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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.

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Posted Friday September 12, 2008 by Melinda Penkava

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