A legacy destroyed and reborn

June 2024

By Mark Barrett

In Part 2, in the May issue, Blue Skies’ stability, seaworthiness, comfort and versatility made her an ideal sail-training platform on which more than 100 adults learned to harness the wind, expanding her rich legacy exponentially. Also, an overnight spearfishing cruise with a friend and his nephew saw no fish caught or seen, but a call at Martha’s Vineyard was enjoyed to the max by all. Part 3 brings to a close a tale of affection for a modest little boat that could be entitled, “Love at Last Sight.”

On the last Saturday of July every summer a sailboat race was held in Buzzards Bay, off Cataumet, Mass., called the Bassackwards. One summer, we entered the race in our J/30 Mojo, and I lent Blue Skies to a jocular older gentleman so he could sail in the event. He lived on a sailboat in the harbor and had once owned an O’Day Mariner, a Rhodes 19 with a small cabin, so he was familiar with the design. His crew was two young guys who worked at the marina and one of their girlfriends, the latter on a sailboat for the very first time.

The Bassackwards was a pursuit race; the slowest boat started first as a handicap. There were about 40 sailboats in the race that year, and Blue Skies, being the smallest, was first to cross the start line. Our J/30, a racer/cruiser, had a much lower rating and, therefore, a much later starting time, somewhere in the back third of the fleet.

It was windy that day, a gusty 15 to 25 from the northwest, so it was a close reach on a starboard tack on the way to the first mark off Bird Island, off Sippican Harbor in Marion. Three other people were on the J/30 with me, a motley crew of friends more interested in drinking beer than trimming sails, but we were holding our own as we headed across the bay.

About halfway across someone pointed off to our left and said, “Hey, what’s going on over there?” Off our port side, a quarter-mile or less away to the south, was a tight cluster of boats. Something didn’t look right, but I was steering and had to focus ahead, so I ignored an uneasy feeling when I glanced over there.

We rounded the first mark and jibed around to point toward Cleveland East Ledge Light, the second mark, which was almost dead-downwind. We were doing well, having reeled in and passed some of the slower boats that started before us. The weather was beautiful, we were on a sailboat, in a race, and what could be better than that? Then one of my crew members observed, “Hey, shouldn’t we have passed those guys on Blue Skies by now? Or shouldn’t we at least see them up ahead? Where the heck are they?”

“Somebody grab the tiller,” I yelled. “I have to get my phone.”

We wallowed around for a few minutes with our sail luffing and boats passing us right and left as one of my crew took over the helm. My phone was in my duffle bag, which was forward on the V-berth, and when I got it out, I saw that I had a bunch of missed calls. Several were from my boss, Scott Zeien, who was monitoring the race in his powerboat Rosie. Two calls were from my friend Curt Jessop, who owned the Sea Tow franchise out of Kingman Yacht Center.

I called Curt. “Mark, I got a call that your little sailboat capsized and sank,” he said. “What do you want me to do? You want me to go out there?”

Capsized and sank? I couldn’t believe it. Blue Skies had been in much worse conditions and always did fine. I called my boss.

“I have some really bad news,” Scott said. “They capsized in Blue Skies.”

“Oh my God, is everybody all right?” I was worried because the skipper was big and not agile.

“Yeah, we got them all out of the water. Everybody is fine. The boat went almost all the way under, but the Marion harbormaster came out and managed to get it alongside. They dragged it into Marion Harbor. I gave the harbormaster your number. [Crewmember] Matt LaValley got the sails down and saved all the canvas. That kid was in the water for a long time.”

I called Curt back and told him not to come out for a salvage operation. There was nothing more we could do. We were on our way to the last mark, about three-quarters through the race, so we kept going to the finish. We still came in 5th.

The Blue Skies crew said they were close-hauled, on a starboard tack, heading across the bay toward the first mark. The skipper was steering from the leeward side, with one of his crew sitting next to him and the two other crewmembers sitting up on the high side. They got hit with a strong gust, and the boat heeled way over to port. The skipper couldn’t get out of the way of the tiller to let her round up, and nobody was tending the mainsheet, so they didn’t spill the wind in time. The port gunwale went under and water poured into the boat.

Blue Skies does not have a self-bailing cockpit; she is an open boat. Once water gets in, the only way to get it out is with the little electric bilge pump or by bailing.

She didn’t sink after that first knockdown, according to LaValley, but she took on a lot of water. All that water destabilized her, and when another gust came, and a big wave, she heeled to port again. All the water rushed to that side, and her gunwale went under again. She filled up and sank.

Luckily, spectator boats were close by, and several quickly came to the rescue, including my boss on Rosie. A former Navy Seal on one of the boats dove in and helped the crew out of the water.

During my renovation of Blue Skies, I had shot expanding foam into the empty space under the V-berth. That foam flotation is probably what kept her nose up and saved her from going right to the bottom of Buzzards Bay. Somebody had sent out a distress call, and the Marion harbormaster had rushed out. He managed – with some difficulty, judging by the damage to her – to drag her into Sippican Harbor and over to Barden’s Boat Yard, where she was hauled and on blocks and stands.

At Kingman, in one of the sheds, someone had started a pile of everything that had floated off Blue Skies. The spectator boats dropped off all kinds of stuff they had pulled out of the water: seat cushions, floorboards, life jackets, fenders, the paddle, the boathook. I called Barden’s to confirm they had the boat, and then drove over there. She was easy to find because only a few boats were out of the water in the middle of summer.

