21. Envoi
FOR THE NEXT five days Expo repented of its folly in welcoming the boat that wouldn’t float. Happy Adventure had opened up so badly that we could only keep her head above water by continuous pumping with several electric pumps, and the somewhat malodorous jets that these flung against the millionaire yachts to either side of us were not appreciated. Expo officials kept moving us farther and farther into the hinterland of the Marina. We never saw our executive friend again, and he probably wished he had never seen us. All our efforts to staunch the leaks failed, and finally, in absolute desperation, we sailed our sinking vessel out of there, heading west in hopes of finding either a mud bank or a shipyard before it was too late.
We needed neither. Two hours after she left Expo, Happy Adventure stopped leaking, as suddenly and as inexplicably as she had begun.
A week later she, and we, arrived at the little Lake Ontario town of Port Hope, where Claire and I had bought a house. There were no facilities there to haul the vessel, so she had to stay in the water that winter. She did not like it. In January, when she was surrounded by ice not quite strong enough to bear a man’s weight, she opened up again. We saved her-just-but I had two memorable and unintentional swims amongst the ice-floes, while trying to reach her from the shore.
This being almost the last straw, I had her hauled that spring at Deseronto, on the Bay of Quinte, and she spent most of 1968 ashore, while experts came and looked at her, and probed, and fiddled, and admitted themselves baffled. Once in a while we would launch her on trial. She would leak like a sieve, so we would haul her up again. By the end of the summer I was ready to abandon hope. I told Don Dawson, the shipyard owner, to tear the engine out of her, strip her of anything useful, and let her die.
Don is a strange sort of a man. He cannot easily endure defeat. Without consulting me, he made one last attempt to discover Happy Adventure’s fatal flaw. One October day he phoned me.
“Farley? Listen now. I launched your boat last week. She’s been sitting in the water ever since, and she hasn’t leaked a drop. I think I’ve found the trouble.”
Of course I did not believe him, but being an eternal optimist I was persuaded to rescind her death sentence.
A few days before she was due to be launched in the spring of 1969 I visited her. As always, she looked a bit ungainly out of water, and she looked totally alien amongst the rows of slick motor-cruisers and fibreglass yachts. She was a sad, forlorn little ship; and I was suddenly stricken with guilt.
I thought to myself that she had been good to me in her way, and loyal too. And I thought what a dirty trick it was to bring her into exile in this land of fresh (polluted) water, toy boats and play boats, and there to let her rot her heart away.
On a sudden impulse I said, “Never mind, old girl. I’ll tell you what. Come summer, if you stay afloat and mind your P’S and Q’s, I’ll take you back where you belong. What do you say to that?”
She said nothing then, but as I write these words she has been afloat for a month, is tight as a drum, and is in better health than I have ever known her to enjoy. That is her answer. So one of these days Claire and I and Albert and Happy Adventure will turn eastward, down the long, long river, to the salt and living sea; to the silence and the fog; to the world in which my little ship was born. Happy Adventure will be going home.
