\Pirates of Deltaville

Pirates and Gentlemen of Deltaville

Deltaville, Virginia shows on the chart as one of the last little natural harbors in the Chesapeake Bay before you enter the Atlantic Ocean. The road to Deltaville flows between the Rappahannock and Piankatank Rivers. The community and the culture of the town reflect its position on the map.

The town was once named, “Sandy Bottom”, because that’s what you find when you lift up your anchor. The sailors and fisherman who live in and sail into Deltaville offer the town much of its business and most of it's local color. Sailors blow into town from distant ports with fantastic stories of adventure. It’s easy to spot the sailors, they hitch hike from the docks into town carrying Santa size laundry sacks. They can be spotted at the pizza place wearing wool sweaters, funny hats, and rubber shoes.

What follows are recollections of a few colorful characters who blew into town.

Capt. Squeezebox

One Sunday morning Rebecca & I were enjoying the misty shoreline off Jackson's Creek. It was a calm spring day and the birds sang a tune named, “Winter's behind us now”. A few boats sat at anchor. One lay in the flat cove just off the shoreline. She had an odd presence about her. She looked French. She was aluminum, built for speed, and painted in deep mauve with pink trim. She had a rose colored plexiglas transom covered by an aluminum storm door. The door was hinged open. A pleasing pink glow lingered on the huge bed inside the plexiglass stern. Definitely French.

The captain sat upon the cabintop in a wide stripped blue & white sailor's shirt playing a concertina! The delicate sounds of the harbor laping the shoreline in the morning light, the gulls contesting their fair share of sushi, and the soothing melody all harmonized as if it was rolling out of a french seaside villiage. A sight to behold in the mist of the sea scented morning. Positively French.

"Good Morning", I called to the Capitan. He looked up, bid us, "Bonjour"; bounced into his little inflatable dingy, and sculled his way to shore. “Would you like to see my boat?” He was bound for a shoreside shower. Capitan François offered us his dingy. We agreed to pick him up when he reappeared at the shoreline.

His boat was fantastic. He and an architect had designed it along the lines of a racing boat hull and rig, with the interior setup for cruising. His next boat, said François, would have a wider bow. He’d been cruising for one year. He’d crossed the Atlantic, sailed throughout the Windward Islands south to South America. He’d gone as far as Rio in Brazil. His recounted adventures that sounded like he’d made his dream come true as intended, and that dream was now reaching it’s end.

He was soon to re-cross the Atlantic to return home. He lived on a farm before he left France. Our conversation was possible with the help of his tiny French/English paperback translator that appeared to have been put to use for many moments such as this. Each sentence was punctuated with furious page flipping as he riffled his way through the conversation. I took a mental note that this technique would be one on the keys to successful voyaging.

He spoke of his little farm in France. I told him I had a little cabin nearby with ducks and geese and chickens and a goat. I asked him what he did with the animals when he left the farm. As he riffled into the translator to interpret his thoughts, he lifted a big can up with a big "O" crayoned onto the lid for a label. He fled into the pages of the translator and he smiled as he reached his target word, "Goose", he said. He also had chicken, lamb, and duck; he'd canned the farm! He cooked up all his livestock into his favorite dishes and put them up in metal cans.

There was enough food put up for one year. His cabin was cozy, modern; disco décor. Everything was plastic or aluminum. Dry food and water was put up in plastic tubs. You could see the rice, oats and water through the opaque sides. The big Plexiglas window over the transom caste a pink light atop the sheets. Most romantic lighting. If you can't get laid in this boat, seek professional help. There was only one bed and he said everyone slept in it. There was room for four. Definitely French.

Captain John Coe

Our favorite character living in the harbor is John Coe. John has been nominated for the Tom & Rebecca Hall of Fame. Our fates crossed as John began a new chapter in his remarkable life. He'd come to the Southland from NYC where he'd enjoyed a life in the theater.

John's tales involved every aspect of theatrical production I'd ever imagined and many I never even dreamed of. He'd served as an actor, director, lighting crew, actor, production assistant, stage builder, actor, stage fancy, ne're do well, and actor. As time and warm beer loosened our tongues, stories of famous productions were revealed.

John never drops a name unless you trip over it, but there are so many famous actors in his past it seems one by one they all pop up. I saw the cover of a “Look” magazine featuring his mug along with his troupe in Paris on tour with the “Living Theater”. His stories of the theater are rich, and thick and fascinating. They are stories from the inside. He has an authentic officer's portable bed from a production on the civil war, a dingy once used as a set prop on stage, viewed by thousands, a silver shotglass presented by a production crew, and hardware inside his boat designed for use in theatrical staging.

