We Asked the 25 Expert Guides on OCH to Tell Us
About The Three Boats They Lust After…
They gave us the inside scoop on 75 great boats!
Here’s a Sample Blog by OCH Guide, Peter Neill.
The Three Boats I Lust After (and Why), by Peter Neill
To know the boat is to see into and beyond the boat herself. My three examples are real to me as much as metaphors; they stand for things other than lines and construction details, for outcomes beyond craft, and for gratifications from another kind of making.
First, Sairy Gamp, 10.5 pounds, purportedly the lightest wood canoe ever built, designed and constructed by J. Henry Rushton for George Washington Sears, who, in the 1880’s, writing as “Nessmuk,” chronicled various legendary voyages in the Adirondack lakes and elsewhere for the readers of Forest & Stream magazine, the “bible” of the 19th century small craft movement.
Sairy is the boat for everyman: inexpensive, perfectly portable, enabling access to the smallest tributary, backwater pond, or wilderness lake. Sairy puts the paddler down into Nature — at the waterline — where normal perception is distorted, sensibility is heightened, where an altered perspective of wind, wave, water and wild life is reduced to a primal level of immersion. The paddler and canoe are one, the energy transfer feeling as if man and craft are joined, wood and muscle flexing, strengths united, moving harmonically as a single dynamic thing toward a destination. For me, Sairy stands for “personal voyage.”
Second, Captain Flint’s Houseboat, from Arthur Ransome’s classic series, Swallows & Amazons, where Uncle Jim has retreated to write his book — a “strange-looking dark blue vessel,” long and narrow, with a raised cabin roof and row of glass windows. According to the Arthur Ransome Society, this vessel was apparently modeled on either the steam yacht Gondola, a replica of which still plies the Coniston Water in England, or Esperance, also a steam yacht built in 1869 and converted in the 1930’s to a houseboat moored where Ransome would have known her during his writing of the series. Esperance sunk soon thereafter, but was raised in 1943 and today remains part of the collection of the Windemere Steamboat Museum as the oldest steam yacht in Lloyd’s Register of Shipping. [Peter, Is this maybe Lloyd’s Register of Yachts?”]
Flint’s Houseboat is a kind of physical center around which many of the series’ adventures spin. Uncle Jim’s manuscript is lost and found; he is made to the walk the plank by the children; he enables situations that allow the Walkers, Nancy and Peggy to exercise their imaginations, to respond to challenges looming enormously large in their young eyes, to survive adventures, and to demonstrate a resourcefulness, logic, and individuality of mind and action that has captivated generations of young and old readers alike. The vessel is a mysterious thing, foreign and romantic, and a place that enables fantasy to be lived, aspirations to be reached, bonds of companionship to be tied, all in a way never permitted by or on the normalcy of land. For me, Flint’s Houseboat stands for “freedom and independence.”
And third, Calypso, Jacques Cousteau’s research vessel and film platform for a series of television broadcasts in the 1950’s and thereafter that brought the beauty of the ocean to a mass audience and to a generation that grew to become the scientists, explorers, marine educators, conservationists, and ocean advocates of today, myself included. Calypso was built in 1942 for the Royal Navy as a wooden minesweeper at the famous Ballard Marine Railway Company in Seattle, WA, and was purchased by the Guinness family after the war as a gift to Cousteau. After its global itinerary in support of Cousteau’s many adventures, it was sunk in a barge accident in Singapore and thereafter endured numerous restoration attempts, apparently still in progress in a shipyard in Brittany under the ownership of The Cousteau Society—a humiliating state of being for such a ship.
Some years ago, I had the good fortune to attend a reunion in Paris of Calypso’s crew, the engineers, filmmakers, and writers who lived aboard in intense collaboration and relationship with “The Captain” in the early years. The evening went late into the morning, and it became clear that despite their ensuing successes, each person remembered the experience as essential to their personal development, to their careers yes, but more importantly to their values, their passions, and their personal engagements with life. The ship was a context for that spirit of adventure, exploration, and invention, for that intensity of shipboard companionship, for that shared understanding that they were doing something good and important in defining a new public awareness of the ocean. It was to such goals that they had thereafter dedicated themselves. For me, Calypso stands for “commitment.”
Three boats, together an equation: “a personal voyage of freedom, independence, and commitment.” That’s more than metaphor when fully lived, and serves well for anyone coming at the world off-center.