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A boat that came through the Town Dock this season had us re-checking our dictionaries. Sure enough, there was the definition of “leviathan”: 1. something unusually large of its kind, especially a ship. 2. A very large animal, especially a whale.”

Nic Smithson’s “Leviathan”, a 20-foot Nordica Holman had to be the smallest leviathan seen around here. The red kayak he uses as dinghy and potential life raft takes up much of the deck space.

Nic had set out on the Nordica Holman from his Ontario home port in September. He didn’t head directly south, but instead meandered in Canadian waters for a while. As it turns out, a few hours he spent as a Good Samaritan almost cost him his passage south.

Nic had stopped to help some fellow sailors who had dropped a turnbuckle in 15 feet of bracingly cold Canadian water. It took an hour just to dig his wetsuit out of storage deep in his boat.

A short time later he pulled in to the last lock of a canal leading toward the Hudson. That’s where Nic says the lockkeeper commented, “You’re cutting it close. You’ll be the last boat to go through this season.”

After that close call, Nic ran in to a lot of weather, sailing through sleet and snow in NY and finding ice on deck in the Chesapeake. But Nic points out that there was also a rainbow “ that broke out and a flock of seagulls took on its colors.” Sailing a 20-foot boat named Leviathan means having a good supply of optimism stowed along with the kayak and wetsuit.

Also on board is a large collection of pennywhistles which Nic plays. His favorite of the bunch is a Copeland whistle, which did have haunting warmth when he played a few notes. But Nic doesn’t play it much anymore because it is made of nickel, which he says caused him short-term memory loss.

Happier notes might be heard coming from his concertina. “It’s a sailor’s instrument,” Nic says. “It loves humidity. This one was built in 1843.” He shows it off on the Town Dock, pulling it from velvet lined case that his wife made.

As he makes his way south to Florida, Nic is traveling alone. When they first married, he’d had high hopes of sailing with his wife, who he says loves to travel and whose children were already being home-schooled. “I thought, ‘This is perfect’,” said Nic, imagining an easy transition to cruising life.

It might have happened he says, except that his wife gets horribly seasick.

By contrast, Nic says, “I get landsick the second I get off my boat.”

He has spent a lot of his life on or near the water.

Nic says he grew up in Ontario near where Grampian sailboats were made. After Grade 10, he ‘went roaming, living off the land, stalking the wild asparagus’ by way of canoe with a ‘dog and a rod’ in the Georgian Bay. He spent time working for a wooden boat builder, making deliveries. But when the same crop of Georgian Bay rocks kept turning up under the boats, Nic switched from navigating boats to making them.

(He tells us that he still doesn’t navigate with charts. Leviathan’s 3-foot draft allows a lot of room for error most of the time, though there was an encounter with Pamlico Sound’s bottom that required lasso-ing a piling to pull free.)

In recent years Nic has set up a business washing windows in the Thousand Islands area of Lake Ontario. He has worked a boat in to the picture there, too. While some of his customers are reached by land, he arrives at other jobs by boat. That’s why he had the words “The Window Wiper” painted at midship.

Before this trip though, Nic hadn’t had much time to sail “Leviathan” just for the joy of it. “I don’t sail before September because I’m working 7 days a week in July and August, and 6 days a week the rest of the year.” And he adds, the rainy days that put off window washing don’t make for good sailing weather either.

But now Nic is off on a trip that recalls his earlier days. He is roaming on “Leviathan” until he heads back north for the summer work season, which starts in June.

In the meantime, those on the coast and ICW who need some windows washed might want to keep their eyes peeled for a 20-foot “Leviathan” and keep an ear out for the sound of pennywhistles and a concertina.

Posted Sunday February 23, 2003 by Melinda Penkava

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