It's Tuesday May 13, 2008
SMALL CRAFT ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 10 PM EDT THIS EVENING
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.
You might now and then see a powder blue boat, or a yellow boat. Rarely a lime green one. But even rarer still, all three colors together.
The Hunter showed up recently at the Town Dock. Often the brightest thing around, it brings to mind a malted Easter egg.
The colors came with the boat when owner Lee Hayes acquired it two months ago in Washington, NC. While it had color, it had no name, and no mast. No sail or rigging, either. The last owner, Lee says, had been a reverend and the boat had been on the hard for a few years. A boatyard wanted to have it out of the way.
Lee has been working his way – slowly down – from Washington. Along the way he found a mast, though it hasn’t been stepped yet.
And as Lee quickly offers, he didn’t know how to sail — his boating experience was on inland rivers, in fishing boats. But even without the mast up, he’s been adjusting to some of the sailing approach. In particular, the speed — or lack of it — with the 5HP outboard. He noted that it took 8 hours to get to Oriental from Hobucken. And that refilling the outboard from a gas tank in a rocky sea is a skill to appreciate.
Lee, who is from Durham, says he decided he wanted to live on a boat in order to get away from the ‘hustle and bustle’ He’d had a serious car accident a few years ago and before that, made his living ‘up in trees’ assessing their health.
His destination is Morehead City or Wilmington, where he hopes to live on the boat and work. With this help of his father, he plans to step the mast and in time refinish the interior of the 1970’s boat. His father, he says, works with wood and has lots of mahogany to spare.
As for the colorful hull, he says he’s thinking of adding a stripe of darker blue near the cap rail.
Posted Saturday April 5, 2008 by Melinda Penkava
