
Neeltje

Viktor IV with Ena and Janneke, 1971
When I was very young, just eighteen, I lived on a Dutch canal boat named the Henry David Thoreau on the Amstel river in the heart of Amsterdam. The boat was a seventy-foot tjalk – a rugged, cold-riveted steel hulled, flat-bottomed, gaff-and-boom rigged sloop built to carry cargo through Europe’s inland waterways. That’s a mouthful, especially if you’re not a sailor. The easiest way to describe a tjalk to someone who hasn’t seen one is to say it’s the boat one imagines in fairy tales. Rounded and raised at both ends with leeboards instead of a deep keel and with a huge mainsail, tjalks have a magical, mythical quality.
The Henry David Thoreau was built in 1889 and owned by the artist Viktor IV, who acquired it in 1961 and made it into his home and studio. When the glassed-in tour boats that wander around Amsterdam’s canals passed by, we could hear the guides describe Viktor as “The King of the Hippies”. Probably true. Most mornings, Viktor would rise before the sun, made a drawing on a mimeograph blank, run off fifty or so copies on his hand-cranked mimeo machine, and set off on his bicycle wearing a worn-out postal uniform and wooden shoes, his wild, long grey hair and grey beard matching his steel-grey eyes, to plaster the drawings up on walls and on the back of stop signs all over the city. He would scoop up hatch covers lost from other boats that came floating down the river, wash them off, dry them out, and use them as canvases for his large paintings. His art was fanciful, humorous, and at time absurd. I was often reminded of Saul Steinberg but Viktor’s work was uniquely his; not derivative.

The Henry David Thoreau
A few years later, Viktor renamed the boat the Berendina Fennegina. That’s what it was called when Cheech and Chong filmed an LSD trip on board for one of their movies. In 1986, while Viktor was diving underneath the boat to plug a leak, he drowned. It was a testament to his popularity in his adopted city that hundreds of boats followed his flower-covered funeral barge as it made its way slowly up the Amstel and out of town to the cemetery where he was to be interred while thousands of people lined the river banks to pay their last respects. The procession was broadcast live on Dutch television.
I liked Viktor very much, and I adored Janneke, the girl I first came to Amsterdam to be with, but I was absolutely in love with the boat. Every canal in the cities and towns of the Netherlands is lined with houseboats that had begun life a century or more earlier as cargo vessels. A great many others have been converted to traditionally-rigged sailing yachts. They require tremendous knowledge and skill to sail, and endless hours of hard labor and expert craftsmanship to maintain. There are many museums across the Netherlands devoted to traditional sailing craft and the boats are treated as national treasures.
If you haven’t listened to or read my earlier stories, then you will not know that I have sailed all my life and that I studied marine archaeology and the history of seafaring. After a few months living aboard the Henry David Thoreau I crossed the channel to Bristol, England to attend a marine archaeology symposium where I met Peter Throckmorton, a founding father of modern marine archaeology. After hearing his lecture I decided to try for a spot on his crew. When he asked for my address I gave him the name of the boat and her location next to the Blauwbrug on the right bank of the river. He said, “Oh, I know the Henry David Thoreau. It was built in 1889 in Groningen”, and proceeded to give me details of the boat’s history, design, and construction that I didn’t know even though I was living aboard. Such was the breadth and depth of Throckmorton’s knowledge.
I convinced Throckmorton to take me on and I had a few months before I had to set off for Greece, so after I returned to Amsterdam I sought out boatyards working on tjalk conversions and begged for work. On weekends I stood on the banks of the larger canals and rivers and stuck out my thumb. While other young Americans were hitchhiking the highways I was hitching rides on the waterways. The captains of cargo boats, often with their families onboard, were glad for a little company and were quick to invite me to motor along with them for a while.
I dreamed of one day owning a tjalk of my own. For a quarter century I held onto that dream.
In the spring of 1997 I was living in a townhouse on the riverfront of Alexandria, Virginia. For eleven years I had been working under contract to the Australian Department of Defense out of the Australian embassy in Washington, but a new Prime Minister decided my work should be done by an Aussie, not a Yank, and I was wondering what I should do next. I was walking to a restaurant with a girlfriend when I saw an issue of Soundings, a national boats-for-sale magazine, and bought it. I was exceedingly rude to my date as I leafed through the pages while we waited for our food, and my eye caught a listing for a, “52 foot 1903 steel-hulled flat-bottomed traditional Dutch sailboat, $25K”, and a telephone number. I recognized the area code as Baltimore. Could it be true? Was there really an authentic tjalk for sale in Baltimore? It was too late that day to call. The evening was a disaster as far as my girlfriend was concerned. In fact, I have a hard time remembering if I ever saw her again. It was a shame, that, but then, there was the possibility a tjalk was for sale a mere fifty miles away! I was pretty sure there wasn’t another anywhere in North America.
I figured eight the next morning wasn’t too early to call, but I’d been up since five. Couldn’t sleep. The phone was answered on the sixth ring by a broker. Yes, the boat, named Encore, was in Baltimore and was up on blocks in a boatyard next to the Domino Sugar Factory near the inner harbor. The broker didn’t know a tjalk from a smelt (sorry, couldn’t rhyme with tjalk) but his description sounded about right. Encore had sat neglected in a remote part of Baltimore harbor for nine years, and was in bad shape.
I was on the road to Baltimore as soon as I was off the phone. The Gods were kind and I didn’t get a speeding ticket for zooming up I-95, though I more than deserved one. I turned into the boatyard’s entrance and as I passed a building shielding my view of the yard, Encore revealed herself. She was all I had hoped for! A tjalk that had been converted to a yacht in a style I particularly admired, and her rigging was purely traditional. Right away I was certain the conversion had been done at a boatyard in Muiden in the Netherlands where I had worked on a similar project in 1971. I couldn’t believe my eyes, even as I registered the most glaring details of her decayed condition.
