GUEST COLUMN – LA GATA

by Carol J. Rhodes Texas City, Texas
It was late afternoon on a bleak November day as I walked through the small shipyard on Long Island Sound, a place where boats, too old to sail, were kept for scrap and spare parts. I had heard my beloved La Gata was there. When my husband and I moved back to Texas twenty-five years before, we sold La Gata to a newly-married couple who were planning to live aboard her. Over lunch during a recent trip back to the area, good friends told us the couple had gone their separate ways after
only a few months. They heard the boat had been sold again and again, and finally abandoned. While making my way through the rubble of this rundown place, the wind picked up, noisily slapping water against the shoreline and the three old boats tied to a crumbling pier. After an hour of searching, I had almost given up hope of finding my boat. Then, rounding the corner of a dilapidated old shed, I saw her. I would have known her anywhere, even though the name was missing from the stern. The once-proud sloop rested uneasily on her side among the remains of a collapsed wooden cradle. Her aluminum mast and boom lay alongside, the stays broken and twisted. Hatches and companionway doors were missing and the cabin had been stripped bare. Still in its mounting, the tiller was broken, the end of it where my hands had rested so many times, now dangled like a badly broken leg. Remains of last night’s rainfall gathered in puddles along the deck. Tattered, faded remains of the red and white sailboat-printed curtains I had sewn showed through the forward porthole. I wondered how long had she been here like this, waiting for someone to reclaim her, to scrub her teak and polish her brass, to make her proud again? Sitting on the side of the cockpit, I remembered some of the adventures and good times our family had shared
aboard La Gata: Riding out a hurricane anchored in the cove of Fisher’s Island. Running aground on a falling tide while waiting for the Minaus River railroad bridge to open. A middle-of-the-night rescue of three people whose boat had sunk off Port Washington. The trip to Block Island. Vespers races on Thursday evenings in the summer. I had hardly noticed how dark it had gotten, until the beam of a flashlight and a man’s voice calling, “Lady, you gotta to be goin’ now. Time for me to close up,” brought an end to my reverie. Reluctantly, I said goodbye once again to my boat. But this time, I wouldn’t be
seeing her with new owners standing proudly on the deck as they steered her out of the channel and into the Sound.
I would, instead, remember a boat that shouldn’t be in this place at all. I glanced over my shoulder one last time and saw her running before the wind, sails sheeted in to keep her steady, my husband at the helm, me and my son working the winches.