this is the sad story of a boat gone too soon.

christened ‘scuffboat’, the name coming from the neglected home she came from – abused. cast aside. abandoned. if boat-abuse was a movement, this poor soul would have been pictured on a print ad in the rain, with a soft ‘why???’ as a caption at the bottom followed by a toll-free number. she was basically given to us for free [read: given to us for free]. it wasn’t a good place she came from.

but that all changed when we adopted her. told her she was special and different from other dinghys. and I think she even believed us. we cleaned her up, put some wood on the side and her dirty bottom and voila! a new boat arose from the ashes of a hard English Winter. she was the first boat to take me to my bigger boat. a family of misplaced orphans we were. I took her out when I was blue and she nicely tipped over to make me realize just how important things like ‘getting wet’, ‘being broke’ and ‘falling out of love’ were.

she knew.

and she didn’t deserve to… well, see, this is where it gets hard. not emotionally – I mean, yes, emotionally, but hard in the sense of I don’t exactly know what happened to her.

I lost her.

as in – I lost a boat.

thought my boarding the wrong plane was impressive? yeah – me too.

but, well… she’s gone.

I tied her up one day out on the mooring to go sailing and decided to – seeing how some bad weather was on the way –  tie up next to the boatyard – one of my favorite places in England. came back the next day and headed back out the next morning.

there was no scuffboat. no ropes. nothing.

some say she blew away.

other’s say she sank.

I prefer to think she, like the rest of her family, fancied an adventure.

and went to have one.

or, that’s what I’ll tell myself.

-

there’s a new tender now.

‘scuffboat II – the revenge’

we lover her. a good boat. could possibly be even better…

but, much like The Godfather Part I and II – even though the latter might be a better film, you can still never like it more.

the eldest sibling in me would like to assume this is how the birth-order works as well.

and this is not the first scuffboat.

that’s why my mentor has a more solemn look in the second photo.

shit got real.

such is our predicament.

-

Nick bought me a big book of knot-tying the other day… I tried not to take offense.