It had only been a few weeks since Amanda had last seen her father at home, but it seemed like longer – a lot had happened in that time.

It turned out that Cordy hadn’t ever been to the Jacksonville airport, since there had never been any reason for her to go there. However, Shades had been there and could tell Amanda how to drive up to the arrival lane. Since Beffy had never been in the car with her, Amanda decided to leave the kitten aboard the Rag Doll, but that wasn’t a problem. The timing couldn’t have been much better; she was just driving up as her father was sitting down on a bench to wait for her. In seconds he and his single carry-on were in the Chevy with her.

Of course, they had to catch up on each other while she drove him back to the Rag Doll. There had been a dusting of snow up at home the day before, but the harbor didn’t show any signs of freezing yet. However, in the last couple of days the weather had turned colder down here as well. Wearing a bikini to take a shower out on deck the night before hadn’t been fun, so Amanda had been looking forward to seeing her father, if for no more reason than to be able to use the shower in his motel room for a few days.

It didn’t take long to get over to the boat yard. Her father didn’t say anything about the work boat nature of the place since he was the kind of guy who knew what work boats were all about. “Don’t see any gators hanging around,” is what he did say.

“They’re around,” she said as she pulled to a stop right in front of the Rag Doll, “but I haven’t seen much of them the last couple of days myself. Cordy says that they go dig a hole in the mud and curl up when it gets cold like this, and while it’s not the most comfortable thing in the world at least there’s that compensation. She says that in another month we’ll rarely see them if we see any at all, and I hope she’s right.”

“I remember them from when your mother and I were sailing the original Pixie down here, and I’ll be the first to admit that they made me think real carefully about jumping over the side to do something on the boat.”

“No way in hell you’re going to catch me doing that here,” she shook her head. “I mean, not on a bet. Anyway, this is the Rag Doll. I know it looks a little rough, but you should have seen it when I first saw it.”

“Well, I suppose we might as well get right down to business,” he commented. “That’ll at least let us have something specific to talk about.”

They didn’t get right to work; Amanda had to open up the cabin to get her notebook, and that meant that she also had to introduce her father to Beffy, too; that meant some petting and purring were more important than a mere boat.

But they finally got to work. In spite of it being overcast the light was fairly good, so they started on the deck, specifically the soft spots she’d found. “To be simple about it, I’m pretty sure I found most of them,” she told him. “But I don’t know whether to try to drill and fill the soft spots, or to peel up the deck.”

Over the next twenty minutes or so, her father went over the deck carefully, finding every soft spot Amanda had found, and thankfully, none that she hadn’t already noticed. He was quickly able to reach a verdict on that problem: “If we were up at home and had all winter, I’d be tempted to peel up the deck and put on a new core. But working in a slip without our shop around, in weather that’s supposed to be grubby, and living on the boat, as I see it, it’s a clear-cut case of ‘Ladies and gentlemen, start your drill motors.’ If you’re careful it ought to come out all right. You’ll want to be careful with sanding and painting, but hell, it’s a deck and you’re going to want to have a thick coat of nonskid paint on it, not bare gelcoat.”

“I was leaning that way right from the beginning,” she told him. “But I thought I better have your ruling on it. Now I can have that project to get started on.”

“You told me you thought you were going to have to have all new deck fittings.”

“Well, yeah. That’s something that’s got me worried. I may be able to save a few of the ones I peeled up, but most of them are junk. I’ve got them in a box down in the cabin if you don’t believe me. I finally got around to looking at the catalogue last night and I’ll bet I’m going to have to spend a couple thousand dollars on hardware, unless I want to get real cheap junk that would probably rust away as soon as it heard the words ‘salt water.’”

“Boats have a way of biting you on the butt like that,” he told her. “That’s the way life works. But who knows, you may get lucky somewhere else to make up for some of it.”

“That’s what I’m hoping. But if it’s not that it’ll probably be something else.”

Since they were there, Amanda’s father continued checking carefully around the deck, pointing out a number of things that needed attention. To her relief, she’d already found most of them; the few new ones he pointed out went into the notebook.

By then it was well after noon. “While I want you to go over everything below about as well as you have topside,” she told him, “most of what I need to ask you about below falls into the category of planning. What would you say if we left Beffy here and went to get some lunch? At least it’ll be warm and out of the wind.”

