High Maintenance

© Melanie Neale / RumBum.com

The house we’re renting in St. Augustine is kind of creepy – creepy in the way that you can imagine all kinds of strange things having gone on there in the past. Since we’ve been there, we’ve had several odd occurrences happen (blank pieces of paper taped to the back door, upside – down pies on our front steps…we haven’t done anything to upset the neighbors, so we really have no idea what’s going on). But one really good thing about the house is that there’s a great workbench in the shed out back. Nevermind the fact that it looks like someone might have LIVED in the shed (the old blankets on the floor and the towels over the windows remind me of something out of a crime show).   

Will and I put the workbench to good use the Saturday after our dismasting. We’d decided that, at this point, whether we were going to sell Annabel Lee or not, we had to get her mast back up. The first part of the process involved beating the stainless steel mast step back into place where it had bent. Will used the bench vice in the shed to grip the piece, and I held a flashlight on it as he banged it with a hammer, slowly bending the metal back into place.

It took several sessions of pounding, but the piece finally resembled its former self (less a few smooth surfaces) when we had finished with it. We were both happy to get out of the shed, and I cringed as I stepped around the blanket on the floor. Next, it was on the West Marine, where we dropped another hundred dollars on different fittings for the rigging. We’d decided to replace the rest of the t-bolts, since they were similar in age and appearance to the one that had broken.

“I thought sailing was supposed to be cheap,” Will said as we left.

“Ha,” I said. “Haven’t you ever heard what ‘boat’ stands for? Break Out Another Thousand.”

Will was right, though – sailing on a 19’ sailboat was supposed to be cheap. But it was becoming painfully obvious that Annabel Lee had a high-maintenance personality, like those women who have to have Coach bags and designer shoes. Neither Will nor I handle those personalities very well, and I wondered how long we’d be able to deal with Annabel’s demands. After all, there were other things in life that we wanted to spend our money on, like buying a home and saving for retirement.

Back at the boat, we got to work on the mast step, Will drilling out the holes where we needed to bolt it to the deck and me down inside the cabin, guiding him to make sure he didn’t drill through anything. The step appeared to have been screwed into the deck before, and not properly through-bolted, so we had bought some longer bolts in a effort to make the mast step as strong as possible.

Midway through drilling, Will came to a sudden stop. “Look at this!” I felt the boat move as he stood up, shifting his weight on deck, and came back to the cockpit.

“What?” I stuck my head out of the cabin and into the sunlight. 

He held in his hand what appeared to be a large silver coin. “It’s a silver dollar,” he said, “from 1923.”

“No way…”

“I found it underneath the mast step,” he said. “Just sitting there. Is that some kind of tradition or something?”

I thought I remembered hearing something about sailors dropping coins underneath where the mast of their vessel rested against the hull, but I wasn’t sure of the details. A quick search on Will’s Blackberry and a call to my dad confirmed the tradition. But normally this was something done with pennies—not silver dollars from 1923. 

“It was tails-up,” Will said.

“Maybe that’s been our problem.” I said.