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Lots of boats come to Oriental, some tie up at the Town Dock for a night or two, others drop anchor in the harbor for a while. If you've spent any time on the water you know that every boat has a story. The Shipping News on TownDock.net brings you the stories of the boats that have visited recently.

Northern Brightwork Heading South
November 6, 2006

M

ike Shaw and his wife Kylie Deacon tied their Cheoy Lee Bermuda 30 to the Town Dock this week. The boat “Meggie” has clean Herreshoff lines and some of the finest varnish we’ve seen on a boat in sometime… especially a boat whose owner does the actual brightwork.

Mike and Kylie come from Thornbury, Ontario on Georgian Bay and are only a few months in to living full time on the boat. They are heading south to the Caribbean. Maybe, they say, to South America. They have no real itinerary. No schedule. They plan to sail “as long as it’s fun”.

And Mike says that he’s going to keep up with the bright work.
Hmm. Fun. Bright work. Some sailors might see one getting in the way of the other.

But Mike sees it differently. He and Kylie spent 3-1/2 years fixing the boat up, they say, and he has a very clear memory of what it took to get the wood clean to begin with. Having once gone through the tedium of taking the wood down, Mike says he just can’t let it go back.

Mike and Kylie have been planning their no-fixed-destination getaway for about 5 years. Much of that time was spent getting the 1964 ketch “Meggie” ready. It meant more than varnish. It was what Mike describes as, “a full-blown refit.” New wooden masts for the ketch rig.

And down below, much more work to be done.

They are the fourth owners of the boat, and somewhere in her 4 decades, the interior had been all painted over. Mike “tore out” the interior, Kylie says, and then restored much of the original wood.

One thing that they did not change on “Meggie” was her name. The previous owner had named the boat for his grandmother, who’d been an actress in England.

“We met her as Meggie,” Mike says, and kept her that way, in part because as a registered vessel, there would have been a ‘cost involved’ in giving her a different name.

During the time they were fixing her up, Mike and Kylie targeted this year as the one they’d be living aboard “Meggie”. And as Mike puts it, “We pulled it off.” They sold their home and “everything we had”. They quit their jobs — his as a carpenter, hers managing a home decor store. And they moved on board to a simpler life.

For instance, the two solar panels tied to the deck, Mike says, keeps up with the need for electricity on board. Then again, those needs are few. The lamps in the cabin and the anchor light run on parafin (kerosene), Mike says. They don’t have electronic navigation, other than a handheld GPS. Kylie, he says, plots everything on paper.

The one piece of electronics they do have is a laptop on which Kylie has been blogging their trip.

Their cruising began July 31 from the Georgian Bay — “a sailors paradise” Kylie says — where they’d been sailing for 8 years. The trip south took them to three of the Great Lakes.

Great Lakes Effect

The first Great Lake — their “testing ground” Mike says — was Lake Huron. It was near there, in Detroit that according to Kylie’s blog, they had an incident with a spreader coming dislodged, something Mike fixed — and had varnished — within hours.

Of the Great Lakes, the “trickiest” was Lake Erie.

A 20 knot wind on Lake Erie, Mike says, can get “nasty” and bring on a “chop in a hurry” thanks to the relatively shallow (by non-Pamlico Sound standards) 60-70 foot waters. He can speak with authority on this because for four days, they faced 20 knot winds for the 200 mile length of Lake Erie.

Things improved after that. Lake Ontario. The Erie Canal, with both masts down. Then the Hudson and in to the Atlantic off of NY and NJ.

That was their first real sail in the ocean, and Mike says he found those “seas quite a bit kinder” than what they’d been through on Lake Erie.

They’ve since spent time in Annapolis and come down the ICW.

In the first few days of November they arrived in Oriental. With their ketch rig they were able to tuck under the bridge and anchor up Green and Smith Creeks for a few nights, then moving to the Town Dock. They are finding Oriental a good place to stop along the ICW – planning to take “Meggie” to SailCraft Service for a haul-out. Mike says he wants to check the boat out after its first 2400 miles, refasten the engine beds and touch up the bottom paint.

While that’s still fun….

Kylie’s Blog

Posted Monday November 6, 2006 by Melinda Penkava