The Slippery Fate of a Banana Boat

The hardest part of boat ownership is naming it. There are just too many good ones. My personal favorites are Never Again XXVI, seen on a transom in Maine, and G Willie Makit, on a fishing boat in Block Island, R.I. New Englanders have that wonderful, dry wit.

In quiet moments, I conjure up good boat names but rarely get around to painting them on. Sometimes they just happen. So it was with our crabbing skiff, a humble, 18-foot, flat-bottom plywood craft supposedly designed after a Nova Scotia fishing boat called a Novi. I've spent quite a bit of time in the Canadian Maritimes but never saw anything remotely like it there.

It has one distinctive feature. For reasons unknown, the bow rises up out of the water in a pointless swoop, like the one on the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile. Why anyone would add two feet of boat at the front that never actually touches the water is a mystery.

We've had some ideas for names in the two years we've owned her but nothing stuck. Then this year, while picking up supplies for the annual spring refit, my crabbing partner Gene Miller and I stumbled on three quarts of discounted, high quality Interlux yacht paint at Fairwinds Marina near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, where bargains often are found.

The color was Sun Yellow, but at $4 a quart, who cares? We slapped some on the inside and liked it so much, we did the outside, too. We painted the seats white, the bottom blue and installed new fiberglass rub rails all around. When she hit the water she was as pretty as new, bright as a sunflower. We took a test ride around the creek and absorbed our neighbors' admiring glances.

Back on land, word got around quickly. As soon as we were ashore, neighbor after neighbor wanted to know how the maiden voyage had gone in the "banana boat." So there it was: Banana Boat. She names herself.

Of course, fishermen say bananas on boats are unlucky, and we had made just one unproductive foray out to the crabbing grounds before disaster struck. Two weeks ago something called a "microburst" hit Annapolis, with ferocious winds and lots of rain. The power went out at the house and there was plenty to do sorting things out there, so it wasn't till the morning that I got down to check on the Banana Boat, which had been pummeled.

The fierce wind apparently set the floating dock rocking, and when it got out of synch with the boat's motion it ripped the bow cleat right off the deck. Then the stern line parted as the boat flailed around and she ran loose for a while, smashing into things. Some kind soul had captured and retied her but the damage by then was done.

The old Banana Boat struck so hard at the waterline that the deck and hull parted ways for about 10 feet; water was sloshing in and the bilge pump was torn off its mount. The outboard was cocked at a weird angle from a sharp blow, the depth finder was knocked off the transom, our new rub rails were smeared with creosote and broken in two places, the bright yellow topside paint was scratched and marred, and the hull was cracked in three spots. Our Banana Boat, in short, was a pretzel.

It's taken two weeks of work (between rain showers) to get her back on her feet. The timing could not have been worse, because a couple of days after the microburst, blue crabs started showing up in earnest after a slow spring. We keep a couple of crab pots off one of the neighborhood docks. When big jimmies turn up in the pots it's usually time to get the crab boat out, set the trotline and fill our bushel. It's been painful to have crabs in the pots and no way to get to the crabbing grounds.

But high season is still ahead. Some years you catch crabs in June, some years you don't. This year, the run may have started but it won't likely hit a peak until around Independence Day. By that time the Banana Boat should be up and running. In fact, we're hoping to get out for another trial run this week if the rain ever stops.

Sometime we'll get around to painting the name on. With respect to New England's penchant for subtlety, I think we'll call it "Day-O!" (For those of you under 50, that's the opening line of Harry Belafonte's great calypso hit, the Banana Boat Song. Check it out. It's a keeper.)

Sailboat Report: My wife, who works for the state, informs me that Talbot County is now the jurisdiction in Maryland with the greatest disparity between rich and poor. After a weekend visit on the old sailboat, I can believe it. The visiting yachts they have over there make Fort Lauderdale look commonplace.

Have the vacationing habits of Messrs. Rumsfeld and Cheney created a monster? It looks that way. The old waterman's town hasn't got a hardware store, a dozen crabs at the once-funky Crab Claw go for $60 (that's $5 a pop, my friend) and the docks serving the waterfront condo developments all have big signs that basically say: Unless you've got big rocks, stay out! What's next, Dolce & Gabbana on Tilghman Island?