Dads

It’s almost Father’s Day when we honor Dad for being completely wonderful. But when I think of my Dad, I choose to remember how funny he was when he wasn’t trying to be.

I was reminded of this humorous non-humor when talking to my friend Pat the other day.  Pat is 50 and lucky enough to still have his father as well as a family homestead in the Thousand Islands.  Among the things Pat and I have in common, are fathers who went out and bought the wrong boat for the family.  My dad bought our wrong boats in the 1970s; Pat’s dad bought his wrong boat about ten years ago proving that fathers can go out and buy the wrong boat right into old age.

In Pat’s case, when his Long Island parents purchased the cottage on the Saint Lawrence Seaway they realized the boating is serious up there.   The Thousand Islands are widely regarded as the best boating in the world, but they’re also extremely dangerous.  There are rocky shoals that lie just beneath the surface of the water that can rip apart the hull of the strongest, biggest boat.  Ocean-going freighters and large cabin cruisers kick up wakes that rival tall ocean swells.  Hit those swells at the wrong angle and even decent sized power boats can capsize and sink.

Pat’s dad researched all that when he bought a boat.  He knew he needed something seaworthy so turned to the obvious choice;  a lobster boat.   At first I thought Pat was exaggerating for the sake of a good story, but no, Pat’s dad bought a lobster boat for the Thousand Islands.  It was modified to look less like what you see trawling the coast of Maine but it was an authentic lobster boat and its days were immediately numbered.  Pat’s dad eventually bought a Chris Craft.

Seaworthiness was on my dad’s mind too when he bought the row boats for our camp in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, only as teenagers my sisters and I didn’t think that was the charming characteristic we know it to be today.  Back then we thought it was embarrassing.

Dad was a navy man born in 1919.  In those days if you didn’t take to the water in something put together with steel and rivets it had to be wood, and dad was determined to carry that technology through, ignoring decades of modernization.  Fiberglass could not be trusted.  So while my new lake friends were speeding around in their streamlined glastrons, dad was driving us around to garage sales looking for wooden boats.

When I thought winter would arrive before a boat we found not one, but two!  So what that they were lying in a field in central Massachusetts? They were super long for a row boat.  In fact two people could row at once!  This could serve a dual purpose.  It would get us onto the water in something safe and cure sibling rivalry all in one afternoon.  Such clever parenting!

They weighed a ton. It was a struggle to get them from the field, onto the trailor, down the boat ramp at the lake and into the water where they promptly sank to the bottom.  No problem!  The navy man said they only need to “swell” after baking in a hot field for many years.  We would soak them, pull them onto the beach and when we returned the following weekend we’d have plumped boats that float.   While our friends continued to bomb around in their glastrons, we waited for our boats to expand on the beach.

With much fanfare, we re-launched them the next week and they sank again.   But this would not defeat the man who witnessed the Japanese surrender in the Bay of Tokyo.  We brought those things right back to the ramp, up onto the trailor and we perched them upside down on sawhorses in the driveway at home in Worcester.  Those glastrons were zipping on the lake and we went with dad to various boat stores to find a solution.  Dad bought some caulk and special marine paint for a big job that got directed down to my sisters and to me.

A few years later, the "right" boats

I recall many hours spent inserting the caulk between dozens and dozens of slats of wood, then painting the things in marine paint of a disturbing shade of robin’s egg blue. With my friends gliding in their glastrons I wished I had a dad who was normal.  What made us too special for fiberglass and aluminum?  For all the money spent on caulk and paint and transportation, wouldn’t it have been cheaper to get something say, 10 years old instead of 40?

By the time we launched the boats yet again we were beyond caring about how we looked.  That’s because the boats still leaked, but we could at least get a couple of hours on the water in them as long as we brought a plastic milk bottle with the bottom cut off to bail while we rowed.   Other people carried small buckets in the unlikely event of a leak, but since ours was likely, we had something ergonomic with a handle and everything.

Even when we added a small engine a year later, we straddled the rear seat and put one hand on the throttle and the other hand on the milk bottle.  The beauty of having a boat that weighed a ton was that it was too heavy to plane; the bow was always high in the air and it sent the leaking water right to the stern where we sat with our open milk bottle.

As a teenager I was mortified my father was unapologetically strange.   Many teenagers feel their dads don’t know anything, but I really felt it.  How else do you account for a man who sends his daughters out to the middle of a lake in leaking old row boats in the name of safety?

Now of course I think I had the greatest dad of all time and I wish he were still around to enjoy.   There are advantages to being eccentric and not caring what anyone thinks about it.  When Pat told me his father bought a lobster boat for the Thousand Islands, I realized all dads sometimes do the wrong things with the best of intentions for their families.  In fact, I believe geneticists recently isolated the wrong boat gene, somewhere between the not needing directions gene and the gene that loves beer on Sunday.

How about you?  Did your dad buy the wrong boat too?  Or the wrong something else?   Father’s Day is almost here.  I’d love to read your stories.

Tagged as: dad, father's day