The boatyard dog

Skipper at the boatyard. Photo courtesy Mark Barrett

August 2024

By Mark Barrett

craggy Neck and put their boat up on the rocks at Southwest Ledge. The boat got hung up on the ledge for a while and took a terrible pounding in the waves. The hull was heavily damaged, but luckily the boat didn’t get holed and sink. They were able to get out a distress call and finally they got dragged off the ledge by Sea Tow and towed into the dock at our marina. The boat was in shambles when it arrived, with the sails down all over the deck and lines tangled everywhere. They were both badly shaken by the incident, maybe even in shock. The husband’s arms were cut up and there was blood all over his white shirt. I was involved in helping the boat land and helping them off the boat and up to the chairs outside the dock house so they could sit down and gather themselves. When I say elderly, I mean they were in their late seventies or early eighties. It had to have been a harrowing experience.

Skipper was right there on the scene. He sat at the woman’s feet and put his head down on her lap. She stroked his head and talked to him in that high-pitched voice people use with dogs and babies. “Oh, what a nice, sweet boy you are,” she kept saying. There is no doubt that Skipper helped calm her down and relieve some of the stress she was experiencing. I like to think that Skipper sensed how shaken and upset she was, and he wanted to help her. Either that, or she had dog biscuits in her pocket, and he smelled them.

Toward the end of Skipper’s tenure, a couple of the other employees, Johnny DiCarlo and Matt LaValley, brought their own puppies to the yard. Matt brought a husky named Sinatra and Johnny brought a lab named Bruschi, named after the great Patriots linebacker at the time. When Skipper was gone, Bruschi took over the job as the official boatyard dog. He also had a long, storied career in that role, which is a whole other chapter, but now Bruschi is gone, too. Hopefully there is another boatyard dog to follow in his footsteps, and another, and another.

Every boatyard should have one.

Frequent contributor Mark Barrett 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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