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“It’s a crazy life we got.”

David Moore says this at one point in our conversation in the cockpit of Nantascot, the boat that he and his wife, Virginia Wilcox, had tied up to the Town Dock in late August.

The Joshua Slocum “Spray”-inspired boat is 28 feet 9 inches and 8 tons of very bright yellow steel. That alone would be worthy of a story. But it comes with stories about other boats in David’s past. One small. And one very, very big one.

“Nantascot”

Before we even had a chance to talk about the unusual-looking “Nantascot”, Virginia was saying that it wasn’t as exotic as David’s previous boat. That would be “Tean”, the one he lived on for 7 years and sailed three times across the Atlantic, before it met its end in the South Pacific.

“It was made of wood. 25 feet long. No engine,” Virginia starts. “It had a broken rig for the 5-1/2 months after he left Panama. He put in at Rarotonga in the Cook Islands. He didn’t want to ask for directions. He hit a reef. It sank.”

“So, he built this one out of steel so he could go back and ram that reef.”

Virginia Wilcox enjoys telling the story. David laughs often through it. The sinking happened in 1996, a few years before they met on Cape Cod.

David Moore and Virginia Wilcox.

Massachusetts is where David went after his boat went up on the reef. Well, actually, it wasn’t quite as simple as that. Massachusetts is where David went after scraping together fare from the remains of his boat and that task was more difficult that you might imagine, because he wasn’t the only one picking thru the wreckage of “Tean.”

He says that as high tide covered his boat, he went to shore and later from there, watched as other people wielding crowbars scavenged, and “pinched stuff off the boat.” He managed to get himself a “couple little things” to sell and pay for his trip back to Massachusetts. He traveled very light on that flight. All of his possessions fit in to “a little hand bag.” He speaks of it with no hint of regret. It was, he says, “a good cleaning act.”

The cockpit area of “Nantascot”.

A native of Weymouth, England, David had first sailed to Weymouth, Massacusetts a few years earlier, and wound up in the nearby town of Hull. Post-Cook Islands, he went there again, supporting himself by making pen and ink drawings. Selling them is how he met Virginia, a native of Missouri who had lived in East Africa before moving to Massachusetts.

“She bought one of my calendars and got more than she bargained for.”

One day, over a cup of coffee, he laid out his plan. “I’m gonna build a boat and go around the world. Want to go?” David grins at the story. Like Virginia, he laughs and smiles a lot (and in doing so, flashes a front tooth with an anchor cap.)

Smiling at anchor.

David says he found a boat that was “half finished by a guy in his back garden.” He worked on it in Hull, out in the open. Having no workshop meant digging thru snow to get to the boat when he wanted to work in the winter. He also didn’t have much in the way of power tools. Just, he says, “a bag of handtools.”

With a stick welder he redid a lot of the existing welds and then added more as he modified the Spray design, most notably by adding a pilothouse. It too, was made of steel, and as you navigate toward the cabin down below, both Virginia and David repeatedly issue warnings. In American and British variations you hear a lot of, “Watch your head.” “Mind your head.” Standing up too soon, say these voices of experience, “can hurt like mad”.

Virginia and David.

By their description, “Nantascot” has “a lot of recycled stuff.” Windows in the pilothouse did previous service on a Mitsubishi truck. The steering gears feature four bike chains. Down below the hot water is held in a five gallon Coca Cola stainless steel tank that David says ‘“came off the dump.” The shower features a small tub. (”$10 out of an RV,” he laughs.)

The Coca-Cola tank put to a new purpose — hot water tank. At lower left you can see part of the square bathtub/shower area.

The cabin’s flooring is laid with “chopped up bits, off-cuts” of parquet and wood from flooring jobs on land. The v-berth (that converts to a couch David designed) sits behind a solid teak door that was scavenged from a Lancer. (That boat, David says, is now in the Hingham dump. At first, he had shown up at the dump with the boat on a trailer, and was told he couldn’t leave it there. So David went back home, he says, cut the boat into one foot pieces, then returned to the dump where the pieces are now interred.)

Forward on “Nantascot”, Virginia near the door (from another boat) and the v-berth that converts to a settee. “Isn’t it fun?” she says, calling her boat, “The Little Boat That Could.”

