Amanda wasn’t one to waste time, not with the prospect of the Triton hanging in front of her. The sun was barely up the next morning before she was on the road in the Impala. She did manage to have breakfast at the snack bar with her parents as usual. Both of them had the usual words of advice about driving carefully and not pushing things too hard, along with some advice from her father about not getting too enthusiastic about the boat in case it turned out to be in worse condition than Ron had indicated. If she thought the boat was a keeper, it seemed likely that her father would be down to help her out with it sometime over the winter.

The Impala was pretty heavily packed. She had clothes and things of that nature loaded aboard, of course, but tools and cleaning supplies as well, along with camping gear like a tent, sleeping bag, and cooking gear. If it turned out that the Triton was a loser there was the chance she would be able to camp out while she looked for another boat. But she hoped it wouldn’t be a loser since on the surface the boat was close to what she wanted – large enough to live aboard comfortably, either by herself or maybe with someone, but small enough that it could be fairly inexpensive to operate.

The part she hadn’t admitted to her parents – and not even wholly to herself – was that she had more plans for it than just screwing around in Florida with it. Though the need for her to be working summers out of Winchester Harbor was still there, that only filled seven months a year. It could be as much as eight when considering the need to have the boats ready to go fishing in the spring and put them up for the winter in the fall. That still left four or five months a year she could spend in warm places. The Bahamas obviously beckoned; in fact, the relatively short ocean crossing from Florida had been one of the reasons she’d lost some enthusiasm about the Knick-Knack – it wasn’t a boat she wanted to consider taking offshore, even on so short a passage. Once she had the boat in good shape, the Triton ought to be easily capable of doing it. And beyond the Bahamas lay the Caribbean, which offered all sorts of possibilities.

There was a part of her that felt the temptation to take after Matt, her now-deceased half-brother. Back when Amanda had been in middle school he’d bought a 25-foot International Folkboat named the Mary Sue. It had been in fair shape, and he’d spent several summers in Winchester Harbor working on it and sailing it, while working part-time in the Lewis family business. Within days after he’d graduated from the University of Michigan he’d sailed away with the intention of crossing the Atlantic. At St. Johns, Newfoundland, his last stop before sailing to Ireland, he’d met a local girl by the name of Mary O’Leary; within an hour of meeting the two of them had sailed away together.

In the next two years the two had only spent a handful of hours apart. They’d sailed across the Atlantic and around Northern Europe, then across the Netherlands and France on canals, spending time in the Mediterranean, then returning to the Western Hemisphere by way of the Canaries and the Caribbean. They’d been making plans to find a bigger boat to attempt a round-the-world trip, but Mary got pregnant, then Matt had a relapse of his leukemia and ultimately died from it. Mary had buried Matt at sea, then sailed the Mary Sue back to her home in a village on the South Shore of Newfoundland and was still living there with her son, Matty. Adam had been up to visit her several times, and even her father had made the trip. Both said it was quite a nice little village, and Mary still sailed the Mary Sue around locally.

Amanda had spent six weeks with Matt and Mary on the Mary Sue cruising canals in Europe, and that, along with Matt and Mary’s example, had a big effect on her. It would be nice to be able to cross oceans and spend time exploring distant, exotic places, and she could do it with a boat like the Triton, if it turned out to be a good enough boat. Naturally, with having to work summers she would be a little limited in being able to make a trip like that, but there was still a lot that could be done in the months she wouldn’t be working at Winchester Harbor, at least if she were careful and planned ahead.

That was clearly off in the future sometime, probably several years off. It could take years to get the Triton ready for such a journey, and there was still plenty to explore in the Western Hemisphere before she had to commit to an ocean voyage. Much could happen in the next few years, which included the possibility of finding a guy. How much that could mess with the vision of making a major trip remained to be seen.

As Amanda pressed southward down the Interstate, the subject of guys kept coming to mind. She wasn’t opposed to the idea of having a boyfriend, but realized she wanted to be careful about it. Much, even most of her plans for the next few years, if not the rest of her life, revolved around working out of Winchester Harbor in the family business. It would be all too easy, she realized, to get hooked up with some guy who would make those plans difficult if not impossible.

She’d had a couple of more-or-less boyfriends in high school, but they hadn’t panned out – and she hadn’t expected them to. Sure enough, both of them had moved downstate as soon as they were out of high school, one to a job and the other to college; she’d seen very little of either one since they’d worn caps and gowns to graduation.