Of course, they went to Earlene’s Kitchen, where Earlene had some good words about Amanda once she’d been introduced to her father. They ordered burgers and fries, and while they were coming Amanda outlined her concerns about the boat’s interior. “It’s clear to me that I need to have the wiring and plumbing figured out pretty soon,” she explained, “Since whatever I do will have to be done before I start getting the new interior in. But I can’t do much about those until I get the old interior out. I know I’m camping out on the boat anyway, but I at least need to have a fairly flat and level spot to lay out my sleeping bag while I’m in the middle of things.”

“So have you figured out what you’re going to do with the cabin layout?”

“Pretty much. I figure everything ahead of the mast is pretty much like I want it to be. There’s going to have to be some wood replaced, but not much of it, mostly the supports for the V-berth in the nose. I don’t know how much I’m going to use that but it’ll make a good place for storage.”

“I’ll agree a V-berth isn’t all that wonderful for sleeping if you’re alone on a boat,” her father pointed out. “That was Matt’s idea on the Mary Sue. Then when he met Mary, well, after they crossed the Atlantic they decided that staying in the V-berth was preferable to settee berths along each side, at least while they were tied up somewhere.”

“So they could sleep together,” Amanda grinned. “I didn’t figure that was much of a concern for me.”

“It may not be now, but there could come a time that you’ll be glad you thought ahead on that one,” her father laughed. “As it was, Matt had to have new V-berth cushions made for the Mary Sue in Ireland.”

“Well, all right,” she conceded. “I suppose you have a point, but I have one, too. There’s not a great deal up there, but what there is will work for me the way it is. Some of what is there will have to be repaired, but not much. There’ll be paint and varnish work to be done, but again, not much. But go back from there, things get worse quickly. The size of the head is all right, but the walls need to be replaced. I’m guessing the head itself and the holding tank are all right.”

“You might want to look into it, just to be on the safe side. In my experience, heads cause more trouble on a boat than just about everything else, including the motor. If it’s not top of the line, I’d almost tell you to replace it while you have the walls for the room out of there, just to make it easier to work on.”

“Another several hundred bucks, on top of the deck fittings.”

“It’s a boat, Amanda. Expect it.”

“I know. Getting back to the layout, the hanging locker across from the head is all right, although again the actual walls need to be replaced, but that’s not a big deal since they’re just single pieces of plywood. But I think I’d really rather have storage bins there than a hanging locker. Beyond that, from there back to the companionway needs quite a bit of rethinking and redoing.”

“I suppose you have a few ideas about what you want to do with that.”

“Well, yes,” she said. The problem is that they’re about twelve feet of ideas in ten feet of space.”

They didn’t solve all those problems in the next hour, or even in the next three days, but slowly they evolved a plan that made good use of the space, and allowed it to be used for several things. Earlene was set to close up before they even got a good start on their discussion, so they loaded up, went back to the boat and continued it there. The notebooks and a tape measure were frequently involved in the discussion.

A couple more hours had gone by before her father finally said. “Enough of that for now. Let’s let it bake overnight and see what happens. You said you had other concerns, like the engine.”

“Well, yes,” she said. “Look, if I had the money, I know what I’d do, which is to put in a new diesel inboard. But I don’t have the money that Adam has, and I don’t have our shop to do it in.”

“Yeah, and that’s something you can’t do unless the boat is out on the hard someplace, too,” he said. “You’re saying you want to try to get along with the engine that’s there?”

“I don’t see a hell of a lot of choice, except for the fact the engine has been stripped, and it may not be possible to get it running at all for a price that I can afford. If I can’t, well, I can’t. Plan B is to put an outboard motor mount on the stern and find a used outboard to get along with until I can find the time, the money, and the place to do something else.”

“You know, I might have an idea on that,” he smiled. “That Atomic 4 is still going to have to come out of the Moonshadow, and that’s a job I’m not looking forward to. But I suppose Adam might be willing to let us swipe the parts you need off the engine in his boat. That’s what, like carburetor, intake manifold, generator, that kind of thing?”

“That kind of thing,” Amanda agreed. “I don’t know enough about it to know what’s missing. Sid knows something about those engines, and he made a list, but I’m not sure if he got it all or got it right.”

