Tag: coastal-life

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Lazy Bones

Bubba Gray was having a meltdown. His wife and the business manager wanted him to accept a contract to restore an old rum runner, and Bubba was saying there was no way on earth that the cursed thing was coming into his yard. Lazy Bones had famously killed its owner, his lover, and two mobsters in the thirties when it brought Canadian whiskey into Maine harbors. It had spent thirty years in a shed, and according to Bubba, it was there the damned boat remained. His wife quietly argued that he either accepted the contract or found another way to extract the yard from eminent bankruptcy.

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Fish

I had zero reasons for resenting the bird that stole my fish. In truth, I hate cleaning fish. I hate fish guts. That derives from filling bait bags for lobster traps one summer when my in-laws thought it would be a great idea for me to work as a stern man for a lobsterman. That …

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An Inconvenient Pine

The Cap'n finished tamping his pipe, lit it, and then tersely commented- "They're just Summer Complaints." My wife, her mother, and Cap'n's brother nodded in agreement. I kept quiet.

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A Seaman’s Primer

In my opinion life at sea is no place to learn some basics you should have learned while still ashore. You are likely to learn all your sailorly knowledge at the hands of more experienced sailors, but conduct on liberty is not something you'll find in the Blue Jacket's Manual or a book on navigation

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Foretopsail

t was a pain but sometimes necessary to take the Grey Menace with me when I went to work on Psyche. If the ketch was on the mooring, it was a bizarre trip in the dinghy. A large cat caterwauling loudly in the stern of a dinghy is bound to be watched by people onshore. Actually, after a moment, he settled into watching the water and the occasional fish he'd see in the water.

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Sufficient

"Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."