I found the broker and got the back story. Dan Rowan, of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in fame, bought the old boat around 1982 and had her converted to a yacht at the de Leeuw boatyard in Muiden. I had nailed it. Rowan named her Encore and he and his third wife Joanna cruised the canals of Europe until the summer of ’87, when he had her shipped to the United States as deck cargo, port of entry: Baltimore. Sadly, Dan died of lymphoma while the boat was in transit.
Encore changed hands a few times over the next decade, but she hadn’t been maintained or sailed. She had deteriorated, her brightwork had faded and pealed, her mast and booms had rotted, her lines had decayed in the sun.
On that day of discovery, I worked through the long list of Encore’s known deficiencies to get an idea of what it was going to take to restore her to glory. The $25K asking price was salvage value, nothing more. I knew a boat surveyor in Baltimore and had him come over straight away. To my surprise and delight, he had already surveyed Encore for another buyer who had given his permission to share the results of an ultrasonic survey of the steel hull’s thickness. There were a few thin spots but for the most part, the news was pretty good. Surprisingly, all the through-hull fittings and the hoses attached to them were in good shape. Rowan has installed a bow thruster and the transverse tube was of a different steel alloy than the steel used to make the hull in 1903. The difference in metals was enough to encourage the corrosion of the tube over the hull. The tube had ruptured and the boat had nearly sunk at its mooring, which was why it was on dry land now. The tube would have to be replaced or the entire bow thruster scrapped and new steel welded over the holes on the bow quarters. The hull, decks, and superstructure would have to be sand-blasted down to bare metal, the weak and thin spots repaired, and then all the steel would need to be protected with modern marine coatings and an impressive number of zinc sacrificials.
The oak leeboards and rudder, as well as all the topside teak, were badly weathered but could be saved with an enormous commitment to sanding and varnish. The gaff, boom, and bowsprit were salvageable, but the mast had considerable rot and would have to be replaced. So too would all the standing and running gear. The hot water heater for the sinks and shower was serviceable but the boiler in the engine room that provided hot water for the radiators in all the interior compartments was like many of the older installations on yachts in the Netherlands. They worked but they were large and burned a lot of oil and were better suited for the basement of a small home. The boiler would not meet ABYC safety standards. It would have to be replaced if I hoped to get the boat insured. Since Rowan had never had a chance to sail Encore on the Chesapeake he had not tumbled to just how hot and humid Mid-Atlantic summers could be. I would need to find hidden spaces for air conditioner compressors and ducting.
A bright spot was that the deep-red Dacron sails were well-used but in good shape! So were the compass, top side engine gauges, jib sheet and halyard winches, and anchors. The 95 horsepower Ford diesel engine was in great condition, and even though the batteries and the big Onan generator were kaput, using shore power I discovered that the rest of the electrical system and navigating lights, though old, were operational, as were the radar and radios. The interior, though dirty, was in very good condition and would be truly beautiful after a good cleaning.
The boatyard would allow me to do the restoration there, and they had the expertise for the heavy work that only a yard could do and gave me some estimates. I did some back-of-the-napkin math and came up with $175K, on top of the purchase price, to fully restore the boat. I wrote the check for the boat and drove back to Alexandria, all the while asking myself, “My God! What have I done?” I was now the owner of 35 tons of rusted steel.
I thought I knew a lot about tjalks. The next day, as I sat at my desk, looking out across the Potomac, trying to piece together a project plan for the restoration of what was now my tjalk, I had an epiphany! I didn’t know shit. I needed to get smart. I booked a flight to Amsterdam the next day and went through my rolodex (hey, it was the cusp of the Internet age), putting together a list of people I had known in the Dutch boating world and wondering how many were still alive or would even remember me. I realized I needed one crucial piece of information I had failed to obtain while I was surveying the boat and it wasn’t in the broker’s papers. I needed the hull number. Nearly all boats larger than a skiff have a hull number carved or etched in a prominent place and registered with the country in which the boat was built. Not that I needed much of an excuse to drive back to Baltimore to see my boat, but I hit the road and was back in the yard with a few hours of daylight left. I needed it all, and the low angle of the setting sun finally revealed the numbers hammered into the starboard gunnel. With luck, I would be able to find the boat’s builder and first owner in the Dutch registry in Rotterdam.
It was no sure thing. I had heard many stories of records being destroyed and boats being sunk in the Ijsselmeer, Rhine, and deeper canals to keep them out of the hands of the invading Germans during WW II. After the war those that had been undiscovered were raised and restored, but the records were still spotty in places.
I checked into my hotel in Amsterdam and looked up my old girlfriend. From hippy fashion model to highly respected judge in a quarter century. Cool. Janneke, her husband, and two sons made me welcome, and it was Janneke who told me the story of Viktor’s death and his incredible funeral.
The next day I visited Berendina Fennegina, still tied up in the same place on the Amstel. She had been cleaned up and gentrified. After Viktor’s death, ownership of the boat transferred to a Danish architect who applied his Danish architectural sensibility and swept the decks clear of all the boat’s original rigging and character. Everything was extraordinarily neat and clean. The owner was aboard and invited me below. Gone were Viktor’s workshop and the bulkhead on which he had laminated $56,000 in U.S. currency. (When I asked why, Viktor said, “I really didn’t really need it, and I thought would look better there.”) The heavy, dark timbers and bulkheads that had once partitioned the interior had been replaced with open birch-paneled spaces and poplar decking. The kerosene lanterns were gone and the interior was bright with modern electric lighting. There was a scattering of sleek, minimalist Scandinavian furnishings. Norwegian wood, isn’t it good. My apologies to the Beatles.