Lured south by fair weather and economic advantage, he came to town to build the boat of his dreams. He chose a 36' Colvin Saugeen Witch design. She was steel, hard chined, no nonsense, with a schooner rig. There were welders here who turned him out a nice steel hull, and John took over from there. He aptly named his boat, ”Mistress Quickly”, in Shakespearean reference to a fast lady praised for her easily reefed skirts.

John had been around boats all his life. He enlisted in the navy in WW2, pacific theater. He tried officer training, but was disqualified because of poor eye sight. So they made him the lookout on the battle cruiser, USS Alaska, instead! Read that again and whistle.

John is all things nautical - his rigging knife is tied to his belt, his pipe is corncob, his homemade hat is macramé, and his preference for beer is not iced, but “schooner beer”, the temperature of the bilge.

John's worldliness often takes me by surprise. One day Rebecca and I pulled up to John's boat and knocked on the side calling out "Yeah, John..." he warmed us into his cabin. We'd been reading a book named My Old Man And The Sea, by David and Daniel Hays which we were sure he would enjoy. He said, "I'm in that book. Have you read chapter 5 yet? I used to sail with the author and his dad. In fact, they were just down here..." What are the odds?

He lived aboard "Mistress Quickly" at Willis Wilson's yard on Jackson's Creek. Willis' dock was crammed with workboats, sometimes tied three deep. John had his priorities aboard. His design philosophy produced a stew reduced to ultimate simplicity but seasoned with nuggets of complexity. "A head in a boat? What do you need that for?" Rumor had a porcelain pot lived under the forward bunk, but in all the years I've been aboard, it never reared its shiny white head.

Sailing with John was always a mini-adventure. We'd leave the dock having to pole our way around the fishing fleet strapped to the dock three deep. It seemed we had to turn the boat around in less room than the length the hull. But it was always done following the traditions of the sea. Two "god dams", one "oh, shit," and a "watch out for that f...cking spike", and we were on our merry way. Her rig was a blend of stalwart tradition and romantic illusion. Most of our many visits to the "Mistress Quickly" were enjoyed at Willis' yard. We'd swallow our way into oblivion aboard the deck of the Mistress Quickly watching the sun sink and the stars rise over the shoreline.

Rebecca and I enjoyed countless visits aboard "Mistress Quickly" at Willis' yard. We'd often cater the evening from a picnic basket filled with lightly on smoked salmon and Brie, studded with capers, bitter black olives on thin brittle cheese, crisp green apples, roasted red peppers, and fresh Italian bread. Ah, the simple pleasures of the leisure poor. As we watch the sun dip under the horizon, and the stars appear in heaven, we'd curse the republicans, and wonder where the ducks huddled in the depths of the night.

Captain Fingers

Sometimes, in a small town, stories precede actually meeting a person. A friend of mine, we'll call Teddy, was one of the best welders in town. He and his brother had built some beautiful boats. Ted called one day to tell me there was someone in town I had to meet. His tales jumped right out of legend, and I invested rapt attention.

It seems this new arrival, whose name I'll pen "Captain Fingers", had recently arrived from Haiti. That little island had been in the news of late had been filled with images of Baby Doc being thrown off the Island for acting like a Haitian head of state - living like a king on a wild bender amongst people too poor to own shoes or drink clean water. Haitian Refugees were being smuggled into Florida's beaches by the hundreds. Rumors had Capt. Fingers providing a ship for the refuges exodus. Another story accounts his arriving at the bank in Deltaville with large sacks full of Haitian money. Of course, the local Bank of Deltaville has no idea how to exchange Haitian money, but they worked it out, and Fingers hits the streets of Deltaville with a fresh stack of American cash money.

Capt Fingers makes his entry at the other end of the phone line with Teddy. Fingers asks him to come to a local the yard where he has a welding job if he's interested. Teddy arrives in the yard and the sight before him blows his freakin' mind! In front of him sits a 55' steel boat laid up on blocks. The boat has been cut in half and spread out to 70'. Fingers cut his boat into two halves and pulled them 15' apart. There is a 15 foot hole where you'd expect a boat to be. Capt. Fingers explained to Teddy that he was familiar with the original boat design. The architect offered the boat in the longer version. He was confident the new stretched design would work out fine.

