More than a Summer Job

The best job I ever had paid twelve dollars an hour.

It came about by accident. It was the weekend before Memorial Day, and I’d just finished launching my little sloop, the Coracle. I went the marina office to pay my mooring fee, but emerged with a free slip and the aforementioned lofty compensation package as the new dockmaster of Sunset Marine.

Sunset was a small marina located in Hull, Massachusetts, a peninsular town jutting northwest into Boston Harbor. The property consisted of a Victorian-style building which housed the Lighthouse Restaurant on the first floor and the marina offices on the second, a long gas dock with half-dozen slips and a dockhouse at the end, and a mooring field. The Sunset company fleet was comprised of a Crosby launch, an Aquasport workboat, and an Avon inflatable..

In the marina business, early morning and late afternoon are the busy times. The lobstermen like to diesel up at first light. Sailors and fishermen prefer to get off to an early start, too; the power boaters tended to have the special at the Lighthouse and get underway by about 10:00. In the late afternoon, the boats would start coming in at about 4:00, and the radio and boat horn requests for launch pickup would go on for hours.

I had a great crew. Andrew, a college junior, liked to open so he’d have his afternoons free to prowl Nantasket Beach. Matthew was a dock rat who’d raised himself and could always start the balky Evinrude on the Aquasport. Jake was the son of a local lobsterman, a courteous young man and a favorite of the customers. The young women, Kate and Diane, usually ran Waveland, a satellite marina a half-mile to the south.

On weekends and holidays, Kim drove the launch. Then in his thirties, Kim was the only one of us with a six-pack license. His touch at the controls of the Crosby was surgically precise; he delivered passengers gunwale to gunwale, regardless of tide or current. Kim’s downside was his rather dissolute lifestyle. He was exceptionally attentive to attractive female launch customers, often to the consternation of their husbands (Kim was quite handsome), and he usually began thinking about beer by about 2:00 PM.

I did a little of everything at Sunset. On busy days (July 4th was a monster), I’d be supervising and serving customers. On slow mid-week days, I’d run the launch and gas dock by myself. The important thing to me was the respite that the marina provided me. My marriage was in serious trouble at the time, and both my wife and I needed some space. Sunset gave me a place to be, a place to collect my thoughts and a place where I felt capable and in control.

Unlike most of the Eastern seaboard, Sunset Marine faces west. My favorite part of the day was dusk, when the last duty would be to take the Crosby through the mooring field, checking for stranded boaters or frayed mooring rodes. The water would be nearly flat calm then, the low sun’s rays dripping down and coaxing a glimmering reflection from each little wavelet. The antique gurgling of the Crosby’s inboard accentuated rather than disturbed the quiet. I would feel at peace.

I remember my last day at Sunset. It was Labor Day, but by 4:30, all our boats were in. Kim shook my hand and told me I’d gotten him through the most successful working summer of his life. Jake’s dad stopped by with a crate of lobsters (mud-bugs, he called them), and a few of our favorite customers (they just happened to be female) came by with tips and beer for the crew.

We had access—in exchange for free storage--to a 44’ ketch on jackstands in the yard. We sent Jake for corn and tomatoes and butter, and we soon had those lobsters steaming on the ketch’s stove. As my dockmaster career ended, I was seated on the foredeck of the ketch, cracking lobster claws with a pair of pliers, sipping a Rolling Rock longneck, listening to Jimmy Buffet sing "Changes in Latitude", and watching the summer's end sun slip behind Spinnaker Island.