I missed the gritty, pitch-covered, lantern-lit chaos of Viktor’s primitive lifestyle. In fact, I kind of miss the diesel, kerosene, coal-tar, dead fish, and raw sewerage stench that typified all the major harbor cities of my youth. While I acknowledge that today’s cleaner, eco-friendly harbors are better in nearly every way, I miss the filth and odors that hinted at intrigue, mystery, and voyages to far away exotic places, the kind of harbors where a man could walk down to the docks and sign aboard a tramp steamer as a deck hand and be hundreds of miles away by sunrise. I never did that. But I imagined I had!
I rented a car and drove to Muiden, not too far from Amsterdam. The de Leeuw boatyard had gone out of business but had been reopened under the same name by new owners wanting to capitalize on the yard’s reputation. Still doing repairs and restorations of traditional boats, there were a few old-timers there who had worked on Encore’s conversion, but no one who had been there in 1971 when I had done drudge work just to be around the yard and learn. I was hoping they would have plans for Encore’s conversion but all the documents of the original de Leeuw boatyard disappeared when it went out of business. I didn’t learn a great deal about Encore but was able to get sources for parts to repair and replace locally made electrical components, winches, lamps, pully blocks, and other pieces of traditional rigging.
Next I went to the Fries Scheepvaart Museum in Sneek, where I had been told by one of the restorers in Muiden that the director, Jelmer Kuipers, was probably the world’s leading expert in traditional Dutch shipbuilding techniques. Jelmer didn’t disappoint. Over the next two days he gave me a graduate level education in tjalk types, design, construction, repairs and restoration, and traditions. I was greatly encouraged when I showed him photographs of Encore’s mast and he said it was traditionally accurate and that I should duplicate its design and fittings. He also sent off my boat’s hull number to the registry in Rotterdam, asking a friend of his there to expedite the request.
I spent the next week buying bits of rigging and repair parts and was lucky enough to be invited aboard a skûtsje, a slightly smaller, faster version of a tjalk, for an annual race on the Ijsselmeer out of Lemmer. I was surprised, because the race is fiercely competitive and the crews train as a team year-round, but they were short a guy on the high-side, the intended crewman was too drunk I think, and I could be of some real use. I just tried my best to stay out of the way and to crank like crazy on the leeboard winches when told. We finished third out of a pack of a dozen. I bowed out early from the after-race party that spread across all the boats, bars, and cafes in the harbor. A new bottle of beer would magically appear in my hand as I finished the last one, and I simply can’t drink that much!
Over the next several days I drove to all the traditional boating centers in the Netherlands, photographing tjalks and the finer details of their rigging, paint schemes, and unique features. By the time I flew out of Schiphol for home, I felt I was ready to tackle Encore’s restoration.
My first good surprise was a letter waiting for me from the boat registry in Rotterdam. Jelmer Kuipers’ friend had come through! He had found the hull in the registry and sent me a photocopy of the quill-and-ink handwritten page. My boat’s original name was Neeltje, or ‘Little Nell’, and she had been built in Waddinxveen near Gouda in 1903 by a shipwright named Smitt for Johan de Jong of Vlissingen. Later, Jelmer Kuipers would put me in touch with de Jong’s descendants, who had photographs of Neeltje when she was new and many stories of her long career carrying grain and other cargo across Europe’s inland waterways.
I immediately changed Encore’s name back to Neeltje and registered her in Maryland. It’s not that I wanted to abandon Alexandria, but Neeltje’s bowsprit and rudder added another ten feet to her fifty-two feet of waterline, making her too long for any slip or mooring in Alexandria or anywhere else along the Potomac near D.C.
And then I got to work. I had promised myself I would devote a full year to the effort, and freed myself of all other obligations. Without wife, kids, or pets, it’s easier. It would also be the last year of my life without wife, kids, or pets, so I’m pretty sure I’m right about this.
At first I commuted every day from Alexandria to Baltimore and back. As soon as I had the interior cleaned up I slept aboard during the week and used the boatyard’s showers and toilets. It was a sweltering summer but I was exhausted at the end of the day and all I needed was an electric fan to make it cool enough to sleep through the night. Neeltje’s cabins were very comfortable. My diet wasn’t very good. I ate everything the convenience store around the corner form the boatyard had to offer. Hot dogs, fried chicken, pizza, sodas and juices. Yum. But the work was hard and I was shedding pounds like I hadn’t since I started fishing for lobster when I was in college.
The boatyard sandblasted the hull and I had a welder replace the thin plate and weld new plate over the thruster’s ports. Then the yard’s crew started work on applying marine coatings to the hull, installing a modern electrical panel, air-conditioning, a new 10KW Northern Lights genset, and a Webasto diesel-fueled water boiler. While that was going on I sent the bronze prop off to get polished and balanced, then got busy repairing, sanding, and varnishing the leeboards, boom, bowsprit, and rudder. I needed new bushings for the rudder pins and I asked my father, then seventy-six and showing the first clear symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, to machine them for me. It was a small task but I was happy to have found something he could do to help with Neeltje’s restoration. He wanted to do more, but the bushings were the last thing he made in his workshop before his Parkinson’s made it too difficult.
I hired the USS Constellation’s master shipwright Bruce Mackenzie to make a copy of the mast. We made trips up and down the Mid-Atlantic to find the right piece of lumber, finally striking gold in Pennsylvania with an Amish farmer who was selling salvaged timbers from a tobacco warehouse built in 1887. We found a fifty-foot by two-foot by two-foot white pine floor beam that was perfect. I thought it was fitting that the wood for Neeltje’s new mast was even older than the boat. I provided a great deal of the labor to shape the mast while Bruce made the critical measurements and cuts and guided me in my efforts. A tjalk’s mast is mounted on a pivot so it can be lowered to the deck to pass under low bridges. I was nervous as hell when Bruce started drilling the pivot pin’s two-inch diameter hole, aligning a giant handheld electric drill by eye and drilling only half-way through, then flipping the mast and doing the same from the other side. Damn if the two holes didn’t meet perfectly on center. There would have been no second chance if he had got it wrong. I couldn’t have done it. But then, that’s why I hired a master shipwright. With another two weeks of hand sanding, deep sealing with anti-rot solution, a long wait for that brew to dry, and eight coats of Epifanes varnish, (The best in the world. From the Netherlands, of course.) the mast was done.
