I get a lot of men sailing on the York River who want to buy a sailboat, but they lack the perfect boating scenario. Inevitably their wives are opposed for various reasons of cost, aggravation, time away from her, etc. My typical response is to focus on time and money. Unless you have easy access to the boat and can sail it at least twice a month, you’re better off leasing or chartering. New websites make that very easy.
Along came Ugo and Faith Boggio, who are enrolled in the current WALT sailing class. They have a summer house on Linekin Bay in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. Ugo said, “It’s on the bay that goes out to the ocean. It’s wonderful for sailing if you can get around the lobster pots. The house has a dock where I can put the boat, and the neighbors on both sides don’t use their moorings, so I can use those.”
That changed everything. It’s one thing to own a boat and drive 100 miles to see it, sail it or work on it. But in your back yard? I told Ugo to go for it, to Faith’s chagrin. “It’s a 22-foot Cape Dory, for $5,900.”
“The cabin was built in 1914. Later the owners put a deck on it, and years later they enclosed the deck as a room. Then they added another deck and later closed that in. Today it has four wings like that. It drove Faith crazy because each deck was built an inch or two below the floor level and she kept tripping. I’m pretty handy, so I installed spacers on top of the existing floors to make them all level with each other.”
What lobsters eat
Faith said, “The house is built on a rock cliff called the granite ledger, so the plumbing is exposed to the weather. We have a fellow come around in mid-October when they cut off the water. He drains the pipes for the winter. Some people try to stay, but not us.”
Ugo added, “Because it’s rock, there is no septic system. Instead, many of the septic systems are called OBD for Overboard Discharge such as used in ships. The Maine EPD is trying to eliminate them. There are a total of about 1,100 systems left. In Linkin Bay there are several.
“The lobster men noticed that, ever since they started installing the OBD about 30 years ago, the lobster harvest in those areas diminished. They thought that the chlorine in the OBD was killing them. The University of Maine did a study and found that we should probably be dumping straight into the ocean. The lobsters eat shit, and our chemical system was denying them that. The OBD discharges grey water, so there is still some shit in it, but not as much as before.”
Izzy the dog
Faith brought along her toy poodle named Izzy, who sat in her lap the entire day, from 10 am to 3:30 pm. “She’s a rescue dog, probably seven years old best we can tell. We got him when he was three years old after six months in a foster home. They told us he was traumatized, with her name tattooed inside her ear. Her hair grew all the way down to the floor and she brown from dirt instead of her natural white. It’s taken a long time to bring her back since he still has a lot of anxiety.”
When Faith went below deck to the cabin, Ugo had to hold a very anxious dog as he flailed his tiny legs reaching out to Faith.
“When I was a little girl, my father was driving a 1938 Chevy one day when he encountered a small fire in a car from the battery. This was on the Pulaski Skyway in Jersey City. He took my childhood security blanket and smothered the fire with it. After that it was no good because it had battery acid and burns on it. My blanket was my Izzy.” She said glowingly, “This is my Izzy today.”
Let’s go sail
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