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t’s getting late in the season for the snowbird sailors who flock up the ICW to find cooler summer cruising grounds. For a while this June, the straggling snowbirds have had a forest fire — and smoke from it — to contend with. More than 40 thousand acres have been burning a few dozen miles north of Oriental, on the Pungo canal between Belhaven and Alligator River.

That fire was on the mind of one of those late snowbirds, John Funke when we caught up with him at The Bean last week. John’s boat “Gavia Immer”, was tied up across the street at the Town Dock. It’s a stop they’ve — John and boat — made often over the past few years.

Gavia Immer returns to the Town Dock. Just off its bow is the Cape Dory 28 on its way to its new home in Elizabeth City.

Since we spoke with him 5 years ago, John’s been up and down the coast with the seasons. He downplayed his travels and the places he’d been (except to note how much of a beating his laptop computer had taken along the way) and was more focused on where he would be going in the next few days. John said he was trying to plot a way north around the fire so he could help a friend navigate his newly-bought boat to Elizabeth City. “This guy is the one you should talk to,” John said.

The Herreshoff 12.5

“This guy” is Jim Lowe. They met a year ago when John and “Gavia Immer” stopped in Elizabeth City where Jim lives (and works — for a little while longer — teaching electronics at the Coast Guard Station.) What impressed John most were the boats that Jim builds in his spare time.

From a shed near the water in Elizabeth City, Jim’s been building wooden (and cold-molded wood and epoxy) boats for years. Among them: The Herreshoff 12.5 (based on a 1914 center-board design), and the 16-foot Welsford Navigator yawl.

“It’s what I do to stay sane.”

They take about six months to build. Jim sells them at boat shows, he says, adding that he hasn’t kept any to sail himself. Indeed, Jim says he’s not owned a sailboat until buying the Cape Dory 28 a few weeks ago in Charleston.

Jim Lowe at the Town Dock with his new boat.

Portlight on the Cape Dory 28.

Why’d he buy this one, now? Jim was quick with the answer: “I retire in September.”

Before now, Jim says he thought having a boat was too costly a toy when you couldn’t use it all the time. But he says that a boat you can live on, “is pretty reasonable … from an economic standpoint.”

He thinks of the Cape Dory, as “my cruising home” on which he hopes to spend a few months — “the hot ones” he says — “up in Maine or Nova Scotia.”

The tender to the Cape Dory is a graceful ‘nutshell’ dinghy. It didn’t come with the boat nor did Jim build it. Rather, he rescued it off of a van in Elizabeth CIty where the boat had been deployed on the van’s roof to keep water out of the vehicle. Its bottom exposed to the elements, its planks had pulled apart. Jim fixed it and was marveling at how effortlessly it has glided behind the main boat on the trip north.

Jim Lowe and John Funke check the charts

Two weeks ago, he started to bring the Cape Dory north from Charleston to Elizabeth City. Despite his years of boatbuilding and an earlier career in the Coast Guard navigating C130 planes (“I told the pilots where to go.”), sailing his own boat was a new experience. He hadn’t raised the mainsail — relying only on the gib and the motor. And he was going slow.

When he pulled up to Oriental’s Town Dock on June 11th, there was a familiar face. Coincidentally, “Gavia Immer” had tied up there the day before and John Funke was ready to take the lines.

Jim had several orders of business — among them, finding a pumpout station for his holding tank. (He ultimately made arrangements for pumping out the next day at Deatons, where only a nominal fee would be charged.) But for that night, with the holding tank in a holding pattern, he didn’t want to sleep on the boat. During dinner at Scoot’s restaurant he asked if there was a phone to use to find a room for the night. Jim said that by the time he finished dinner, Scoot’s owner Eric Stickrath had called around to four places in town, and summarized the prices and vacancies for him.

On his boat-searching missions in recent years, Jim had visited Oriental’s outer reaches but not the village part of town. The resident of Elizabeth City, a town known for it hospitality to visiting boaters, says he wants to come back to Oriental after his brief stay last week. One other attraction had been the relatively new, Marine Consignment of Oriental, where he acquired a few more things for “Sea Otter”.

Transom of the Cape Dory, to be named, Sea Otter, and the dinghy that was once a cover for a leaky van.

The final task was to find their way north. The two cruisers decided against the usual ICW route, via the Pungo Canal above Belhaven, because of the heavy forest fire smoke still in the air there. With east winds blowing the smoke inland, they decided to take the rarely used alternative route – going up the entire length of the Pamlico Sound and then entering the Albemarle. John agreed to travel alongside Jim on this part of his trip. They took off late Thursday afternoon.

Once in Elizabeth City, “Sea Otter” will take a slip across the street from Jim’s woodboat workshed.

Posted Monday June 16, 2008 by Melinda Penkava

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