That didn’t mean the situation was hopeless. Once again, she had her parents as an example. Her father had been a fuel dock hand, short order cook, and deckhand on the old Chinook for a couple years before he and her mother had gotten together; there was no reason it couldn’t happen again, or so she thought. After all, summer help came and went most years, sometimes they were local kids, sometimes just temporary help of one form or another. There was every chance that lightning could strike there sooner or later just like it had with her parents, but it hadn’t done so yet.

In any case, she was in no real rush about it. There were things she wanted to do before she got tied down to some guy, and establishing her career in Winchester Harbor was one of them, as was her desire to do some cruising. A guy would be welcome for either one of them, but only if he could accept doing it on her terms.

She kept pressing south all day, stopping only for brief pit stops when the gas gauge on the Chevy began to get low. She was in Kentucky as the sun was setting, but decided to press on for a couple more hours. Finally she decided it was getting late enough, so found a large chain motel with a restaurant and a bar. She was stiff from sitting in the car all day and the thought of a beer or two to help wind down from the long day was appealing. But she was still a couple months shy of her twenty-first birthday and decided to not push her luck like she’d done with Adam up on Beaver Island; it wasn’t that important, after all. She settled for a good walk to loosen up a little bit, a mediocre meal, and going down for the night in a bed that was none too comfortable.

While she was sitting in the restaurant – the service was much slower than what they tried to provide in the snack bar at the Channel Stop – she pulled out her cell phone and called Ron. “So,” she said without preamble when he answered the phone, “have you found a slip where I can work on the Triton?”

“Not yet,” Ron replied, a little surprised at her directness. “We were out maintaining navaids all day. I talked to Chief Barnes about it. He has a couple ideas, but I haven’t had any time to check them out yet. I should have something worked out by the time you get down here. I’ve got duty again tomorrow, but the day after that is free. I figured on looking then. When do you plan on being here?”

“If I push it I ought to be able to be there tomorrow night.”

“Wow, that was a little quicker than I expected. I figured you’d finish up the season at home.”

“No, the folks realized I wasn’t going to be doing much besides thinking about the boat so they told me to get out of there,” she explained. “Adam is going to be the deckhand on the Chinook for the rest of the season.”

“I should have realized you were going to be pretty hot to trot on this,” he sighed. “Look, if tomorrow goes like today did I’m probably not going to be off duty until pretty close to dark and we couldn’t look at the boat or look for a slip that late anyway. You might as well take your time. We could meet up the first thing the day after tomorrow and have all day to work on it. I’ll give your cell a call when I get off tomorrow night, and we can work out a place to meet.”

“I guess,” she agreed, however reluctantly. “Ron, I don’t want to sound too anxious, but I want to see this boat and see what I’m getting myself into.”

“It’s not going to be a hop on and go, that’s for sure. Like I told you, it’s going to need quite a bit of work, but both Chief Barnes and I think it’s basically sound under all the dirt and crap. I wouldn’t have put a bid in on it otherwise.”

“I sure hope you’re right,” she sighed. “I just won’t be happy until I can see it myself.”

The sun wasn’t up when she was on the road again the next morning, after a breakfast that was just about as uninspiring as the dinner the previous night had been. Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Atlanta all passed behind her as she pressed on southward. By the end of the day she was into Florida, and she hung it up for the night in a motel outside Jacksonville.

After a couple phone calls, she met Ron at a nearby Watkins restaurant the next morning, which was bright, clear, and held the possibility of being warm. “Look,” he said as they waited for the waitress to bring their breakfast, “I just want to warn you that this boat isn’t much to look at right now. In fact, it looks pretty crappy, so I don’t want you thinking I’ve oversold you. But like I told you, both Chief Barnes and I think it’s sound under all the dirt and crap.”

“You’ve told me that before. I think I’m prepared for it to not look like much.”

“I just don’t want you disappointed,” he told her. “I’m willing to help you out on it when I can, but it’s not going to be every day, and when I do get a day off I will have other things I have to do, too. Fortunately, working on navaids is pretty much a Monday through Friday affair, but I’m also backup on an oil spill crew, and that can go absolutely apeshit at any time with no warning whatsoever. I wasn’t here when they had that oil well blow out over in the Gulf a couple years ago, but the guys who had to go over to work on that tell me they were there for months with hardly enough time off to change their underwear.”

“Well, shit can happen, I guess.”