Fingers had the wisdom to realize that no welder could be convinced to cut a 55' boat in half. So he'd learned how to half-assed cut steel with a torch and cut the hull in half by himself. He used a simple ingenious method to assure alignment. Before cutting he welded four pipes onto the deck. These pipes were welded along the centerline in a straight line with each other. He welded four washers onto the tops of the pipes like a set of peep sights on a target rifle. A line of sight down the holes in the washers established the boat's alignment, dead on center. Then he cut the hulls and spread them apart 15'. He used the sights to register the alignment of the two distant hull sections. Then he called the welders. All they had to do was weld up new plates, and then add the frames. Genius shows up in the oddest places.

Teddy and Fingers became fast friends. Teddy finished up the job, and then shipped out together on the newly strtched yacht. They needed a new rig to suit the larger boat, and FIngers knew right where to find one. They motored North to NYC, City Island, to a boatyard that Fingers knew. There was a rig there that had been taken off another boat and stored in the yard. Teddy told the story which was later confirmed by Capt. Fingers. They pulled the boat up to the dock and Fingers started shouting out orders to the boatyard workers. He ordered some men to go get the forklift operator & bring the lift over to the mast. They lifted the stored mast, including the boom, stays and fittings. He ordered them to load it onto the boat at the dock. Stole the whole damn thing, lock, stock, and barrel. And off they went with the entire rig - masts, cables, shackes, the whole magilla - lashed to the deck and headed south.

Later, as we drank Island Rum on the aft deck under the new rig, as Fingers recounted that story, he touted that the rig wasn't the only thing he'd acquired without exactly paying. He'd also stolen THE BOAT! His story was this… he was in NYC years back, and he read an ad for that boat for sale. It was the design he'd been interested in for years. He had no money, but he went to see the boat anyway.

He met with the seller and found him motivated to sell the boat by an impending divorce. He wanted to liquidate assets fast. The owner's new girlfriend was there. She wanted to get rid of that damned boat immediately. Not only did it reek of Finger's former aromour, but it was named for the wife, and that was double the reason for both of them to dump the boat immediately. Fingers smelled a bargain decidedly not made in heaven.

He got them both drunk as skunks and the seller agreed to transfer the tittle if he would get the boat out of the state immediately. According to Fingers, he transfered the tittle, and left as soon as the couple stepped off the boat. He didn’t stop till he was in the Caribbean well outside of the long arm of the American authorities. He said he never did pay a nickel to that guy, and that the guy still sends him Christmas cards!

Last I heard Teddy had shipped out with Fingers and a crew to Nicaragua. They had a cargo of 38 caliber bullets for the Contras. While off the coast, they were boarded by a gang of banditos of unknown loyalties. They jumped Fingers at anchor and held him down to the deck with a speargun.

The crew caught wind of what was up on deck, but they had an even better plan than the pirates. Up from the hatches poked Teddy and the mate, the prettiest little ex-Coast Guard member you'd ever find. She was holding a fully automatic weapon and knew exactly how to use it. Check and mate.

There was short a standoff while all parties considered their new positions of new game. The banditos had the Captain on the deck with a speargun to his head, but they were surrounded by his mates with machine-guns. Aint life peculiar?

The story has it that this was followed by a bout of laughter all around which led to an all night drunk. With the pirates. It seems that was Finger's answer to critical business negotiation. Get everyone drunk, and they all pass out.

The pirates told FIngers they had orders to kill him and his crew and steal the boat, and that there would be hell to pay when they got back to camp. Instead, he drank and laughed his way out of a near death experience. The man obviously leads a charmed life.

Last I heard...

Capt. Monkeyman

Speaking of ne're do wells there was another character who went by an alias instead of a name. His name was... Blackbeard and his sidekick was named McGoo. This story begins one stormy night as a giant sailboat pulls up the the dock in Deltaville half full of seawater with a weary rented crew. She arrived nearly sunk, so they tied her to the dock, and put the pumps to her all night long. By morning her bilges were largely dry, but there was a mystery about the sailboat that captured the imagination of all who peered inside her cabin.

The sailboat was a classic Nathaniel Herreshoff racing boat about 65 feet long. Built around 1935, she'd once been one of the world's finest yachts. Long and lean and built for speed in fine American tradition. The Herreshoff yard was in Rhode Island. It was one of the most advanced of its time. They designed & constructed entire classes of yachts, had their own sawmill, caste their own bronze fittings, and even made some of the early steam engines in their motored launches. In her heyday, The Sea Wolf was a sight to behold. Now she was a sight to be holed.

