into the slips because of my boat, so they used grappling hooks and tossed the boat to shallow water at the end of the docks. The owner told us that they had had some bad storms and high tides so now the boat was high and dry on an empty lot.  Bob and I walked to the lot.  There was the boat.  Some kids had stripped it of anything valuable – which wasn’t much.  We went back the following summer and all that was left was the bottom of the boat and some ribs.  My next boat was definitely going to be a row boat!