“No fooling, and when it does a normal life goes out the window. But if things are routine, maybe I can get some of my friends to come over and help out now and then. But, if you decide to go ahead with this, most of the work is probably going to be in your hands. Anyway, Chief Barnes and I talked it over and he suggested a place that probably would be good to work on this boat. It’s not real near the station, but it’s not impossibly far away, either.”

“I hope it’s not too expensive.”

“I haven’t seen it. According to him it’s a dump, but at least it’s a cheap one.”

Despite Ron’s apparent attempt to let her down easily, Amanda was still so anxious to see the boat that she gobbled breakfast, and soon she and Ron were driving to a marina a few miles away, where the boat was tied up in a muddy backwater.

After all Ron had told her Amanda thought she was prepared for the boat to be looking pretty sad, but the reality surpassed her wildest dreams. Ron had been right; the boat was dirty from years of disuse, there was green mold in a lot of places, grass was growing in spots here and there where enough dirt had accumulated to take root. The boat sat a little lower in the water than she had thought normal, and it didn’t take much inspection to see that there was a lot of unidentifiable crap growing on the hull. “Jesus, Ron,” she said. “Are you sure you didn’t get taken on this? Two-fifty seems pretty high.”

“The keel is worth more than that in scrap,” he told her. “And it’s likely there are a few other things that could be sold. The mast seems to be in pretty good shape, for instance. It looks like it’s a fairly new replacement. But I think the boat is better than it looks.”

“I hope you’re right,” she replied, starting to feel pretty dubious about the whole thing. She hadn’t been expecting a showpiece, but this was a lot worse than she’d hoped.

“A lot of it is just plain dirt and crap,” he told her. “It should clean right up. Once you get past that, there are some problems, but there are some good things, too.”

“Name one.”

“It doesn’t leak,” he replied. “There’s absolutely no water inside, which I find pretty surprising. I don’t know if the bilge pump works, the battery is dead and probably shot, but it’s dry inside and it’s been dry for at least a while. Oh, it’s damp, but I think that’s been from condensation. It’s obviously had water in it at some point since there’s a lot of woodwork that’s going to need attention, but even the dry rot is dry so it hasn’t been wet inside for a while. My guess is that the water came in through the top, a loose hatch or something, rather than through the bottom.”

“Well, that’s something. Let’s take a closer look.”

In the next half-hour Amanda found plenty of things wrong with the boat, many minor, some more serious. There were several areas where the deck seemed soft, and it didn’t take any real genius to see why. For example, there were a number of deck fittings that had been put on without any visible trace of bedding compound, so water had obviously leaked in and rotted the core of the deck. If the rot weren’t too widespread this could be fixed, but it was an obvious problem that needed to be dealt with.

The inside of the cabin was a jumble of cushions, loose wood, boxes of this and that, along with sail bags. “I haven’t taken any of the sails all the way out of the bags,” Ron told her, “but it looks like everything is there, and the one that I pulled partway out looked to be in pretty good shape if not brand new. I don’t know a thing about the boat’s history, but if I had to bet, I’d guess the boat was owned by someone who tried to take care of it up until a few years ago. Maybe they lost their job or something and couldn’t afford to keep it up. You’d be surprised how quickly things go to hell in the climate we have here.”

“You’re saying it could have gotten this bad in, oh, four or five years?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” he said, and turned to the engine hatchway. “Now, here’s a bad thing. It has an Atomic 4, but it’s been stripped.” He opened the hatch and pointed; Amanda could see the bare engine sitting there, but that was all – no generator, no carburetor, no distributor, or things of that nature. “My guess is that somewhere along the way someone had an Atomic 4 and needed parts for it, so they swiped what they needed. Frankly, God alone knows what else they could have taken, but I don’t see anything obvious. Still, you’re going to have a heck of a time getting it running again.”

Amanda thought of the engine in the Moonshadow. It was the same thing as this, but it was seized up and couldn’t be turned over. As far as she knew, it was going to be taken out of Adam’s boat in the next couple months. Could that be at least part of a solution? “I might have an idea on that,” she told her brother. “I’ll have to look into it.”

As Ron had said, the cabin woodwork was a mess from dry rot, especially down close to the deck. “Some of it could probably be saved,” he told her, “But some of it is definitely going to have to be replaced, and you might not want to do some things the way they are, anyway. That shows all the signs of being a big job to me.”

“Yeah, me too,” she agreed. “I can do simple carpentry jobs, but there’s cabinetry involved that could be a real pain in the neck.”

