AUGUST 4, 2024 -When the opportunity presents itself, I love boarding and inspecting old refurbished wooden yachts. My most recent encounter with such a classic vessel occurred last summer at the Annual Wooden Boat Show at Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut. What stopped our slow walk along the wharf was a 30-something-foot-long beautifully restored sloop.
I can’t say I’ve ever sailed aboard such a vessel, and I’ve certainly never contemplated owning one—dreaming of possession isn’t the same thing—but simply being in physical contact with this gorgeous boat brought me great satisfaction. When we stopped alongside the work of art, the friendly skipper-owner noticed the childlike delight in our faces. After greeting us cordially, he invited us aboard. He was “John” from Newport, RI, and his yacht was named Seven Stars. He had committed untold hours to refitting and refurbishing his pride and joy.
I remember running my hand along the molding and cabinetry crafted from exotic hardwoods and shining with what appeared to be eight or more coats of high-gloss marine varnish; admiring all the brass fittings, thoroughly polished as recent as the morning of our visit; walking my eyes along the perfectly tooled and fitted wooden decking; luxuriating for a fleeting moment or two in the stylish accommodations below deck; eyeing the masthead fly (wind vane); and imagining the mainsail and the Genoa unfurled as the good ship made its way into Long Island Sound.
John had done well for himself in life financially, I surmised, and he was clearly skilled as an avocational nautical craftsman.[1] I am learning with age, however, that even people who seem to “have it all” in fact don’t. Sadly, John had worked on the project for years, anticipating that in retirement he and his wife would sail all up and down the Eastern Seaboard and throughout the Caribbean, but then his wife got deathly ill, and that misfortune upended their dreams of a life at sea—along with many other dreams.
I’m reminded of our encounter with John of Newport and his Seven Stars as I punch this post out aboard our pontoon boat, with the unofficial name, Northern Comfort. This 20-foot Bennington with an old-but-reliable Mercury motor is hardly in the same class as Seven Stars. For starters, there isn’t a sliver of wood aboard our “yacht” (the bamboo stick-handles to the kid-fish nets don’t count). Plus, our home port is “Björnholm Trädgården” (in keeping with our family’s Swedish connections) on a freshwater lake close to the geographic center of the North American continent, not the famously exclusive seaport of “The Ocean State.”
Be this as it may, I’m perfectly content sitting on the pontoon and pretending it’s something far grander than appears to the other occasional pontoons that putters by noiselessly, their elderly skippers and skipper-spouses greeting me with a post-retirement wave.
The most notable thing about our pontoon is the canopied solar-powered lift, which cost more than the boat itself. Parked at “the landing” I engineered and constructed last spring, the pontoon has served as my “happy place.”[2] When I lower it to the waterline, the boat becomes a comfortable shaded patio. If I don’t lower the boat enough to achieve buoyancy, the “ship” reminds me of the cruise ships and superyachts I’ve observed in ocean ports: when anchored or tied up at a wharf those vessels are so massive, even major harbor chop has no effect. The hulls seem to be firmly aground. Likewise, when our lake is a field of whitecaps, I can set the pontoon lift so that the boat doesn’t move while docked.
The breeze off the lake shoos the bugs away, and the space between the canopy and the top of the bench seating affords a 360-degree view of the gorgeous surroundings.
But here’s the downside of a gorgeous yacht like Seven Stars—or Northern Comfort: you wouldn’t want to call it your home. The galley on Seven Stars was the size of a large closet; Northern Comfort has no galley. The head aboard the Seven Stars was comparable in size to the one that was part of our “private sleeping compartment” aboard Amtrak’s North Shore Limited. The head on the Northern Comfort is . . . well, it’s not actually aboard the boat. It’s inside the Red Cabin—before and after time spent on the pontoon.
Speaking of the Red Cabin—it’s nice to have a back-up plan for inclement weather; an alternative to the confinement of a Seven Seas or a Northern Comfort. That back-up plan is called a house, with full indoor plumbing, a spacious functioning kitchen and four walls, a roof, windows, and a furnace. Yesterday evening a bunch of very black low-hanging storm cells swept down from the northwest, smack dab over our corner of Grindstone Lake and toward the southeast. I gathered up my belongings—my book, my briefcase-with-laptop, my bag full of sketchbooks and pencils, and last but hardly least, my snacks. I disembarked, raised the lift until the pontoon was fully protected from the oncoming meteorological disturbance, and repaired to the . . . mother ship.
For the rest of the evening, I enjoyed the comfort and safety of . . . a veritable cruise ship, unaffected by the “heavy chop” in the harbor.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
