Enter Cujo

I Bought a Boat Just to Throw Away

Gypsy Wind was waiting for me in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, a 4 ½ hour drive from home, not counting coffee stops, pee breaks or traffic.  She sat on her cradle, everything I thought I wanted in a boat.  Well, almost everything.

She didn’t have a trailer.

Interestingly, I couldn't give the cradle away. It ended up going to scrap metal

When the boat movers quoted me $3,600 to bring her home, I almost cried.  That wasn’t happening. Sailing her home in the Atlantic and into the Bay of Fundy wasn’t an option either, not with my novice skills and her unknown rigging.  I was stuck.

Enter Cujo.

We spotted Cujo at Romeo’s Boatyard on one of my many scouting trips.  A derelict sailboat, long forgotten and in sorry shape.  While I was hesitating, my girlfriend, who has far less patience for my overthinking, stepped in.  She wheeled, dealed and bought the whole sad package for $500. When I finally made up my mind, she sold it to me.  Sometimes you just need friends who make decisions for you.

Look at those trailer tires!

What followed was a kind of nautical archaeology.  We stripped Cujo bare: winches, boom, mast, cleats, every scrap of teak and stainless we could cut out or pry loose.  It felt respectful, somehow, salvaging parts to keep other boats alive.  You never know when you’ll need a spare part or when you can help a fellow sailor in a bind.

The trailer was the real prize.  We gave it new axles, fresh tires on new rims, packed the bearings and rigged temporary lights. It became a greasy, satisfying puzzle, one I couldn’t have solved without help.  In the end, for about the same price as a one-way trip with the movers, I owned a boat trailer.

Trailer retrofit in progress.

Cujo herself had seen better days. Abandoned for years, her story was lost to weather and neglect.  I wish she could’ve had a better ending.  But one gray morning, we towed her broken shell to the landfill.  We stayed and watched as the excavator lifted her off the trailer, my trailer and crushed her.  It was sad, final and strangely necessary.

But there it was: freedom on wheels.

A few weeks later, Gypsy Wind was craned onto that very trailer and began her journey home.  That’s how one forgotten boat’s ending wrote the first chapter for mine.