Early Fall, 1961
The
Gee Jay II was a 22 1/2 foot MacKenzie Cuttyhunk Bass Boat. She was a sturdy
craft. Her builders, Morse Marine on Cape Cod, had made her a no nonsense boat;
not a working boat, but one for serious fishermen. Old man MacKenzie would have
been proud of her.
If
you ordered her in stock colors, you probably got her with a black hull, and a
dado brown painted cap rail with gray decks. There wasn't a bit of varnish on
her. They had built her stiff. She didn't work at all in a seaway. Her frames
and ribs were solid oak, her planks mahogany. The planks were fasted with
bronze rivets, making her tough as nails.
She
had a small cuddy cabin, enough for storage, temporary shelter, and a head, but
no bunks. Just inside the cabin entrance was a shelf that held her gray and
white Appelco marine radio. In those days, marine radios were large affairs,
with vacuum tubes. Each such radio was somewhere between the size of a toaster
oven and a microwave. It fed a tall antenna, which sat on the starboard side,
by the windshield. The tubes meant that the radio also acted as a heat source
for the cabin. It was on this same radio that Dad and I had once listened to
the agony of the doomed Italian liner Andrea Doria as she sank slowly into the
unforgiving waters of Nantucket Sound after colliding with the Swedish liner
Stockholm in the fog bound approaches.
The
Gee Jay was powered by a single 125 horsepower Chrysler Crown, a flat head six,
which was a converted truck engine. It was popular, but ours in particular was
not known for its reliability, which resulted in my father having a close
relationship with Mr. Al Feiler, the largest marine engine mechanic in the Salt
Pond area. He went 300+ pounds, easy.
We
kept the Gee Jay II at the Snug Harbor Marina, near the south end of the Great
Salt Pond. The marina was strictly a working affair, filled with charter boats
and some serious private fishing boats. If you had a luxury yacht, this wasn't
the place for you. There wasn't a floating dock in the place. You kept your
boat at an eight foot fixed finger pier, and it could be a long climb down at
low tide. When you came in, you pulled in to the main dock, gassed up, cleaned
your catch, then moored at your finger pier to hose down your boat. The charter
boats weren't the kind of "head" boats that are so popular now. If
you wanted to go fishing, you called the office, and booked a day trip in
advance on the boat of your choice, flat rate. Typically you could bring up to
three friends with you, and you had the undivided attention of the captain and
mate. Those guys knew where the fish were, but they kept it to themselves,
unless you happened to know them really, really well. My father knew one of
them, Honky Clark, but that didn't mean we necessarily got the inside skinny
all the time. Honky was the kind of guy who lived on his boat. During the
winter he picked up odd jobs at Holgate's Boat Shop. He didn't talk much,
except to swear when he made a mistake, but he did show me how to cut in a
waterline over Easter vacation one year. That was about as close as you could
get to Honky, unless you were his mate.
Dad
kept his ear glued to the radio when we were underway, trolling for
intelligence. Fishermen on the radio were blabbers, but notoriously closed
mouthed about where the fish were. They generally spoke in code, if they spoke
about what was biting at all.
On
this morning we got underway about seven, under a partly cloudy sky that
promised to get sunny. A boat is responsible for any damage caused by its wake,
so we cruised slowly toward the breachway leading out of Salt Pond, passing the
fishing villages of Galilee to port and Jerusalem to starboard. Galilee was a pretty
big port, with its own fish processing plant, and fifty or sixty draggers,
most of which were at sea by the time we
got underway. I could see them dragging their nets on the horizon. These were
the days before the big factory ships, when you could still see the draggers
within easy sight of land, their outriggers already deployed. Jerusalem had
maybe ten boats, mostly lobstermen. I doubt if anyone in one town knew folks in
the other.
A
gentle wind gave the pond's surface a scaly appearance, but the flags fluttered
only intermittently, so I figured we were in for a nice day. Once we passed the
breachway into the Harbor of Refuge, Dad cranked the Gee Jay up to cruising
speed and headed for Block Island.
The
Point Judith Harbor of Refuge is a protected area formed by a breakwater. The
breakwater was created by depositing tens of thousands of boulders, leaving two
entrances. On one end of the breakwater at each entrance is a tower with a
light and fog signal. Each tower was a tapered latticework, with a light at the
top, and a white enclosure about halfway up, which contained a fog signal. As
we passed the tower at the western entrance, leaving the protection of the
breakwater, we picked up the long, slow swells from Rhode Island Sound, and for
just a moment we could smell the muscles and seaweed growing on the half tide
rocks. Every few waves the Gee Jay would come down off a wave, and the spray
rails would throw water out away from us with a low hiss, as the boat shimmied
into the sea. The little bass boat punched through the swell beautifully, a
tribute to old man MacKenzie's design. Within twenty minutes we could see the
sand dune-like eastern cliffs of Block Island's Mohegan Bluffs peeking through
the haze. It was looking like a nice
day, but when you are eleven, every day with your dad is somewhere between
pretty darn good and great. I took out a thermos, and poured a cup of beef
bullion for my father and I to share.
In
another hour we were off the north side of Block Island. We could see a sandy
beach, and a low lying light house about three miles off. Dad throttled the
engine back to bare steerageway, and turned the bow to starboard until we
paralleled the beach. At this speed the engine exhaust made a "glug,
glug" sound, but you couldn't actually hear the engine at all. He put a
line in the water with a long hook covered by a piece of surgical tubing. It
had a piece of pork rind on it. He let out about eighty feet of line, and
slipped the rod into a holder on the port side. We were in about thirty-five
feet of water. With the engine this quiet, we could listen carefully to the
radio chatter, which was constant.
As
we drew even with the shade of the east side of the island, the westerly wind
died, and the sea became like glass. The currents formed little road-like
streams on the surface. Sixteen years earlier, a periscope had pierced this
same calm water. Perhaps a U-boat captain had admired these tall, sandy cliffs.
Neither
of us knew it, but just a few miles to the east, on the bottom, lay the bodies
of over sixty German sailors, asleep in their watery grave since their U-Boat
had been sunk in 1945, on a day not unlike today. A few years hence they would
be re-discovered, but for now, we trolled in the sandy shadow of Southeast
Light, hoping to get into some bluefish.
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