I had chosen a traditional color scheme of green hull with black trim and a cream-colored deck. While I relied on the boatyard crew for the two-part primer and base coats on the hull and superstructure, the color top coats were one-part paint and I applied them myself. Thank you, whoever invented the paint roller.
All the mattresses and cushions below decks were in excellent condition. Absolute proof the boat had been Dan Rowan’s were the colorful paisley fabrics on the throw pillows. With new bed linens and towels, Neeltje was a showcase of comfortable living. Her Galley was equipped with a four-burner propane cooktop, a bar-sized refrigerator, microwave oven, and a large sink with plenty of surrounding countertop. The saloon was huge and the boat had a minimum of six feet six inches headroom throughout, rising to eight feet over the aft galley. She had two staterooms, one midships with two over-under bunks and a master stateroom forward. Opposite the companionway from the midships stateroom was a head with a sink and aft of the head was a shower compartment, both spacious and comfortable. Forward of the master stateroom was a workshop that also held a clothes washer and dryer, sail and gear storage, and the chain locker. The engine room was beneath the aft cockpit and a lazarette held the propane tank for the cooktop.
Five months into the project and with the propeller, leeboards, rudder, and bowsprit back on, a big moment had arrived. It was time to float the boat. The yard’s Travel Lift lowered her gently into the water. I don’t know what I was expecting. Anything dramatic would be bad. Calm, quiet, and without any gurgling sounds would be good. What I did enjoy were the applause and cheers from the entire boatyard crew, who after all these months and so much of their time and labor put into the boat, were heartened to see a beautiful old lady back in her element.
We left her floating just above the lift’s slings and it would stay there overnight in case there were problems with through-hull fittings or, God forbid, the hull itself. But I wasn’t going to sit idle! It was time to find out what worked and what didn’t. I fired up the generator. The breaker panel lit right up and the electrical systems came alive. I switched on the A/C and heard all the right pumps humming and saw the harbor water surging through the filters in the engine room, then felt the cool air fill the saloon and cabins. It was still Indian Summer hot, but I started the Webasto boiler anyway and heard the ignition, then the turbine spin up and more pumps in the engine room start turning. After ten minutes the radiators in every compartment were pleasantly warm to the touch. Bilge pumps, new VacuFlush head, shower sump pump, freshwater pump, hot water heater, navigation lights, radio, radar, refrigerator, washer, dryer, interior lights, fans, microwave oven, electric propane cut-off valve – I tested everything that needed electricity. It all checked out. I shut everything down and slept aboard that night, getting up every few hours to check for water in the bilges and to visually inspect all the accessible through hull fittings. The boat was bone dry and it stayed that way. The blasters, welders, fitters, painters, and riggers had done a good job.

Neeltje under sail
The yard crew arrived to remove the travel lift slings. With all new batteries, the engine fired right up. Never in the seven years I had Neeltje did her engine misbehave or even complain. With the slings cleared away, I motored Neeltje to the fuel pier where I filled both her 250-gallon diesel tanks and her 200-gallon potable water tank. The boat could cruise for two months on the fuel in her tanks.
I moved her to a spot alongside the pier where the yard’s crane lowered the mast in place and the great stick dropped smoothly into her pivot socket and the pin was driven home. The mast rested in its lowered position while the standing rigging – the shrouds and stays – were attached and the running rigging – the halyards, topping lift, downhaul, running backstays, and sheets – were rigged. All told, the boat had about five hundred feet of new running rigging. It took half a day. Then, Using the boat’s own purpose-built lever, we rotated the mast vertical and secured her forestay. With the help of friends, we bent the sails. There was still a punch list a mile long, but Neeltje was ready to go!
The yard gave me a prime mooring spot alongside the pier. On the next pier over, with a clearance of about fifteen feet between us, was the former Coast Guard cutter Tamaroa, made famous by her role in the real-life events behind the book and film The Perfect Storm. Forward of me was the yard’s floating office barge and then the battleship-grey Badtz Maru, a 125 foot former British navy coastal patrol boat converted into a yacht by a dot-com millionaire, given the name of an Anime character adored by the millionaire’s wife. Badtz Maru was captained by Tom Waite, an able and knowledgeable sailor and Maryland native who had been an invaluable source of knowledge, advice, and connections during Neeltje’s restoration. Ahead of Badtz Maru on the adjacent pier was the traditionally-built Baltimore Clipper topsail schooner Pride of Baltimore II, undergoing a major refit.
The yard was no yacht club. Any lady (or guy, given the people who hung out there) wearing high heels would break a leg before making it ten feet out the pier (Yeah, that happened). Tidewater was a working commercial boatyard with a few dozen slips on floating docks and space for half a dozen larger boats along the pier. Next to the Domino Sugar factory and bathed at night by its giant red neon sign’s glow, you had to swab down your decks every few days just to wash away the fine burnt sugar crystals that drifted over from the factory’s evaporators. Parking in the boatyard was anywhere you could fit in between the dozens of boats resting in their cradles. Heavy equipment was constantly rolling through the gravel and cracked concrete-covered grounds. The private boats in their slips were an assemblage of all the run-down and unpresentable boats and struggling-to-get-by liveaboards in Baltimore harbor whose owners either couldn’t afford the posh marinas and yacht clubs or had been turned away as unpresentable to finer company. I loved it. Just my kind of people. We had our share of drunks and addicts, but that wasn’t too bad, at least not until they fell in the harbor and had to be fished out. Then it was bad. Nothing put me in a foul mood faster than wrestling with a combative stoner while trying to save his life. True story. Happened more than once.
