In 1952, A man bought a new boat for his summer house in Maine. It was special ordered from the factory in Ohio, and cost a reasonable sum of $2,000. A nice boat, though not a speedboat for the likes of the nantucket kennedy’s. This was a Lyman Islander, an all purpose fishing boat, meant for pleasure and recreation; for fishing and hunting trips on sea and lake.
I never met the original owner of the boat, but I can only assume he used the boat as it had been intended, without undue cherishing, nor fear for replacements and pragmatic alterations.
In 1987, the original owner was sadly passed on, and the boat which had once been kept up as needed each year was left out in the elements - out in the lake. Perhaps a storm, or the crushing winter ice, brought it to its ‘final’ resting place, at the bottom of the lake, luckily with water only deep enough to submerge the majority of its body.
Paul Miservy, a former Maine State Trooper, was a man who I admired deeply. He was, from the very depths of my first memories, an unashamedly old man. His sitting parlour (for that is what he called it) smelled of scotch and old books. Whenever he did favours for my grandfather, like rebuilding his old car, or sharing with him his favourite fishing spot, he refused any sort of compensation short or long of a bottle of scotch. His smile was full of gold fillings, and he was of the old breed of Mainer who spoke almost exclusively in aphorisms and strangely accented english sayings, descended from the original fishermen and lumber workers.
He was a man who spoke equally well with metaphors as with the work of his hands. And when my grandfather found an old decrepit house, once the splendour of this remote area of the world, he agreed to lend a hand in fixing it up. In 1989, when the two old men were walking around the grounds of the newly acquired property together, with woollen pants and hands held behind backs, they made their way to the end of the old wooden dock, sticking out into the cold November water. They stared down at a sunken wooden boat, forgotten by time.
I wasn’t there, I wasn’t born, and so I speculate at the conversation between them.
“I guess something needs to be done about that”
“We could fix it.”
“We could try.”
And so the two men of few words salvaged it off the rocks, and Paul made space in his garage to rebuild the boat.
My grandfather christened the finished and rebuilt boat “Margarethe”
Ever since I can remember, it has been there, closely watched over by my grandfather. Taken care of in the way that, frankly speaking, it never truly deserved as a working boat.
Each year, Paul and my grandfather would spend a day together sitting abreast of the engine in the boat, scratching their respective heads about some problem or another, applying grease here and there, or turning this or that adjustment screw until the engine sounded right.
Paul passed away in 2015, after which my grandfather kept up the same maintenance as they had developed over they years. But there was always this problem or that, which he no longer had a curmudgeonly friend to brainstorm with. The engine runs rough when its warm, there is something funny about the timing, and the finish inside and out is looking a little aged.
I know that in his head, I’m still a little 6 year old boy who is excited to hold onto the steering wheel of the boat, but I guess over the years I’ve made my case as being relatively astute at woodworking. And so, faced with the 6th consecutive year of sitting in the old Lyman and asking without response why its running rough, my grandfather sent me a short message:
“We took the connections apart that you and your dad did in the spring looking for possible sources of arching. Maybe we can try to find new components,- points etc even a new distributor and start from scratch. At the end of summer It was running rough again.”
Afi
I took this as a green light to make the repairs on the boat, carte blanche, that I feel it needs.
Rundown:
There are a few problem areas that I want to tackle:
Ignition system
Electrics
Water temp sensor
Instrument panel
Interior finishing work
Hull paint