Isn’t it ironic

July 2023

By Bob Muggleston

Growing up, I spent a lot of time around my dad, working for his small landscaping company. He never considered himself a deep thinker, but he sure did love a good aphorism. He especially loved ones that contained irony, and of those, “The shoemaker’s kids always have the worst shoes in town” might have been his favorite. I can’t remember any specific instances when he used it, but I know it was for situations that didn’t quite add up, usually observed through the window of a moving pick-up truck. What it means, of course, is that while you can be very good at something, there’s no guarantee that you’ll end up getting the chance to use those skills at your own place.

Having recently hauled my Siren 17, Scout, out of the apple orchard where she’s lived for the last six months and parked her in our driveway, and given my father’s recent health crisis, I’ve been thinking about this phrase a lot. I work for a marine canvas and upholstery shop. The stuff I could do on Scout is endless. And her needs are many: mainsail cover, Bimini, sunshade, cockpit and settee cushions, deck bag for the jib, clever little storage bags . . . the list goes on and on. None of that has happened, of course. And, in the meantime, because friends have asked, I’ve replaced the zipper in a pedestal cover, altered canvas that was built for a 17’ RIB to fit a 15’ RIB, and pulled the trampoline off a 16’ Hobie Cat to re-sew rotten stitch lines. (“One thing you don’t want to do is get run over by a boat going 20 knots,” my brother-in-law said, nodding sagely.)

I have big plans for Scout. Ever since reading “The Unlikely Voyage of Jack De Crow: A Mirror Odyssey from North Wales to the Black Sea,” by the Australian A.J. Mackinnon, I’ve been obsessed with small-boat voyaging. In the book, while walking the school grounds where he teaches in England, Mackinnon happens upon an overturned 11-foot Mirror dinghy next to a canal that runs through the property, and thinks: I wonder where that canal leads? Thus begins the idea for an Odyssey on a small scale. Mackinnon makes a few rudimentary modifications to the dinghy, drops it in the canal, and rows away. His 3,000-mile journey by oar and sail ends up taking him across the English Channel and through a total of 12 countries and 282 locks. Near the end he is captured by Balkan pirates. In 1997. And he wears a pith helmet throughout the voyage.

The book is charming and funny, and beautifully written, but most importantly it opened up to me what is possible aboard such a small platform. I’ve had big boats, but because they were big, I always felt limited as to what I could do with them. That is, getting anywhere different took a lot of time. Having something as eminently trailerable as the Siren opens up the possibility of popping over to Narragansett Bay for the day (90 minutes by car), heading up to Lake Champlain (four hours by car), or cruising Maine via the Maine Island Trail (six hours by car). And, of course, there are dreams of A.J. Mackinnon-type voyages: The Great Loop using our domestic canal system, the ICW to Florida (on which 8” of draft would come in handy), or the granddaddy of them all, a European canal voyage. It sure would be great to have proper canvas and upholstery on these adventures.

In the meantime, the boat sits in my driveway, and my wife is complaining that it’s taking up a parking space. Which means in the next week or so I’ll clean the boat, slap on the latest registration sticker, and send her off to the low-rent yacht club where she lives in the summer. With no new canvas. I’m too busy fixing and installing canvas on other peoples’ boats, and working on this magazine.

How would my dad appraise the situation? “The shoemaker’s kids always have the worst shoes in town.”

And he would nod sagely as he said it.

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