52 Saving Mariposa
courtesy of Penny Zahn Take two boys and add an abandoned sailboat. She appeared in the spring an old white and blue fiberglass sloop, maybe a 1970s racer-cruiser, smack in the middle of our creek off the South River. Her name was Mariposa. Locked up. No dinghy. No one aboard. Her mainsail came unfurled and flapped in the breeze. Lines hung everywhere. No one came to check on her. She was poorly anchored, on light tackle and a short scope, and she dragged around the creek in every storm, coming perilously close to docks and boathouses. We watched to see where she d be each morning. She stayed there all summer, all fall, all winter. She froze in the ice. The neighbors complained: It s an eyesore. Someone probably left it here because he couldn t pay yard bills. It s like having an old car parked on your street. The State should tow it away. Someone called the marine police, but they did nothing. Apparently it s not illegal to leave a boat anchored in a creek, even if she s an old boat and the neighbors have new docks and new houses. By the next spring, she had dragged ashore. She lay on her side in the mud beneath a canopy of high leafy trees, high and dry at low tide, with her mast and shrouds tangled in an overhanging branch. We felt sorry for her, abandoned and unloved, by Mickey Raup 53
photos courtesy of Maryland has a law that enables people to rescue abandoned boats. After giving notice to the owner, and with the permission of the landowner (if the boat is on land, as this boat was), anyone can apply for title to an abandoned boat. now she was suffering some serious damage. But what could we do? The boys our son Hugh and his friend Graham, age 17 and 18 asked: Could we rescue her? Could we get her floating? Could we fix her up? Could we sail her this summer? Could she be our new boat? I had some questions, too. Is she seaworthy? How much work does she need? And what about the owner? You can t just take someone s boat, even if she s shipwrecked and abandoned. Or can you? We researched that last question first. It turns out that Maryland has a law that enables people to rescue abandoned boats. After giving notice to the owner, and with the permission of the landowner (if the boat is on land, as this boat was), anyone can apply for title to an abandoned boat. The process is described on the website of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources: dnr2.maryland.gov/documents/b117_abinstuction.pdf. But the DNR rules required a lot of information we didn t have: the make, model and hull number of the boat, the name and address of the owner of the boat, and the name and address of the owner of the land where the boat had washed up. We started with the boat. Clambering aboard for the first time, Hugh and Graham identified the emblem on the mainsail: a Catalina. The Catalina website showed how to find and interpret the hull number molded into the transom: Mariposa turned out to be a 1977 Catalina 27. Based on the registration numbers on the bow, the DNR gave us the address of the registered owner. I sent a certified letter to the owner, but it was returned as undeliverable. Apparently the owner had moved without leaving a forwarding address. The owner also did not respond to an advertisement I placed in the Annapolis newspaper. Next, we needed to identify the owner of the land and request his permission to remove the boat. Some work with the county property tax records gave us a 54
name and address. We knocked on the door. The owner s son suggested that we put our request in writing to his elderly father. We wrote a letter, but got no answer. After a few weeks and several phone calls, we received a terse, legalistic response: We had permission to remove the boat at our own risk and expense. Now it was time to visit the DNR. We assembled all the documents, photographs, forms and certificates required by the DNR rules, returned several times with missing information, and spent some quality time with the DNR staff to be sure our papers were in order. Finally, we paid the $47 registration fee, and the boys were issued clean title to their very own shipwrecked derelict. Mariposa was now our problem, and our responsibility. The first order of business was to get her insured, as we were concerned with liability if anything went wrong. Then, we had to get her off our neighbor s beach, hopefully without sinking her. We managed that, at high tide, with our 1966 Mason 33 as the tugboat and a towline attached to Mariposa s masthead to heel her over as we gently towed her off. Once in deep water, she floated happily. This should be the happy ending to our story. We had successfully navigated through the DNR bureaucracy. Hugh and Graham did the hard work of salvage and were rewarded with their own boat. I did the paperwork and paid the $47. And my wife, Marian, did the worrying. But Mariposa was still unpopular with the neighbors. We towed her to an unused slip at our community dock and asked the neighbors for permission to keep her there for a few days while we cleaned her up and assessed her condition. Big mistake. Remember the neighbors who objected to the abandoned boat when she was anchored in the creek? They objected even more when she was tied at the dock. (We apparently have high standards in our community, including a rule that prohibits work boats, whatever that means.) Within minutes, we were directed to get Mariposa off the dock. One neighbor said we were lucky the neighborhood tolerated our first sailboat (the aforementioned Mason 33), and they certainly would not tolerate a second. So we sank a heavy mooring in the creek and moved her there the next day. The next few weeks included a lot of hard work. We had Mariposa hauled, Continued on page 79 Top to bottom: Graham (left) and Hugh (right) giving Mariposa a washdown after returning from their first year away at college; and Mariposa s saloon full of old sails, a donation from a friendly neighbor. Opposite page: Hugh examines an abandoned Mariposa where she lay beached along the South River s Beard s Creek. Preceding Pages: Hugh washing Mariposa, and dreaming of what good condition she ll be in someday. 55
Saving Mariposa continued from page 55 and the boys scraped off years of barnacles and painted the bottom. Everything below the waterline seemed sound, although there was significant cosmetic damage to her topsides from several months on the beach. We had her motor overhauled, and it ran beautifully. A new battery and solar panel adequately power her new bilge pump. Her sails were in bad shape, including an old (original?) mainsail and a mismatched collection of jibs. Bacon Sails and Marine Supplies in Annapolis offered us a nice selection of good used sails but even at the best bargain price, their inventory was too expensive for a $47 boat. But the gods of sailing smiled on Hugh and Graham. One of our kindlier and more enthusiastic neighbors, a young physician who lives next door, once had a Catalina 27 a sister ship of Mariposa, in fact. He was forced to sell her because he couldn t keep her at the community dock. (Those high standards again.) But in his basement, he had a treasure trove of sails and other Catalina 27 gear, including a good working jib, a genoa, two spinnakers and a spinnaker pole! He wanted the stuff out of his basement, and the boys happily hauled it away. With these kind additions, Mariposa had a full suit of sails. She also acquired an original Catalina 27 owner s manual. Now we come to our story s happy ending. Hugh and Graham had a summer full of fun and hard work. They learned that scraping barnacles is not as easy as it looks. They learned how to sand and paint and varnish. They learned that masking tape left on for a week is much harder to pull off than masking tape that is pulled off an hour after the task is complete. They took the Maryland state boating safety course and got their certificates. They learned how to sail and navigate. They learned the importance of always making sure the water depth is greater than the boat s draft. And most importantly, they learned that girls are much more likely to go sailing with them on a pretty boat. They sailed up and down the South River and capped off the summer with a three-day cruise to the Eastern Shore by themselves. The boys went off to college last fall Hugh in D.C. and Graham in Montana, but they were counting the days until summer. Now that they are reunited with Mariposa, they plan more work (including topside paint, a new head and holding tank, and new instruments) and more cruising. These improvements are expensive, and the whole project has cost us a little money. But for what the boys got out of it, it was worth every penny. The boys still happily call Mariposa their $47 boat. h sails the family s lovely 1966 Mason 33 sloop, Nepenthes, out of Beards Creek on the South River. 79