I still had a lot of work to do on Neeltje and wasn’t thinking of finding another berth anytime soon, but I knew she’d be welcome in the better marinas. I was seriously thinking of living aboard full-time; putting all my furnishings in storage and giving up the townhouse in Alexandria. Right about this time Bob Brandon, the boatyard owner, put the office barge up for sale.

Neeltje and the barge
Brandon had erected a two-story steel pre-fab building on a 100-foot by 30-foot steel-hulled spud barge, giving the barge three decks total, or about 8,000 square feet of usable space. The lower deck, beneath the barge’s own top deck, was utilitarian and held the waste processing system and heavy-duty electrical transformers. The rest of the space below decks was storage. The main deck was nicely fitted out as office space and store with an exterior, wide, awning-covered walkway wrapped around three sides. Access to the upper deck was via exterior stairs at either end, and there were hinged ramps to the pier at both ends, allowing them to adjust to the tides. Three massive air conditioning units were bolted to the deck underneath the stairs. The upper deck was one expansive space with a fifteen-foot overhead that was being used as a sail-making loft. Both decks had an ample number of windows that let in an abundance of natural light. The barge was connected to city power, water, and sewerage. With a view straight down into Baltimore’s inner harbor and across to Fells Point, it was a magically beautiful location and a crazy idea sprang to my head that I couldn’t shake. Why not buy the barge, convert it into my home and office, and dock Neeltje to the outboard side of the barge? My long slog to go sailing would be to step outside the door of my house and step down onto my boat.
A few weeks later I was the proud owner of another large steel thing floating on water. I moved all my townhouse furnishings onto the main deck of the barge, build a workshop in one half of the upper deck, left the other half of the upper deck open, stored everything else I owned below decks, and hired a visioinary designer, Brian Voss, to convert the barge into a comfortable home and office. I was a pretty self-satisfied guy.
I made several short sails to learn Neeltje’s ways before setting out on a long cruise. It took a minimum of six good crew or four exceptionally good crew to sail the boat. One didn’t just adjust jib sheets from the cockpit while the helmsman trimmed the main like on a modern Marconi sloop. Neeltje was gaff and boom rigged, with a massive main, which meant it took three sets of strong arms to haul on the head and peak halyards to raise the sail. The jib needed to be walked across the foredeck when tacking, something that was unnecessary on a modern boat with a clear foredeck. And then the leeboards had to be lowered and raised on opposite sides on every tack using dedicated winches on the stern quarters. There was much to do. It took a lot of muscle to sail 35 tons of steel.
I never had a shortage of crew. Every sailor on the Chesapeake wanted to sail aboard Neeltje. Rafael Alvarez, then a writer on HBO’s The Wire, wrote a magazine article about the restoration. It was widely read and yielded quite a few volunteers, and every time I sailed a loop through Baltimore’s inner harbor my cell would start ringing from all the 9-to-5 guys in the office towers telling me how magnificent Neeltje looked from their glassed-in perches and asking when it would be their turn to come sailing.

Windy’s dog Sadie, who loved to sail
Through the rest of that autumn we had some wonderful cruises around the Chesapeake. My favorite day trip was to Rock Hall on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. With a sun-up start and a fair wind we could make it by two in the afternoon. Because of Neeltje’s shallow draft we could go over the two-mile-long sand bar that others couldn’t clear to make the harbor entrance. I don’t know why, but having had steamed crabs at almost every crab shack up and down the Chesapeake, I think the crabs served up at Waterman’s Crab House in Rock Hall are the sweetest, tastiest of all. It may influence my opinion that they have a slip big enough for Neeltje right in front of the restaurant and they always made sure it was available when I radioed ahead. With bellies full of crab and corn, we wouldn’t make it back to Baltimore before sunset, but the trip into the brightly lit harbor at night was ever beautiful.
It was always gratifying late in the day to pull into a bay or creek, or gunk hole as they’re called on the Chesapeake, and anchor for the night. Drawing only three and a half feet, Neeltje could go places no other large sailboat could. But our mere presence could cause problems. Too many times we would see another large boat poke its nose into the spot where we were anchored. They would look at the chart, look at us, and I imagined them saying, “I don’t give a damn what the chart says. If that gigantic boat can make it in there, then so can we!” Then they’d turn towards us. We would wave them off and try to raise them on Channel 16, never with success. Then we’d just sit back, open another beer, and take bets on where they’d run aground. Never made a friend of one of those guys. They usually had a long list of things they thought we ‘coulda, shoulda’ done to warn them. My response was always, “Hey, all you had to do was look at your freakin’ chart, yeah?”
I had many long cruises planned in my mind. The entire Intracoastal Waterway. The Hudson river to the Champlain canal and on up to the St. Lawrence and Montreal. The Chesapeake Bay alone had countless destinations.
But the days grew shorter and the weather grew colder and the sailing season on the Chesapeake came to a close. I focused on sail repairs, plumbing improvements, replacing the steering gearbox, redesigning the diesel fuel manifold in the engine room, and the thousand-and-one small details on a never-shrinking list of things to be done. Neeltje was well equipped to endure harsh winter weather while remaining in the water. Her diesel-powered radiator heating system kept her interior at a comfortable 70 degrees on the coldest winter days, and her steel construction made her impervious to the elements. Likewise, the barge was well insulated and had a massive heating and cooling system. All it took was paying the equally massive utility bills. The barge’s fresh-water-in and sewerage-out hoses were electrically heated to prevent freezing. Even in the urban and industrial heart of Baltimore, the slow pace of the boatyard in winter was one of the most peaceful and quiet settings imaginable.