The first thing I noticed was the mast, which was bent and curved sideways like a banana. The standing rigging was still attached, but some of the turnbuckles and chainplates were twisted and bent. A long area on the starboard side, where the hull met the deck, was crushed and destroyed, and other spots showed fiberglass damage. The hull wasn’t holed below the waterline, and the keel and rudder were intact. The fiberglass hatch from the foredeck was gone, no doubt residing on the bottom of Buzzards Bay.

Inside, the boat was a mess. The fuel tank for the outboard had somehow emptied, and the cockpit was slippery with gasoline residue. The battery, the VHF radio, the switch panel, and all the lights had been immersed in salt water and were kaput. All three crewmembers had lost their keys, phones and wallets, but the girlfriend had stored all her stuff in a Ziplock bag in the V-berth. The bag was still there, all the way up in the bow, sealed up, and her phone was still turned on when I found it.

I brought the outboard engine back to Kingman, and was instructed by the outboard mechanic to stick it upside-down in a barrel of fresh water. It sat there for a few days, and eventually we got it running again. Unfortunately, Blue Skies’ insurance had expired, and I’d never bothered to get another policy. Barden’s was going to charge me for hauling and storing the boat.

Scott’s advice was to leave her there and let Barden’s deal with her. After all, I didn’t ask them to haul her out. “That’s their problem, now,” he said. “Given the damage, the boat is totaled, and they’ll probably chop her up and put the pieces in a dumpster.”

Did I really want to pay to get the boat back, and then spend the money to fix her up again? We already had Mojo, the J/30. We didn’t need two sailboats. I knew he was right, that the course of action that made the most sense was to abandon her. She’d had a good life, and now it was over. Walk away.

A few days later, I went over to Barden’s one more time, to make sure nothing of value was still on the boat. She sat there by herself, in the corner of the boatyard – that corner in every boatyard where the boats go to never again see the water. Her single portlight on the side of the cabin was a sad, misty eye that gazed at me forlornly as I approached. One of her halyards tapped against her bent mast in the slight breeze, like an old, loyal dog wagging her tail one last time before she gets put down.

No way I could leave her there to get chopped up. The next day I called Barden’s and arranged to have her launched. I paid them for the haul-out, storage and launch, and, a couple days later, we motored across to Marion in a friend’s Back Cove 33 and towed Blue Skies to Kingman. Her race skipper felt badly about the whole episode and repaid me for the haul-out and launch.

Restoration took much longer this time around, several years as a matter of fact, as I picked away at it whenever I had some time. I made several attempts at the fiberglass repair to the hull and deck joint on the starboard side, none of which came out very well. After one last attempt, which was ugly but structurally sound, I gave up on the cosmetic part and covered the whole section by screwing on thick rubber tubing designed for docks, not boats. It served the purpose.

I started looking for a replacement mast, and found a derelict O’Day Mariner in Barnstable that someone was giving away, just to take it out of his yard. The owner was nice enough to let me take just the mast; I sure didn’t need two derelict boats. Between the old mast and the “new” old mast there was a serviceable set of standing rigging, including turnbuckles to replace the ones damaged in the salvage operation.

Unfortunately, the derelict Mariner was a newer model than Blue Skies, and the forward hatch was a different size and shape. Constructing a new fiberglass hatch was beyond my ability, so I screwed down a square piece of plexiglass over the opening. Later, once I discovered that the cabin needed ventilation to keep mold and mildew from growing on the walls, I installed a solar-powered vent in the plexiglass.

On another day I removed the battery and radio and interior lights, and ripped out the wiring. Over time, I fabricated the pieces of lost cabinetry that had not been retrieved by the spectator boats and painted everything with two coats of glossy white enamel. Luckily, the sails, the sail cover and the boom tent had come through the sinking unharmed. I retrieved the Tohatsu outboard from storage, where it had been for years, clamped it back onto the transom, and Blue Skies was ready for the water again.

I now had two boats in the water, Blue Skies and the J/30. One boat was on the town mooring, which was inexpensive, and one was on a Kingman rental mooring, which was about $2,000 a year at the time. Employees of Kingman were allowed to store one boat for free over the winter; for me, this would be Blue Skies.

After a couple seasons paying for two boats and spending most of the time cruising on Mojo, I sold Blue Skies to John Burman, the general manager at Kingman for “ten dollars and other valuable consideration.” In other words, I gave her to him, which allowed me to do away with the cost of the Kingman mooring. Now I could store the J/30 over the winter for free, which saved me thousands of dollars.

John wanted Blue Skies so he could teach his grandchildren how to sail. Now and then, I saw Blue Skies under sail with John and the kids aboard – his long beard blowing in the wind, the two kids’ heads sticking up just over the gunwale – which always gave me a good feeling.

The seasons rolled by, and one day in the summer of 2019, John Burman approached me in the boatyard and handed me an envelope with $750 cash in it. “I just sold Blue Skies to a couple of college kids for $1,500,” he said. “I’ll split it with you.”

The last time I saw Blue Skies, she was loaded onto a trailer with her mast on deck. I swear she was smiling at me, a merry sparkle in her portlight. She was waiting to get towed off to somewhere in Connecticut, to start another chapter in her long, storied life.

Sometimes you can’t help loving a particular boat any more than you can help loving a certain person. If anybody reading this happens to see Blue Skies around, please take a picture of her and send it to me. I miss her.

You can read the other parts of this series at:

Part I: The legacy

Part II: The legacy unleashed

 

Frequent contributor Mark Barrett started at the bottom of the boating industry – literally – scraping, washing and painting the bottoms on all sorts of vessels. He is a yacht broker at Cape Yachts in Dartmouth, Mass., and he lives in Sandwich, on Cape Cod. Mark and his cruising partner Diana sail their 1988 Freedom 30 Scout out of Red Brook Harbor, in Buzzards Bay.

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