“Well, if I can talk Adam out of his old engine, and I don’t see much problem with that, it might be worth giving it a try since it won’t cost a lot but some busted knuckles, bad language, and getting dirty. If it doesn’t work, I suppose you can go to Plan B.”

“Worth a try, I guess,” she replied. “Let’s face it – this is a sweat equity job. I don’t have the money to spend, at least I don’t have a lot of it to spend, so I guess I’d better plan on spending time on it.”

“That’s the whole point of it,” he agreed. “Look, Adam is a nice guy, and he has money. If a major problem has to be dealt with it’s no big skin off his ass to pay someone to do it. That’s why I’m going to be the one to do the engine change, not him. Now granted, he’s been doing some little stuff on Moonshadow partly because he feels like he wants to be a part of it and partly because he’s bored and can’t think of anything else to do. You don’t have that kind of money so you have to do it the hard way, and sometimes the hard way isn’t the best way in the first place. You’re going to want to come out with everything pretty good, but somewhere along the way you’re going to have to decide when pretty good is good enough.”

By the time they wound down for the day it was getting late. They went out to dinner – there was no reason Amanda had to subject her father to canned stew, after all – and then went to his room so she could have a real, warm, honest-to-God shower. She hadn’t had one like that since she’d moved aboard the Rag Doll. It was after dark before he took her back to the boat, but she still checked things out pretty well in the car headlights to make sure there were no gators hanging around, even though it seemed like it might be a little chilly for them.

It was cold on the boat that evening; for the first time the sleeping bag didn’t seem like it was going to be enough to keep her comfortable. After an hour or so, she got up, pulled her sweats back on, and got back in the bag. That made it tolerable, if barely so, and it was clear that cooler weather was going to come.

There was no frost to be seen when her father showed up in her car the next morning – it wasn’t that cold – but it did remind her of an October morning in Winchester Harbor. The two of them left Beffy in the cabin as usual and went to breakfast, where they talked about the cabin arrangements some more. It was still a little cool when they got back, too cool to want to get started on patching the soft spots in the deck, so she decided the thing to do was to get started on the forward part of the cabin. It was clear that after half a day or so it was going to involve paint, and the V-berth supports would still have to be fixed. At least when she painted, she would be able to wall the space off so Beffy couldn’t get in there, get into something she really shouldn’t be getting into, and cause a mess.

Working in the forecabin also kept her close to her father, who was spending much of his time with a tape measure and notes of his own. By the middle of the day he’d roughed out a cabin plan that seemed to be a good compromise among the things Amanda wanted to accomplish. It involved two settee berths much like she had now, but neither of the quarter berths; part of the space they occupied would be used for storage, part for an ice chest, and part for a galley. One of the settee berths could be made into a two-seat dinette, while the other one was a bit wider. Her father also penciled in a fold-out extension to that settee berth that would make it almost as wide as a three-quarter bed, or that could be used as a bunk board when the boat was heeled while at sea. He may have smiled but didn’t say anything about what Amanda might want to use that for, but she got the message anyway.

“Yeah,” she said finally when she went over his plans. “That looks like it ought to work.”

“It’s probably about the best you’re going to get, given what we have to work with,” he said. “I’m going to spend some time getting some very detailed measurements, so maybe I can do a little prefabbing after I get back up north. It’s still going to be several days’ work to get everything put together and more is going to be involved varnishing, but I think it’ll work.”

“I’m looking forward to it.”

“I’ll bet you are. That makes me think. Probably there’s going to be a couple weeks when you and Beffy are going to want to move into a motel since the cabin will be so torn up. You’d probably prefer trying to live in the forecabin, but a motel might be the wise choice. And that leads to the thought that maybe you ought to think about getting a cat carrier so you can keep Beffy from poking her nose into something she shouldn’t be messing with, while you’re painting or stripping paint or something.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Amanda agreed. “In fact, I was thinking about something like that this morning.”

“All right, with that out of the way we can go over wiring and plumbing, although you won’t want to get started on that right away. I want you to leave the existing wood pretty much in place until I start work on the new cabin, since there will be pieces I’ll want to use for templates.”

“You’re saying you’re offering to do the interior.”

“If we were at home, with access to the shop, and you weren’t living on the boat, I think I’d probably want you to do the majority of it,” he said. “But we don’t have any of that, and there’s no way that you could do the quality of job here that you could do at home. So I figure this is the next best thing. Don’t worry; you’re still going to have plenty to do.”