Shortly after the new year Bruce Davis, an old school chum of my youngest brother, got in touch with me. He was the COO of Sylvan Prometric, a very successful company that delivers computer-based tests in thousands of testing centers in more than one hundred countries. They had grown very quickly and their computer technology staff was in disarray, not uncommon for a growing tech company at the height of the dot-com era, when people would jump jobs every few months for higher pay or more stock options and when management practices hadn’t evolved as fast as companies were growing. Bruce asked if I would come on as chief technologist to get things sorted out. The offer was good and Prometric’s headquarters were just across the harbor in Fells Point. Another big plus for me was that my base of European operations would be in the Netherlands, which would make my restoration work on Neeltje a little easier. I took the job in April and over the next several years made a trip to the Netherlands every other month, always returning with a suitcase filled with bits of brass, rigging, and odds and sods to maintain the traditional character of the boat.
In my first week at Prometric I was asked to host a meeting of technical service leads from our various regions of operations around the globe. They had all come to Baltimore and I was particularly interested in meeting the pair from the Netherlands for obvious reasons. When I walked into the meeting and the meeting’s coordinator began introductions I stopped her when she came to a young red-headed beauty I was certain was one of the Dutch team. I introduced myself in Dutch and was rewarded with a bemused expression from the poor woman, who clearly had no idea what I was saying. The coordinator jumped in to explain that the woman on the Dutch team had been delayed in another meeting and that the confused lady I had addressed was actually the coordinator’s assistant, Windy Hackett, who was a native Marylander and had never been to the Netherlands, let alone learned the language. The other half of the Dutch team, Jan Blok, stepped forward and introduced himself and that was the beginning of a long professional friendship that has survived our time together at Prometric. Jan is now director of the Dutch law-enforcement forensic college and he hosted my oldest son Skylar and me when we were in the Netherlands a few years ago. A true friend is a friend for life.
We were having a warm spring and at the end of the meeting I invited the entire contingent for an evening harbor cruise aboard Neeltje. It was a great success in spite of the German guy who drank too much beer and ended up regurgitatively feeding the fishes over the leeward rail (I made sure of that). He was a good technician but I never let him live it down. I also never had any technical issues with German operations. But all through the cruise I couldn’t help noticing Windy (who I initially called Wendy as everyone does when they meet her but I was corrected enough times that I finally got it). She seemed right at home on the boat and was clearly experiencing a different level of pleasure from everyone else on board. I’m glad I noticed. We have been married for nineteen years and Windy is not only my steadfast anchor in every storm, she and our two sons are the joys of my life.
By late June I had decided to take Neeltje to St. Michaels on the Eastern Shore for the last day of the annual Wooden and Classic Boat Festival. It was a spur of the moment decision, and I hadn’t reserved a spot on a dock as many of the larger boats had done. I also wanted to reward the boatyard crew who has worked so hard on restoring Neeltje to glory, and we set off for St. Michaels early on a Friday, myself and a half dozen of the best sailors from the yard. We had a fair wind and made for the inside of Kent Island, through the Narrows under power, and up the Miles river into St. Mikes, arriving early afternoon. The harbor was crowded but I managed to snug in and anchor just opposite the maritime museum and the center of the festivities. Well, not without incident. I did manage to cut the anchor rode of a small powerboat with my prop as I was maneuvering in the tight harbor. They must have had a 20-to-1 aspect on that line! Still, my bad, and it was an embarrassing way to arrive with my sixty-two feet of classic boat. But that was nothing compared to the embarrassment to come.
The rest of the day and evening were good fun and I was proud of Neeltje and the attention she received. By late evening half my crew had met up with friends and were staying ashore for the night. I retired to my cabin around eleven with Neeltje resting easy at anchor surrounded by glassy smooth water and still air.
Ha.
One thing every boat owner learns is the feel and motion of their boat. It becomes part of your body rhythm. Anything unusual triggers a primordial response to danger. It was nothing more than a gentle nudge. Neeltje has bummed up against something. Not hard. Just a touch. It was enough. My eyes were wide open in an instant. It was dark out my porthole. My ears heard the wind and the sound of driven rain against the steel superstructure. I was up in a flash and ran down the companionway, through the saloon, and up the hatch steps topside, shouting, “Everyone on deck! NOW!”
I was blinded by the heavy rain that struck my face and body like BBs. It was howling. Neeltje had drifted. In a heartbeat I knew why. I had been distracted by cutting the runabout’s anchor rode that afternoon and hadn’t backed down on Neeltje’s anchor when I dropped it. Its flukes weren’t dug into the bottom muck. Neeltje’s stern had bummed up against a 35-foot piece of floating Tupperware, and her owner was on deck shouting a long and well-crafted string of obscenities in my general direction. I deserved it, and he was obviously practiced in the art. I gave the guy an appropriately low bow of contrition and only then did I realize I was stark naked. Well, I’ve slept in the buff since I was seven. My body runs hot and I like things cool. I fired up Neeltje’s engine and sent two guys forward to raise the anchor off the bottom so I could reposition the boat. The problem was, it was raining so hard I couldn’t see the bow of my boat, let alone the other boats in the densely-packed harbor.
By then the commotion had brought people on all the nearby boats up on deck. Spreader floodlights came to life on Sixpence, the boat closest to us, an elegant fifty-five foot wooden ketch tied up to maritime museum’s dock. The utter contempt on the faces of the man, woman, and young girl who stared back at me were enough to transform the chill I was already feeling into an arctic freeze deep in my bones.