“If you can get Dad down here to help, he probably could take care of some of the tougher stuff,” Ron suggested, “especially if you do the easy stuff. I can probably help you with some of that. I guess it’s going to involve how nicely detailed you want the woodwork to be.”

Eventually they made it back out onto the deck – there wasn’t room enough to sit down and talk anywhere inside the cabin, since things were such a mess, but the cockpit was clear. “So that’s what you have to work with,” Ron told her. “Like I said, Chief Barnes and I believe it’s a sound boat under all the crap, but it’s going to be a hell of a lot of work to clean up the crap and fix the obvious things wrong with it. I wouldn’t blame you if you decide it’s more work than you really want to deal with.”

“It’s obviously worse than the Knick-Knack was when I bought it a year ago,” Amanda replied thoughtfully. “But that cleaned up pretty nicely. A lot of it was just dirty work, but I learned a lot from doing it, and from Dad helping me with it. And when you get down to it, this boat isn’t that much bigger. Heavier, yes, a lot heavier, and a bit more complicated. You’re right, it’s going to be a heck of a lot of work. But, it’s like I told Dad when you called me, a Triton 28 is just almost exactly the boat I’d hoped to have when I get done. I’m just wondering if it’s going to be worth all the extra work it’s going to take to get this boat to what I want it to be.”

“That’s one I can’t answer for you,” he said with a shrug. “I can see how it could be a pretty neat boat, and I can see how it could be a lot more comfortable to live aboard than the Mary Sue. When Matt and I took it over to Georgian Bay years ago, we were gone for a little more than a week, and that was getting to be about enough being cramped and stooping over in the cabin for me. I have no idea how he and Mary managed to live in it for over two years.”

“It was pretty damn cramped when the three of us were on those canals in Europe,” she shook her head. “But we were outside most of the time, so that helped. This is bigger than that. I think it’s big enough to live aboard for an extended period, at least so long as I could have it set up the way I wanted.”

“Well, you have the chance to do just that,” he smiled. “You might want to put some serious thought into just gutting the cabin and starting over, rather than trying to fix things up the way someone else had them. I mean, this boat was obviously set up to sleep six in considerable discomfort. If you were to redo it so it was just for one or two, maybe another guest in a pinch, it could be a lot more roomy.”

“I’d want to think about it,” she sighed. “After all, that’s not a decision that I have to make right this instant. In fact, I’m still not all the way sure I want to even get started on it.”

“I can’t blame you if you feel that way. After all, I can still have it scrapped out so I wouldn’t lose anything on it, not that it’s that much to lose.”

“Yeah, but still,” she sighed and got up. She stepped over onto the pier – not a long step, and walked away to get a little better overall view of the boat. It was disappointing, not what she had expected, not by a long ways. Still, she could see Ron’s point – underneath the crap there was still a good, solid boat there, but it would take a lot of time and effort to bring it out. It could be the boat she had been dreaming of, working toward for years – but was she up to doing all the work it would take? There was so much she didn’t know about this boat! Would it be worth it?

A wayward thought crossed her mind. “Ron,” she spoke up, “does this boat even come with a name? I’ve never heard you mention it.”

“I didn’t notice anything on the paperwork,” he replied. “There’s the trace of a name on the stern, but I didn’t take the time to try to bring it out.”

Interested, she walked over to where she could get a better look at the stern. Yes, there was some faint lettering there, some of it entirely illegible due to sun fading and dirt – but the more she looked at it, trying to put the parts of the letters together in her mind, the more it became clear to her. “Rag Doll,” she said finally. “Why does that stick with me?”

“There’s been a couple songs by that name over the years,” he replied. “I don’t remember the lyrics, but there was something about “sad rag doll.”

Somehow the name hit her. Yes, this was a very sad Rag Doll. In better days it must have been a doll of a boat, too, flying the glad rags of her sails, a bone in her teeth as she sailed across bright ocean waves toward some distant, exotic destination.

It could again.

The words of the song were stirring around in her mind, just loose words that she couldn’t quite put together, something about changing sad rags for glad rags. This boat didn’t deserve to be sitting at the edge of a swamp in a muddy backwater of a marina, all sad and forlorn. There was a soul of a boat waiting to be freed from its grubby, dirty appearance, and she could be the one to do it. It would be a lot of work, but deep down inside she knew there could be a lot of satisfaction for doing it, too.

“Yes, Rag Doll,” she said so quietly Ron couldn’t hear her, “you and I are going to have some great times together.”

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.