The next day was warmer, so they decided to get to work on fixing the soft spots on the deck. This was a big, slow job that was going to have to be done when it was warmer. It involved drilling lots of little holes in each of the soft spots, using a drill with a stop on it to keep from drilling too deeply, and then injecting epoxy into the hole and the surrounding rotted areas. It really wasn’t as good a fix as stripping the deck would be, but like with the interior of the boat, they weren’t at home, with the boat in the boat shed and all the needed tools right there to work with.

The thought of it made Amanda a little sorry that she hadn’t been able to turn up a boat like the Rag Doll on the Great Lakes, because she could be doing this job at home. Well, there was no turning back, now, and at least the warmer weather compared to what it was like at home had some advantages, too.

Each day they made a little progress on the boat, or on the plans for what had to be done. They lost a day of work to hanging out with Ron, who showed them around the station and took them on a tour of the town, but they made up for it a little on the next day when Ron, Shades, and Zack showed up and spent the day working with them. They made a lot of progress on the deck and some other items on the list that day.

It was kind of fun for Amanda to watch Zack and her father sizing each other up. Although little had been said, it seemed clear that Ron, at least, had the impression that things were a little more serious between Zack and her than they were.

Several things were clear from watching them. Her dad and Zack liked each other from the start, which Amanda was glad to notice; apparently her father’s impressions of Zack matched her own. But it was also clear that Zack was a little uncomfortable with the other guys and her father around; it might be because he was just plain shy, or maybe not comfortable dealing with a group. He tended to be the quiet one and not say anything unless someone asked him.

Although Amanda had spent several hours with Zack on different occasions, there always seemed to be a little question about him, something that was bothering him that he didn’t talk about. Again, maybe he was too shy to speak of it, but she thought that perhaps there was something else going on there, too; what it might be was hard to say.

The upshot of that thinking – and it didn’t come all at once, was that while she liked the guy there was something there that bothered her. That made her a little leery of getting too involved with him too quickly. He made a fine friend, even a close friend, but she was pretty sure she wanted to be pretty careful and know what she was getting into before she went too far with him.

But that was all right, too. In four months or so she’d be heading back to Winchester Harbor while he would still be in Jacksonville. If she did let things get serious, there was always that fact to consider; things could get very complicated if she let them get out of hand. A quick, friendly kiss at the end of the day was one thing, but more serious things would have to involve careful contemplation.

When she got down to it, though, the whole question was pretty theoretical. It might be something she would have to deal with in the future, but not this winter – the Rag Doll was more than enough to have to deal with.

There were a couple more days of working one-on-one with her father after the guys spent the day with them. The weather turned cold and damp again, so they concentrated on inside projects, like the wiring plan. Amanda could get along for now with an extension cord, a shop light, and a little electric heater, but she wouldn’t be able to do that when the Rag Doll got operational. Fortunately, most of the complicated wiring would be in the vicinity of the engine and the rear of the cabin, but there were still things that had to be accounted for. It was clear that the whole boat would have to be rewired, including possibly the wiring to the masthead light; floodlights on the spreaders to light the deck after dark also seemed to be a good idea.

Finally, the time came that her father had to head back north. “I want to get a real good start on the Moonshadow before Adam gets back from wherever he’s going,” he said as they were riding to the airport. “But I’ll chip away at prefabbing the interior for this thing, too. I probably won’t be ready to come back down before the first of the year, but I’ll have a pickup loaded with goodies for the Rag Doll when I come.”

“It was good to have you come down here and help out, Dad,” she told him. “There had been some times that I thought this was going to be impossible. Even with your help, there’s still a lot to do, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it all before I head back in the spring.”

“Don’t break yourself down trying to get things done,” he told her. “Take some time off now and then, take a breather and enjoy yourself. Life is more than just a boat, you know. Maybe have some good times with Zack. He seems like a nice kid, if a bit on the quiet side. I don’t know what the deal is with that.”

“I don’t either,” she sighed. “I agree, he’s a nice guy, but there’s something with him I just don’t understand.”

“Take your time and see if you can figure it out,” he advised. “You never know, but he might prove to be worth the effort.”

“He might be,” she smiled. “But I don’t think there’s any rush to do anything too serious.”

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