I shouted for the guys on the bow to tell me if I was about to hit anything but I couldn’t make out their reply in the wind. I used my memory of where all the boats had been earlier in the evening and strained to hear voices warning me of danger as I guided Neeltje to where I thought I could safely drop the hook again. It is only a large gift of good fortune that night that allowed me to get to the right spot, drop anchor, SET it this time, and watch the swing to make sure we were clear of other boats. After I was finished with the engines my guys kind of averted their eyes for a minute before one of them reminded me I was standing on top of the pilot house without a stitch of clothing. Embarrassed yet again, I ducked below to cover my nakedness. When I came back on deck appropriately attired in foul weather gear the spectators on the other boats realized the show was over and returned to their bunks. I spent the rest of the night on deck, drinking coffee and making damn sure Neeltje didn’t drift an inch.
By morning it was calm with clear skies and I went below for a few hours of sleep. By the time I came topside again most of the other boats had left the harbor, including the ketch that had been tied up to the quay. The festival was over. We were able to depart St. Michaels without inflicting any more damage, my reputation on the Chesapeake permanently sullied.
With our late start, we didn’t tie up to my barge in Baltimore until after midnight, my maneuvering made a little more difficult by the addition of a new boat alongside the adjacent pier, nestled in between the Tamaroa and the Pride, an elegant fifty-five foot wooden ketch with Sixpence painted across her stern. I wasn’t looking forward to morning.
Nor was I given any time for reflection. Dmitri Bernhardt, Sixpence’s owner, and his wife Ros were knocking on the barge door before I was awake. I was still clearing the sleep from my eyes when I opened up and invited them in. Though their smiles were genuine their words were harsh, further admonishing me for my poor seamanship in St. Mikes. Dmitri and Ros were part of a rare breed of world-cruising super-sailors. I’ve known many, even considered myself one of them at times. Not in the past twenty-four hours. At other times. Definitely other times. But not at that moment.
We drank coffee and talked about boats. Dmitri, like me, considered himself a steward of a great boat. Sixpence was a sturdy, heavily planked motor-sailor designed by noted New England naval architect William Hand and built in New York in 1934. Dmitri acquired the boat in 1981, seven years earlier, and was bringing her into Tidewater for a major refit while he, Ros, and their six-year old daughter AnnaRuth lived aboard. We would be neighbors for the next year, and one of the saddest days of my life on the barge was when Sixpence set sail from Baltimore for the last time. Truth: as close as we became, Dmitri and Ros never forgave me for St. Michaels.
I did gain back a little credibility when the Bernhardts were with us on a day trip to Rock Hall (We had a need for crabs!) and Windy’s hat blew overboard on a broad reach home. I treated it like a man overboard drill, having Windy point at the hat continuously while I threw the man overboard buoy off the stern (no EPIRB – not that necessary for an inland boat), brought Neeltje around to a run, and took the wind out of her sails at the perfect moment to recover the hat on the leeward side of the boat. Ros was as close to a Coast Guard rescue swimmer anyone could be without being in the Coast Guard. She has a long list of letters after her name testifying to her offshore rescue and first-aid capabilities. Her approval of my recovery technique for Windy’s soggy hat took away just a smidgeon of my St. Michaels stigma. At least in my mind. Maybe in my mind only, but I’ll take it.
Yet that day had its own less-than-perfect ending. Sadie, Windy’s lovable collie-and-something mutt, loved sailing. She liked it even more when we tied up to a dock, where she could jump ashore and relieve herself. When we reached Baltimore, I headed for Tidewater’s fuel dock at the end of the pier to top up my tanks. As soon as Sadie felt the boat press up against the bumpers she launched herself over the railing, onto the dock, and took off at full speed down the pier for her favorite patch of grass. Problem was, it was late twilight and Sadie didn’t see the attendant coming around the corner of the shack on the pier. Sadie veered to avoid the young man and ran right off the planks into the harbor, landing with a great splash and a loud yelp.
Look, much has been said over the years about the terrific and ongoing effort to clean up the Chesapeake Bay and Baltimore Harbor. Great stuff, but I don’t care how much progress has been made, Baltimore harbor is still a cesspool of septic filth. I used the dead rats that floated by for target practice, confident the heavy industrial noises of the sugar factory, the boatyard, and the adjacent shipyard and drydock would mask the sound of my 9mm pistol. I wanted to put a few holes in the rats’ bloated bodies so they would sink. At least they’d be feeding the crabs and worms and not stinking up the air around the barge until the snapping turtles got around to them. Gigantic snapping turtles! Hurricane Isabel flooded the harbor in 2003 and I grabbed a forty-pounder swimming by as I waded through the boatyard. Grabbed him the wrong way around, too. Nearly modified my gender. I ramble.
For the second time that day something went overboard that wasn’t a man that nevertheless needed rescuing. Sadie swam under the pier and I could hear her whimpering but couldn’t hear her moving. There was nothing else for it. I jumped in, already anticipating the wide range of antibiotics, anti-fungal agents, gamma globulin, and treatments for amoebic and other parasitic organisms I would require. I found Sadie wedged between two crossed pilings, terrified and trembling. It took a while to get her free, but when I did she hopped onto my back and dug in with her claws, pushing my head underwater. Holding my breath, I swam over to one of the powerboats with a swim platform at the stern, where Dmitri and Windy were waiting to haul Sadie off my back. Both Sadie and I sloshed onto the barge and took long, hot showers. I don’t know about her, but I didn’t feel clean for a week.
Burt Davies and his wife Becky watched all this from their catamaran Pendragon. Living from hand to mouth but loving life, they barely kept Pendragon afloat with the stingy wages Becky earned cleaning the boatyard’s offices, the odd varnishing job, and their seventeen-year-old son Pip’s wages as an able-bodied seaman aboard the Constellation. Burt’s full-time occupation was raging against the British Government for denying him his pension and freezing his assets in the UK.