Into the engine room on Page 2 of Nanascot >>> [page]

Then there’s the engine, a Vetus 20HP. “It’s a very old engine,” David says. “Someone else got it second-hand in 1975. It was under the snow for a bit and used as a work bench.” He’s applied TLC and babies it, he says, with regular oil changes. He also retrofitted the fuel tanks with plugs so that he can periodically take the filter-clogging “scum off the bottom of the tanks.”

The engine room on Nantascot.

He put some thought in to the engine compartment, as well. And put in two water cooling systems. That way, he says, “if you’re up a river and your filter gets blocked up, you can just change over and don’t have to stop the boat.”

That attention to detail on the engine stems from the years when David worked in much bigger engine rooms.

After getting out of the British Army a few decades ago, he went to work for Cunard Lines as an engine room cleaner. He says he had no formal training when he started, but did “muck around with engines and motorcycles and things like that.” In the steam engine rooms of liners such as the QE2, he was called in to save the day a few times when what he calls the “gold braiders.. were waving their certificates” at an engine problem to no avail. Cunard sent him to college for an engineering degree and he eventually rose to Senior Petty Officer.

He was senior mechanic on the QE2 when the famous cruise liner made its first passage thru the Panama Canal in 1975. “They came and got me out of bed,” he says, when the 105 foot wide ship had to squeeze into a 110 foot wide lock. Deep down in the steam engine room, Davy was at the throttles with not much room for error. There were 30 inches to spare on either side.

That trip thru the canal was the first one of several that he made on the liner. Ironically, he went from living on a ship with massive engines.. to his own wooden boat which was powered only by sail, and when he needed them, oars. When he initially tried to take “Tean” through the canal, he was rebuffed because it didn’t have an engine. He eventually tied up to another boat that did have auxilliary power. Then, half a year later, “Tean” sank on a South Pacific reef.

The bow figure — nicknamed “Nana” — on “Nantascot.”.

Which is what led David to “Nantascot.” and all those winters of shoveling snow off her. Finally, after years of work, he and Virginia launched their very yellow boat in 2005. It’s a color that Virginia chose (“It’s Safety Yellow,” she says, “What better color to be at sea?”) and which David didn’t like at first ( “but she said ‘yellow’, so we like yellow.”)

He allows that it did come in handy at least once on the trek south on the ICW from Massachusetts. While in Norfolk’s busy harbor, “we were in the way of some great big container boat.” Through “all that gobble-de-gee,” on the radio, David says, he heard someone calling, (and here his voice goes high pitched) “Lit-tle yellow sailboat.”

Nantascot’s reflection bobbing at the Town Dock..

The couple initially had ideas of going across the Atlantic that first year – it would’ve been the fourth time for David and a first for Virginia — but by the time they launched, it was too late in the season. They headed down the ICW instead.

David thinks the Atlantic would’ve been easier and, as he puts it, “ten times safer.”

They say the waterway was “not for us.” With their late start, it was cold. There was ice. And their 20HP engine couldn’t push the 8 tons of steel fast enough.
They went aground. They “snagged on something …. between the keel and the rudder” that sent them to the hard in Belhaven. There, Virginia says, David started rebuilding the boat. It has been, they say, a circus. They laugh.

No litterbox needed for the cutout cat.

After Belhaven, they crawled a little further down the ICW, eventually getting to Beaufort. And though it hadn’t been part of the game plan, they bought a house there. For the past year or two, “Nantascot” has been on the hard at Bock Marine, on Adams Creek. She was only recently put back in the water. She sports a “For Sale” sign. (Their attitude is that if somebody buys her, good. If not, no worries.)

Oriental was Davy and Virginia’s first stop once they got “Nantascot” back in the water. When we spoke in late August, they were waiting for a good weather window to go to Ocracoke, which they eventually did reach.

Next month, they start a 6-week stint as lighthouse keepers at Cape Lookout, and after that? Virginia says she’d like to go down to the Caribbean. Davy says he’d like to cross the Atlantic first, then back again and then go thru the islands on the circuit. Virginia talks about wanting to go to the South Pacific.

The crew of Nantascot: Virginia and David. (Not shown here: the Union Jack shorts that went on jogs thru town.)

That could mean another trip for David through the Panama Canal, which could be fitting for the boat they named “Nantascot.” It’s the word Indians used for the land near Hull, Massachusetts and means “The Land Between The Two Tides,” a term that would describe Panama as well. While she might go thru the Canal some day, the travel plans for the crew of “Nantascot” are as fluid and light as the laughter of its crew.

Posted Friday September 12, 2008 by Melinda Penkava

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