THE BOAT across” the
finger of dock where my
boat is tied up huddled under
an untidy bulk of plastic
sheets,

!o have been staring at this
shrouded craft) for several
minutes before 1 quite realize
what Lam doing. Brooding.

The owner died just befare
Christmas, you see. Heart attack,
Thad scen him just a couple of
days before, it guy maybe only
about five years older than me.

We intraduced ourselves a
couple of times over the years,
but 1 forgot his name cach time.
I'm not good with names. But we
still waved and exchanged quips
when we can into cach other —
never anywhere else than at the
dock.

He drank a fair amount. But
then you sce that, from time to
time, on a dack. And, for that
matter, } drink a fair amount
too.

He had told me once: ‘You
and I have got the two boatiest
boats down here, you know."*

What do you mean we? I
thought. But I nodded.

What he meant was that we
had the only two old wooden

Bob Hunter

@ stricily personal @

boats: with) engines instead of
sails, Among the various subcults
into which boat peaple tend to
divide, us power-driven recre-
ational old wooden boat owners
form an imaginary elite all our
own,

We are apart from sailboats
entirely, of course. Different
species. Anything new is, well,
tacky. And of course we fook
down our noses at anything
fibreglass.

We know our place in the
scheme of things. We aren't the
big rumbling-engined power
yachts that are cither owned by
corporations or millionaires.
Rather, we are the low-key
funky-bul-skookum class of
nice-looking real West Coast
old-style motor vessels.

My neighbor on the dock took
good care of his boat. We ad-
mired each other’s paint jobs.
Exchanged notes on what to
watch out for in terms of rot.

And he understood the Great
Rule of the Dock. Let the other
guy get on with his chores: san-
ding, varnishing, repairs, clean-
ing, scraping.

You can work all day next to a
guy and never have to exchange
more than a dozen words. It’s

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Of course you do your com-
municating by the way you main-
tain your boat. You take care of
it. You nurse it. You treat it with
respect. Otherwise you insult
everyone else by the suggestion
that boats aren't really worth all
the hassle.

So I was quite surprised —
shocked, actually — to come
down to the dock one mid-day
week and find my neighbor's
bow line Ieose.

The boat had begun to swing
outward and might casily have
started smacking against a boat
on the next float, except that
cnough of a wind had come up to
keep ‘her bow a mere six fect or
so from where it should be.

Sloppy, sloppy.

indignantly, | scooped up the
loose line, pulled the boat in, and
te-tied her properly, thinking:
That turkey! 1 mean, negligence
at a dock threatens everybody.

A couple of evenings Jater, 1
learned of his death.

Could there be some connec-
tion with that loose line? Had he
first felt the stroke down at the
dock? But no, he had died at
home in his sleep with no
premonitions.

You’ve heard those eerie
stories of dogs that began to

how! the moment their master
died, even if he was on the other
side of the world at the time.

This reminded me of those
stories. It will seem outrageously
fanciful to suggest that a loose
line and a man’s death could be
connected, but when you are
down on a dock by yourself,
looking at a boat that sits there
empty, dank, unloved, clumsily
shrouded like a coffin awaiting
burial, it is easy to see that, yes,
there is bound to be a connec-
tion.

For an old wooden boat to lose
her owner in the middle of winter
is almost a death sentence. It will
be months before she can ve
sold, since hardly anybody buys a
boat before spring.

The bits of rot that her owner
knew about but hadn’t got
around to fixing will expand like
unattended wounds, invisible
under the plastic sheets.

The engine, not started up for
months, is bound to fall prey to
rust. Water will get in the oil, for
sure. The battery runs down.
Mildew crawling everywhere.

From the moment he died, she’

began to die, you see. The first
sign — and the sign of his pass-
ing — was that line left loose,
floating in the water.

Boxcar
blaze
doused

A MINOR fire Monday evening in
a North Vancouver train yard
brought a lot of phone calls but
was otherwise uneventful, a fire
department official says.

North Vancouver District’ Fire
Department Lieut. Ken Fleming
said firefighters worked for 2%
hours putting out a blaze in the
dismantled train boxcar.

Fleming said the rail workers
were dismantling the wood- and
styrofoam-filled train boxcar when
it somehow caught fire at approx-
imately 5:50 p.m. Monday.

ff
Bendt Sorensen

formerly of Lynn Valley
General Repairs. Is zvailable
to service garden equipment,
snow mobiles, chainsaws,
marine engines. At his new
location. .

Cali 986-0516.

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