As Burt told it, he was the proto-James Bond, part of a bold experiment by John Major long before he was Prime Minister to insert uneducated working-class blokes into MI-6, which had hitherto fore been an exclusive club of the Etonian-Oxbridge class. During his years of service, Burt claimed he had secreted millions of pounds of slush fund money in hidden bank accounts and had purchased several major London hotels, the beginning of his post-retirement business empire, he said. But Major grew tired of the whole scheme; it hadn’t worked out. It seemed, Burt quoted Major, that “You just can’t take a barrow boy and turn him into a gentleman.” Well, it’s an old story, idnit? The whole experiment was canceled and Burt was turned out without so much as a “by your leave,” while the government froze his assets and seized control of his hotels. He said he festered over his shoddy treatment for years until Major became PM, then, one night, he snuck into Major’s bedroom at 10 Downing Street and demanded Major return his assets and that if the government tried to harm him or his family in any way, he would return and slit Major’s throat. Major’s response was to declare him persona non grata, forcing him into his current life as an expat, unable to return home.
It was all very entertaining and well worth the price of a six pack to sit in Pendragon’s cabin and listen to Burt’s tales. I never did figure out whether he believed all he said or if he was just an entertaining weaver of fantasies.
It was heartbreaking when I was sitting out reading one afternoon and heard agonizing cries coming from Pendragon’s cabin just before a paramedic truck came into the yard and stopped at the foot of the pier. It seemed Burt had rolled over in bed and broken his arm and it was causing him excruciating pain. We learned later that it was no simple break. Burt had bone cancer and his entire skeleton was becoming brittle. The next three months were hell for him. He suffered one break after another until he passed away in a codeine induced stupor.
Becky told me Burt had left me one of his London hotels. It was a nice, if fanciful, gesture.
July 4th was approaching and by then Windy was living with me on the barge. Baltimore puts on a fantastic firework display for the nation’s birthday and the barge from which the pyrotechnics are launched is always moored about a hundred yards straight out from our pier. There was no better place to watch them than from my barge. We decided to have big bash. We ended up with about two hundred guests and the barge still didn’t feel crowded. It was such a success that our 4th parties became a regular event that grew and was better each time. We had one for the millennial New Year as well. Windy and I were married by then and our first son Skylar was not quite four months old. The explosions were so close and so loud you could feel each one shake your body. To this day Skylar avoids fireworks.
I had been traveling more than half the time while Windy was pregnant with Skylar. I traveled twice around the world and I enjoyed the life, but I was pretty sure Sylvan was looking for a buyer for the Prometric business unit and I knew I couldn’t maintain the same intensity of travel with a newborn child at home. I made a tough decision and resigned from Prometric, effective the day Skylar was born.
Life changed in every way imaginable. There were, of course, all the changes in a couple’s life that parenthood brings. I delighted in all that, especially once we were getting a full night’s sleep again. But other things were happening too. Prometric was sold to the Pearson family business group and taken private. I’m glad I left when I did because the entrepreneurial atmosphere vanished overnight. Within six months eighty percent of the leadership was gone. While most of the upper management and leadership had been required to sign non-compete agreements at the time of the sale, at my request, I was not. I was approached by a consortium of European businessmen with whom I had worked during my time with Prometric who asked me to be the Director, the European equivalent of CEO, of a startup computer-based testing company to compete head-to-head with Prometric. There was a feeling Prometric wasn’t in tune with the European market and that there was a better way to deliver the same services that would provide a competitive advantage. As one of many perks they would pay to have Neeltje transported back to the Netherlands. Windy and I had talked seriously about the possibility of raising our family in Europe and we decided to accept the offer.
In June, we sadly put a halt on Brian Voss’s design work for converting the barge into a home, left Skylar in his grandparents’ care, and headed for the Netherlands to deal with a mountain of paperwork and to hunt for a house. Two things of tremendous significance happened while we were there. The first is that the dot-com bubble burst and its effects were immediate. Investors in the new testing business pulled out overnight and the whole enterprise collapsed. The second is that the driver’s window sill in the Audi A6 they had given me to drive was higher than the sill of my car back home, just high enough so that when I rested my elbow on the open window’s sill I was forcing my left long-head biceps tendon up into a knife-like bone spur on my clavicle I didn’t know existed, severing the tendon completely and grinding my rotator cuff into hamburger. By the time we flew home my left arm was in searing pain and paralyzed. I had surgery immediately but the damage was extensive and I lost use of the arm for nearly a year.
Just as I was getting my arm back in shape I doubled over with chest pain during a dinner party we were hosting on the barge. I like providing guests with entertainment, but this was a little extreme, even for me. I was in deep denial that the problem was anything but extreme heartburn, so rather than calling 911, I had Windy drive me to a hospital I trusted north of the city, about a half hour away. Oops. Turned out I was having a heart attack at the tender age of forty-nine. All I could think of was that I had a young wife, a toddler son, and Windy was pregnant with our second child. This was no time to die! Luckily, angioplasty and a stent put me right. Follow-up studies revealed I did not have coronary heart disease, but that I had damaged a coronary artery in a terrible car crash eleven years earlier, a crash in which I had broken my hip, ankle, several ribs, and suffered a severe concussion. The soft tissue damage remained hidden until my heart attack.
The responsibilities of parenthood, my long period of ill health, the paper loss of a great deal of wealth from the dot-com bust, a mountain of medical bills, a very expensive lifestyle, and the increasing challenge of knowing where Skylar and our new son Luke were every second of every day, because one lapse could mean they were in the water and lost, gave us pause to reassess our priorities. Finally, in 2004, we parted ways with Neeltje and the barge for a more traditional life on land, better suited to our children and family. It was the right choice, but I miss that great hunk of steel with sails. I never traveled the length of the Intracoastal Waterway. I never sailed up the Hudson and through the connected canals and lakes all the way to Montreal. I would have liked to have done so, but my family is everything and a boat is insignificant in comparison. Who knows. Skylar just graduated high school and Luke isn’t far behind. Maybe one day.
Recent Comments