Caveat Emptor

Please mind your extremities

On our “to do” list had been the bullet point Shovel Off Boat. It'd been a particularly wintery winter here on Long Island, and while our Laura Lynn can handle the load (wet-stored, she was resting on her lines despite a foot of snow on deck), we'd wanted to make sure everything below was hunky dory, and to clear the dock and lines for the eventuality of real trouble. Plus, it seemed something akin to spousal abuse to let her wallow so ignominiously. For all I know, leaving a layer of insulation on her might have had a protective effect against the ravages of UV.

While we shoveled we noticed Matt, a local institution, tending to one of his own fleet, the cute-as-a-button water taxi that doubles as a tour boat during the fun season. He was moving ice out from around her on a lazy Saturday. When you’re in the water biz the work never ends. Having said that, I’ll wager there is nobody on the Eastern Seaboard more up to the rigors of the job than Matt.

Let me say this about the man. If one day he decides to hang up his foulies for good, our town might as well fill in the bay and start building condos. It truly frightens me to consider our harbor without his presence. He annually tends to a swarm of moorings belonging to the municipalities, yacht clubs and individuals of several harbors off the Sound.

I rent one of those moorings, and last summer Deb and I chose to hunker down aboard our boat as a vicious squall we’d tracked on radar tore through the harbor. While we huddled underneath our thrumming dodger I watched as scores of boats got knocked on their beam ends, our dinghy swamped and our oars took flight for the near coast. When it was over I remember marveling to Deb, “Matt’s moorings all held. He saved all our hides.”

Matt also oversees our bay’s water taxi service, much of the maintenance and seasonal care of docks, floats, gangplanks and whatever other nautical paraphernalia crowds the shoreline, and offers harbor tours to the less fortunate on the aforementioned scenic vessel. Beside all his other responsibilities he must deal with the likes of us, the hordes of boat owners who care only for our own personal pleasure.

One can imagine how hard it might be to book some face time with the guy. But here he was, coming over to say hi as we tended to our singular task. It was a rare pleasure to share in his seemingly limitless joy of being on the water.

Matt just seems made for this environment. He works like a dog (a Chesapeake Bay retriever comes to mind), one that wouldn’t have it any other way. The thing is, ways change. It’s been going on in this country for some time now, and some of it just plain turns my stomach.

When we asked how things had been going his countenance clouded over, something I doubt an act of nature could wring from him. No, this was man-made, and he proceeded to unload a weighty cargo involving an incident involving one of the town’s moorings. It had occurred a couple years back, but like some bad ideas it had festered inside another man’s poisoned mind. The details had pulled Matt away from the work he loved, immersed him in a foreign world, and the experience was keeping him awake at night.

I will now state for the record that anything I print from here on in is my own interpretation of events. Why? Because it involves boaters and lawyers. You don’t believe me? Take a gander at the water from any safe distance next spring. If there is a boat there, there is likely trouble in the offing. And as I love to observe, if I have not shed blood today, I surely have not spent time on a boat.

And lawyers? The term “lawyer” requires no explanation. It is as self-descriptive as the term “diarrhea”. What kind of diarrhea? Do you need to see a list? I don’t think so.

I’ll stick to what I do know. We boaters are a sad lot. Little is officially required of us in terms of experience and know-how, and what policing does exist is marginal. It often appears that the only thing one must have in order to be referred to as “Captain” is the key to the engine and a cooler of brewskies.

We captains are jumpy, too. The second a warmish day surfaces in March we expect the bay to be ready for our orgiastic spring emergence. Maintenance be damned; first one in the pool wins.  

So I’m seeing this guy in my mind’s eye. He’s itching to get his tub floating again, and his mooring ball is out there, having been placed by an experienced crew that has swapped it in for the winter stick that ID’s the strategically positioned and inspected ground tackle, one which serves as the template for Chapman’s Guide To Boating. He’s got this powerful hankering in his loins, but there’s no pennant so he figures he’ll rig something himself. How hard could it be? He tells Matt, and Matt being the kind of guy he is says the pennant won’t be in for a week, but feel free to give it a go, Cap. Just exercise due caution.

So our MacGyver proceeds to mangle a finger in an attempt to pass a line though a mooring shackle. Tricky business, threading a rope through a loop. It’s only done maybe tens of thousands of times a day by boaters who have an iota of common sense. So you know what’s up next, right? Time to call in the legal team. That’s where a real boater shows his metal.

In this, the most litigious culture in the history of Planet Earth, no folly shall go undenied. No culpability shall go undeflected. No lapse in judgment shall forego the attempt to reap monetary reward. We are a nation of dufus/whiners who feel no shame in the blaming of someone else for our own failings. Having stumbled on the sidewalk while gawking at the Wonderbra billboard, it is now time to take on the municipality, the concrete company, and the dentist who failed to match the color of the chipped tooth.

Matt Meyran once nearly died in a hospital after a routine operation went awry. When I asked if he’d sued for bazillions, he just went, “They were just doing their job. Sometimes things happen.” Yes they do, Matt. And now there’s a numb-nut out there trying to make a killing off his own stupidity, with a money-grubbing legal team looking for a cut of the action.

You’re out there somewhere, Captain Douchebag. Next time you decide to try to bust a move from the bow of your SS Guppy, do us all a favor and drown. And take the family shyster with you.