TOM CUNLIFFE
CLASSIC BOAT AUGUST 2016 65noticed him polishing a large, ugly automatic pistol in the cockpit.
Ros was better off with the chicken-wire man.
The one thing everyone refitting a boat needs is wheels.
Especially if there’s no on-site chandlery and the food and liquor
stores are miles away. We’d been hunting for a hundred-dollar car
when someone loaned us a beat-up 7-litre Plymouth. One day,
halfway to the chandler’s and five miles from the yard, we blew out
a front tyre. I opened the rusty trunk to haul out the spare and
found only another puncture. Not having transferred our RAC
membership, I did the only thing I could. I left Ros to mind the
jalopy and flagged a ride back to the yard for reinforcements. I
arrived at high noon. The best bet seemed to be the ever-competent
Blackie, but his blow-lamp was cold and he was away at work.
Andy was also out of town on a job, which left Ambrosio and a
lad called Ricky. Ricky resided in a rotting, open Cadillac behind a
yacht with her hood-ends hanging out under a live oak festooned
with Spanish moss. I’d never seen him do anything other than roll
joints, so I opted for the lesser of two evils. Ambrosio found an old
wheel somewhere he swore would fit, before announcing that his
truck was kaput. There was nobody else around, so it had to be
Ricky. We roused him from a haze of illegal smoke and piled,
three-up, into the front of his car. The Cadillac was just lurching
out of the gates when my boss The Murderer came loping up five
hours ahead of schedule and leapt into the back. We weren’t quite
‘Thunderbirds are go’, but we were on our way, V8 burbling and a
front wing flapping in the breeze. Ricky wrestled with the wheel
and Ambrosio sang a song, while The Murderer sat in the back
looking dangerous. I tried to pretend I wasn’t there.
I had been pondering on how we were going to cram
Ambrosio’s wheel on to the Plymouth, but I needn’t have
worried. As we careered round a corner we saw Ros being
pushed down the highway by a Chevrolet with ‘State Trooper’
on the side. I was just telling Ricky to pull over when
Ambrosio recognised the implications.
“Don’t stop!” he roared. Ricky tossed his smoke over the side
and kept on trucking. We swept by and slid off home by a
different route. Ros came back at teatime with her trooper who
had fixed the tyre, taken her to meet his mother and bought her
a Whopper for good measure.
The last I saw of Ambrosio was the day Ros and I handed
Cannonball back her crab pot and squared away for New York
with our boat totally sorted and a few dollars saved. My boss had
decided to launch his yacht and go for a test sail. He had no crew
and Ambrosio said he’d join him after confiding to me that The
Murderer owed him money. If the guy proved unwilling to pay up,
he said, the trip would give him ample opportunity to persuade
him. Ambrosio was known to be short of temper and somebody
had noticed The Murderer had a bulge in his pocket that had
nothing to do with being pleased to see anybody. “Things could
turn ugly,” chuckled Blackie, as the crazy little yacht reeled away
down the creek, gybing all-standing in a sharp following wind. He
grabbed Cannonball’s VHF and, with a wide grin on his whiskered
face, issued a broadcast I’ve never heard since. Perhaps it could only
happen in the USA: “All ships, all ships, Homicide in progress.”
I visited the old creek recently and it was as though the yard
had never been. Smart condominiums stand by the water and
expensive European cars glitter in the sun. The shrimp boats, the
wrecks and the hippies have all been cleared out. We who care
for tradition should be alert for the men with clipboards. When
the developers start looking for planning permission, we must
fight to preserve the backwaters where real characters can
survive and an honest sailor is still allowed to do it himself.wand-like outriggers and tall wheelhouses. In back, on an acre of
gravel known as ‘the hill’, stood a veritable navy of do-it-
yourself-if-you-bother-at-all vessels.
Ready for refit after some protracted ocean miles, and extremely
short of funds, Ros and I had sailed our gaff cutter into the creek a
few weeks earlier wondering, as one does, what sort of reception
we’d find. We needn’t have worried. A square-rigged woman in her
mid-forties leapt down from one of the fishing boats and waved us
into a vacant length of walkway. Universally known as
‘Cannonball’, this lady turned out to be the queen of the shrimp-
boat fleet. She summed us up in as long as it took her to stop us
with a stern line. Five minutes later she’d lent us a spare crab pot.
‘Just heave it under the boat with some old fish heads and
you’ll dine free as long as you’re here,’ she said. ‘Creek’s full
of blue crabs. Great eatin’.’
That was our food organised. The next thing was work. We
needed cash and within a couple of days we were both on a
payroll. Ros was twisting chicken wire onto the framework of a
ferro-cement hull while I was varnishing the brightwork on a
smallish yacht. This sounds like an upside-down choice of jobs, but
my excuse for avoiding the misery of the chicken wire was that I
was recovering from broken ribs sustained in an argument with a
mast fitting off Cuba. It also turned out that my billet would have
been no place for a public-school girl.
One morning as I was strolling down the yard, I ran across a
young lady clambering off a pretty little Tumlare yacht. I’d been
wondering how the boat ended up so far from Scandinavia, but
before I had the chance to ask I was distracted by the girl’s T-shirt.
It was obviously clean-on, white, with black writing which read,
“Isn’t this a lovely day. Now watch some bastard louse it up.”
Her name was Martha. She lived on the tiny yacht and herboyfriend was Andy, the local engineer who had a southern accent
that would have given Johnnie Cash a run for his money on a good
night out. I often think about Martha and her T-shirt. She was a
sweet-natured girl and how right her outfit has often proved to be.
Martha enquired how I was making out with my boss,
mentioning that Rumour Control said he’d been indicted for
homicide and had got off. I had decided already that there was
something peculiar about him. He used to turn up at cocktail time
with a few stiffeners already down the hatch, look at me oddly, run
his hands over my varnish just before it dried, then laugh like a
stage maniac and tell me how much he hated Ambrosio. I didn’t
much care who he liked or disliked, and in the end it was his own
varnish he was ruining, but I confess to some concern when I