When the water was finally pumped out, a rather odd interior arrangement emerged. Her regular cabin sole (floor) was laid in typical Herreshoff style with chocolate colored Mahogany and white Holly trim accenting the flooring. Over this beautiful original woodwork was an additional plywood floor nailed onto 2 x 4’s. The height of the new floor just barely left room for the crew to crawl under the cabin roof! This left a huge void under the "floor". A boat like this develops a story real fast in a small town. By the end of the day, local law enforcement, the DEA, and Customs showed a peculiar interest in the Sea Witch. They searched her cabin high and low, but found neither powder nor seed, so the boat was void of evidence, so her checkered future remained on course.

Blackbeard hired any part time worker willing to swing a hammer inside a boat. Most of them, as it happens, were my friends. I refused to work on her because I was warned by my uncanny ability to predict disaster. But the stories were thick, and the money kept flowing for the workers.

The owners showed up in and out of town for the better part of the winter. I often ran into them at parties, which seemed to be a skill they'd developed over many years. Somehow their numbers seemed to swell at parties.

They all seemed to have funny knicknames taken from cartoon characters, or names that rhymed like Silly Billy or Red Ned. I don’t believe their mothers called them by these names. I pictured these names spelled out on a poster in the post office entittled "Wanted". The knicknames would appear under, "AKA". But I must say, when it came to parties, they cartainly came well equipped with party favors.

They actually got a federal grant to rebuild the Sea Witch! When you visited the boat, off a little dock in Jackson Bay, you had to walk around a big sign, “Historical Restoration”. Of course the locals referred to it as the “Hysterical Resurrection”.

The crew worked away diligently never knowing when payday might be drawing near, but every few weeks or so Blackbeard and McGoo would come ambling down the dock carrying a paper sack full small bills to pay the workers. They would ask, “How much do we owe you?" The workers would make up some amount everyone could live with, and McGoo, acting treasurer, would reach into the paper sack and count out the loose bills.

There was often a particular distraction during this activity because Blackbeard had a monkey on his back. An actual monkey. On a chain. On his back. Everyone pretended to like the little monkey. But actually, the monkey was really paranoid. And it was really, really mean. People would say, "Come here little fella..." But were thinking, "Come over here you little shit heaving rat on two legs..."

Well, as anyone with two keen eyes and a half a dick under his zipper would have predicted, things went sour in the end. The “boatbuilders” had decided to out design Nathaniel Herreshoff. Rather than take off an old rotten deck plank and replace it with a new one that looked just like it, they decided to use an original space-age technique to repair the leaking deck. They cut thin little planks about 1/8” thick and glued them to the rotten deck using a space-age adhesive. It didn't work. It looked like crap. The strips buckled as they were bent, and the adhesive couldn't hold them flat. When they sanded the surface, they cut right through the thin planks. And the deck leaked. Other than that it was perfect. Blackbeard was pissed. Also some rigging had been stolen. The party was definitely over. The bill was due.

The pirates took their aggressions out on one of the builders named Peter. They tied Peter up with a phone chord. And then they beat him up. "Where is our rigging stuff?" Like he had the slightest idea. Peter wasn't the thief... he was just the first guy available.

The next I saw of them was a few weeks later when Blackbeard and McGoo came rolling down my driveway. I figured there were two possibilities... they either thought I stole their stuff - after all, I was building a boat - or they wanted to hire me to fix their deck. I figured I'd better only address the second notion. There was no way in hell I was going to work for these guys. I thought the best approach here was to be direct.

I decided to take the issue head on, right off the top, grab the issue by the balls and never waiver an inch from my course. Stay focused and use all the forces I had at hand. I told Blackbeard and McGoo I was not going to work for them. He offered me plenty of money. I told him absolutely not – it was not going to happen.

I asked him if he beat up Peter? He said he had. I told him I did not believe that violence is the way to settle disputes. There was no hope that I would work for him. I tried to stay calm, but I knew this moment could turn out two different ways. I needed to hold my position with all the tools at hand.

All the while I was sitting in front of my cozy little cabin. I’d just returned from a hunting trip. I'd skinned out two deer the day before. The fresh skins were stretched in the sun tacked to the outside of the cabin wall. The scent of fresh meat blessed the air.

The skins hung like a subliminal message that even a pirate would appreciate: I believe in peace, but I shoot big game. I cut them into little pieces. And I eat them.

They went away. Thank God. I thanked the spirit of the deer for protecting me. And went in for lunch.

Yum, venison...

(Peace boat) (Gordon wedding) (Samoon)