Le Menagerie

My friend Don says that we won’t get any real weather until he has totally finished remodeling his house on the beach. Since he is a few weeks (at most) away from that goal, Hurricane Dean has turned his attention further southward and, at this point it looks pretty unlikely that we will even get wind, rain or surge from this ugly mess. Perhaps there is somebody in deep Southern Mexico, where the storm is slated to make landfall that has recently finished building or remodeling his house……I have suggested to Don that it might be best to wait until, oh, mid-January, maybe early February to finish work…

On the other hand, we are preparing anyway.

I have stripped the sails from the booms, gathered up the storm lines, put in the storm hatches, basically emptied the interior, and today will take ‘Div over to Port Isabel, to a relatively secure slip far in the back of the fingers, well away from the derelicts at Anchor Marina, rig up some storm lines that will allow her to rise with any surge that might happen, and hide her there till the threat of this thing is over.

During the weekend we moved Le Menagerie, the Rhodes 22 that we are half owners of onto it’s trailer, and out of Port Isabel. The other half of the ownership lives in Austin now, and rarely gets a chance to come down here.  It was time anyhow. The little boat was unattended, neglected and unloved. I am ashamed of myself for letting her get in this dismal condition.

Le Menagerie was the boat that the twins learned to sail on, happily taking the tiller for great lengths of time. They overcame their fear of heeling, swam from the stern and fished in the warm waters of the Laguna Madre aboard this wonderful little boat. Now she has fallen into a state of disrepair, and yesterday we nosed her over to Anchor Marina, and with the help of my friend Jim (Island Times) unstepped the mast and got her trailerized… I will now take on another project, and renovate Le Menagerie and hopefully, find her a good home.

And speaking of derelicts, while at Anchor Marina yesterday, who should come riding up on a brand new childs bicycle….you know the pint sized ¾ BMX kind of thing?

Dock Boy

With his wife standing up on the rear axle nuts, balanced with her hands on his shoulders, they skidded to a stop. I marveled at the little bike’s ability to handle the combined weight of two fully grown humans. Dock Boy’s wife disembarked, and headed back down to their boat, the See-Lyin, but Dock Boy himself just couldn’t help but fire off a few questions as we stood there getting ready to drop the stick on Le Menagerie.

“So I bet you miss it here, right?” he asked.

I thought about that question for a minute, and it occurred to me that this place, full of drunks, derelicts and degenerates was a perfect spot to amass stories and profiles of the quintessential harbor inhabitant. Love it or hate it, it is a source of color and flavor, unique, yet universal in and to itself. And so I prayed that we would be spared the storm, and added this in as another reason.

“Well…..sometimes” I muttered, and went back to my task.

Dock Boy edged off towards the new money box for the launch ramp, the one that I had just stuffed a dollar into in order to extract Le Menagerie. The afternoon was hot, and I guess he was out of beer.