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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.

SV New Life
Looking For Rocks
November 22, 2011

R
ocks are avoided by most cruising sailors. They bring to mind the hard grounding, the ruptured hull, the water pouring in on the floating dream.

Not so for nine year old Marvin Echenard aboard the steel cutter, “New Life.”. He collects them. To him, rocks are “treasure,” prized objects to be sought on distant islands. The Echenard’s nine year cruise has shown how stones and boats can coexist.

Marvin, Patricia and Thierry Echenard
New Life at the Town Dock

Marvin and his parents Thierry and Patricia Echenard recently visited the Town Dock aboard their steel cutter, New Life. They’d spent the summer in the Chesapeake Bay and were now heading south, to warmer weather. Originally from Le Mont-sur-Lausanne in Switzerland’s French-speaking region, they have been sailing the Caribbean and US East coast for almost a decade. The stones Marvin has gathered trace his early traveling years.

While the stones in Marvin’s collection come and go – some end up back in Switzerland with his grand parents, some are given away – most are tied to a geographical memory. Take one of his earliest acquisitions. White and angular, it came from a beach in Venezuela. “I was digging in the sand and found a big rock but it was too big,” he says. So he chipped off a white piece of stone attached to the large rock. It served as the seed of his collection.

Over the 9 years the family has cruised, his collection has grown to include dozens of other pieces. A flinty stone from Curacao. Pumice from a Caribbean volcano. A quartz-colored chunk from Panama’s San Blas islands. There’s lapis lazuli and blue pectolite, also called larimar, acquired in Colombia and St. John in the US Virgin Islands.

A piece of quartz picked up in Marvin’s Caribbean travels.

While the stones he’s gathered are sparkling clean, they don’t always come into his life that way. He says his rocks come from “everywhere.” Some are found clean on the beach. Others are coaxed out of the ground. The dirty ones, he washes. First, he puts them in a container. Then he says, “I clean them with soap and water with my hands.”

Unlike the shells, carvings and textiles traditionally collected by sailors, gathering stones poses some boat-specific challenges. Mostly it’s the weight. Too many rocks on a boat cut into valuable buoyancy. So Marvin sticks with pieces the size of his fist or smaller. Many are silver dollar-size or less.

Not that there’s a law on board New Life against bringing home really big pieces. Marvin says that for the right rock, that wouldn’t be a problem. The only catch, he jokes, is, “they have to be gold.” In that case, he thinks his dad would let him bring aboard a piece as large as the Town Dock.

Where the white stones live.
Marvin shows where part of his collection travels while New Life is under way – under the forward settee.

Then there’s the matter of stowage. While long on adventure, sailboats can be short on space. Focusing his collection on certain pieces has kept the size manageable. A small plastic storage container houses his collection of white stones and quartz. Other samples occupy a plastic baggie and a black metal box.

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For the Echenard family, Marvin’s nautical stone search has been a long time in the making. It began far from the ocean, on the geographical equivalent of a landlocked rock – Switzerland. It was in the Swiss town of Le Mont-sur-Lausanne, about 300 miles from the Mediterranean sea, that Patricia and Thierry put together their vessel.

Years ago, Thierry was looking for a boat to take him sailing. One day, he came across a bare steel hull. Designed by Gilbert Caroff, it had been started in 1975. Years later, it was still only a hull and deck, and beginning to rust away. The transom was holed. Through it streamed dark rust.

How New Life life looked when she came into the Echenard’s life (Patricia Echenard photo)

The structure was in such poor shape, it was going to be scrapped. But it spoke to Thierry. Patricia says when Thierry stepped into the vessel he imagined “he heard a beeping sound, a cry for help.” Describing the sound as something one might hear on medical equipment, she says it was as though the boat was crying out, “I’m alive! I’m alive! Save me!”

So Thierry bought the hull. That was 1990.

Working alone at first, then later with Patricia, he turned New Life into a voyaging vessel. Patricia says one of the biggest challenges was working with “no money”. With finances tight, the couple scavenged most of their materials. The lead ballast, over 3,500 pounds, was sourced from wheel weights and sheathing for underground electrical cable. Other lead came from indoor plumbing. As plastic piping made its way into Swiss homes, some of the condemned lead pipe made its way into the melting crucible.

The mahogany for New Life’s cockpit floor was also salvaged. It was sourced from old wood windows that were replaced with new, plastic ones.

How New Life’s interior initially looked in Thierry’s backyard in Switzerland… (Patricia Echenard photo)
… and how she looked more recently in Oriental.

The years passed. New Life took shape. Finally, in the fall of 2002, the vessel was complete. Just before launching in Lake Geneva, a final addition was made. On August 16, son Marvin was born. Less than 2 months later, New Life floated for the first time. The following spring, the vessel was trucked to Port Camargue on the coast of France. The Echenards’ voyage, the one 13 years in the making, could begin.

Home port Basilea. Patricia says all federally registered sailboats in Switzerland share the same home port – Basel. The city straddles the Rhine River. From here, vessels can reach the sea. How the city’s name is spelled on the transom is up to the owner. Swiss, French or Italian speakers would spell the the city’s name “Basel”, “Bâle” or “Basilea”. Patricia says that, though they speak French, they chose Basilea “because it sounded more tropical, more singing.”

From France, the Echenards sailed to England, then crossed the Atlantic, arriving in Guadeloupe in 2005. After cruising and working in the Caribbean they visited the East Coast in 2009, returning to the Bahamas and Virgin Islands the following year. The fall of 2011 found New Life in Oriental.

For Marvin, the travels have been a chance to grow his stone collection. At first, he collected just rocks. Later, he specialized in white ones, particularly crystals and quartz.

Then came the treasure hunters.

While cruising in the Florida Keys, Marvin met one of treasure hunter, Mel Fisher’s crew. Fisher made history for discovering the remains of the treasure laden Spanish galleon “Nuestra Señora de Atocha”. Spending time with one of Fisher’s crew members – or maybe it was all the talk of diamonds and rubies – steered Marvin’s attention toward a different kind of stones. The precious and semi-precious ones.

While he still hasn’t amassed a trunk filled with diamonds, Marvin has added some color to his collection. While visiting the Town Dock, Ralph Evey presented him with a few semi-precious stones, including two purple amethysts. Also making their way onto New Life were a few fossilized clams. They were sourced from a driveway within walking distance of the Town Dock.

Treasure worthy of a pirate ship. Two amethysts that joined the collection in Oriental.
Some stones are precious in other ways. Here, Marvin puts pumice to heel on a Town Dock visitor. The product of frothy, molten stone that’s been cast out by a volcano, he found the lightweight rock in his Caribbean travels.

So where are the Echenards heading next? Recently, Patricia says, Marvin is starting to miss something. While rocks are fun to collect, he wants to be around more kids his own age. Patricia says families cruising with young children as not as common as they once were. The plan now is to sail south, sell New Life, then return to Switzerland. There, it is imagined, Marvin would begin school, make new friends, and continue looking for old ones – in the form of his beloved rocks.

Posted Tuesday November 22, 2011 by Bernie Harberts


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