We rolled her off the railway and jacked her up. We tore off the garboards (they came hard, and lost all identity in the process) and the transom (which was held in place by the deck canvas and some particularly sticky seam filler they’d tried at the end); and we left her to dry out over the winter, while we went back indoors to work on the new sloop.
Spring came in a few days, and Wyn with it, bearing a matched set of lovely little lignum vitae deadeyes and a new sail plan. We needled him about it. “Marconi? Faugh!” said Wyn, and dust stirred in the far corners of the shop. We’d take two cloths off the leach, and shorten the gaff, and move the mast right back against the house, and give her two heads’ls. (And these things we did; and after Wyn tried her out, rather late that summer, he reported that she sailed and handled better than she’d ever done before.)
But before that, at odd moments through a short and bitter spring that was full of harsh words from other owners, we fitted new garboards to a reinforced keel, put on a new stern, lined the rudder port with a four-inch lead sleeve, bridged innumerable shattered butts-on-timbers. Finally we hoisted aboard a new and beautiful little four-cylinder engine, lined it up, coupled it to the old shaft, and told Wyn he’d have to find someone else to finish the installation.
We launched her on the fly, and hauled her half out again to save her, because she needed two days’ soaking for the old planks to take up. Starcrest towed her to Witham’s Wharf, in Kittery. Wyn’s friends hooked up the engine while he bent on sails and got the gear straightened out—and she was off, tight and fairly sound again in her 67th year; getting used to the new rig, and re-establishing sovereignty over her section of Pepperell Cove.
Wyn came up and told us about some of the trial cruises. Big kedge got away from him when he was catting it just inside the Annisquam Bar—but what mattered another stove plank to Mascot? Hell, this one was clear above the waterline! And how she came home that day, with the wind s’utheast and the Bay feather-white!
Mascot wintered well, so did Wyn. They started off to do some serious voyaging that summer of ’47, when their combined ages amounted to about a hundred and forty years.
Then one day came a rumor of disaster somewhere away to the eastward. Mascot had blown up, burned, and sunk. Wyn came by and told us about it. They’d gone in to Brown’s Wharf at Port Clyde for gas, and had spilled a quart or two on the cockpit floor. Waited a few minutes for it to evaporate, and then pushed that newfangled starter button. That did it. Wyn said he’d never realized how old and weak she was until he saw the water gushing in and the flames creeping up ahead of it.
Wyn got himself another boat after a year or two, but it wasn’t the same. He’s gone now, and a great many people mourn his loss, and feel that there’ll never be another like him.
As for Mascot: all these years we’ve been thinking of her lying full fathom five, and suffering a sea change. Brooksy, who fastened off her new garboards in the spring of ’46, volunteered to do some field research a couple of weeks ago. He found her. She’s hauled up at the head of a cove at Pleasant Point, ... “and those new garboards and new stern and rudder we put on look darned good!” says Brooksy. Charlie Stone hauled her there, after the mess at the wharf was cleaned up, and he boarded her over for a platform to store his lobster traps on. I’ll bet they’re the best-held-up damned lobster traps on the Maine coast!
David C. McIntosh