YACK on: Boats
Grant Sanders
Idon't own a boat. But I grew up on them. My dad bought a little cabin on a lake in central Massachusetts in 1969 for $6,000 cash and I spent every summer there until I was 18. We had a boat for every member of the family. A Styrofoam® hull Sunfish. A windsurfer. A red wooden canoe. A dinghy with perennially broken oarlocks and plenty of fiberglass patching. A little fold-up yellow thing that was part bicycle, part pontoon boat that was my favorite for bass fishing ("Take your little brother with you!" "I can't mom, there's only room for one!"). And of course, we had a big tri-hulled power boat with an oversized growling Merc for water skiing and "other activities." My brothers and I would go down to the gas station every morning in our beat-up Town-And-Country station wagon and fill up two 6-gallon tanks with gas and then spend the remainder of the day burning that $1.07 a gallon fuel. Skiing. Fishing. Anchoring and swimming. Finding large submerged rocks with our propeller. I spent three months of the year for eleven seasons in a perpetually damp pair of cut-off shorts and Chuck Taylor low-tops. Getting a sunburned nose. Stealing my mother's favorite knives to clean fish. And generally getting into trouble, which, today, would simply qualify as harmless albeit boring activity by our kids' standards. The only thing that interrupted our day was an occasional trip to the emergency room once or twice in the summer to get sewn up by my father, who now is a retired surgeon, and who has never once sent us a bill.

I wouldn't mind owning a boat. Except for the part about having to maintain it. And fill it with gas that's a whole lot more than $1.07 a gallon. And then there's the question of having to keep the thing somewhere.

I've noticed that most people on Nantucket keep their boats in their front yards. I'm guessing this is for one of two reasons. First, to tell all of the neighbors, "Hey, look at me, I have a boat!" And second, because aside from the front yard, there aren't a lot of spaces large enough to keep a boat. For free, that is. I have one neighbor who, for the past ten years has stored a 36-foot sailboat, a massive old in-board Grady White and an overturned skiff on his front lawn. My guess is that this is merely an attempt at keeping the sun from reaching large parts of his lawn so as to minimize the need for mowing. Perhaps my neighbor got a new mower and is feeling more ambitious because the Grady White has just recently disappeared. I miss it, in a strange way.

I would venture a guess that there are more boats on Nantucket sitting on front lawns than there are slips and moorings in both harbors to keep them, by a factor of ten. At least. And the number is likely to rise if reports from friends who have tried to launch and trailer boats at the new boat ramp are true. Why? Because the ramp, reportedly, is so shallow that launching or retrieving a boat, even at high tide, is darned near impossible. Apparently, the pitch of the ramp itself is 11 degrees when most boat ramps are typically between 15 and 19 degrees. Boaters on YACKon.com have been moaning about this ever since the thing opened. Apparently, pulling a lot of boats out of the water before a storm may prove to be impossible if something is not done. I'm not sure what can be done except to build another ramp after taking a jack hammer to the new one. Or to perfect the art of launching and retrieving boats via catapult.

(You can read more about the new boat ramp on www.yackon.com or on my friend Martie's blog at http://nantucketwaterfrontnews.blogspot.com if you so desire.)

I will not have to worry about the boat ramp problem, because, as I have said, I do not own a boat. I, instead, have friends who own boats. This is far more convenient and does not require that I scrub boat bottoms, cover my hands with fiberglass resin or create a patch of dirt on my front lawn with a discernable bow and stern. I'm happy to buy gas for my friends once in a while, fill a cooler with beer and help clean the fish (I still have my mother's knives…). If you have a boat with an empty cooler, a gas tank that needs filling, or fish to clean, please consider all of the benefits a friendship with me may hold. I'm taking reservations for the summer season. I'll throw in a free bucket of chum to sweeten the deal.

Afriend of mine once tried to give me a boat. For free. But, ironically, I found, that I could not actually afford even a free boat. I discovered, after running the numbers for fixing the thing up, re-powering it, buying electronics and paying for huge amounts of gas to push around its 28-foot hull, that there might not be enough money left over for things like groceries and vet bills and coffee.

My wonderful wife encouraged me to get the boat, however. She said she would be thrilled to have a massive boat up on sawhorses in the back yard for me to work on, perhaps forever, as soon as I repaired the fence, fixed the roof, refinished the kitchen floor, cleaned out the basement, installed new countertops, repaired a broken window pane and rid the back yard of dog poo. She also said that it was fortunate that the boat had room for a berth down below, because if I did bring it home, I was

welcome to sleep on it. I

I still do not own a boat.

YACK on.

Grant Sanders is the host of YACK, the Nantucket Online Community at www.yackon.com and he is, thankfully, still happily married. His views are his own and do not reflect the editorial stance of The Nantucket Independent. His wife is glad to be happily married too.