Vic Socotra

01 April 2009

On the Beach

(Captain’s gig on crane)

I saw the Dalmatian Doc yesterday on one of the four visits that the health care plan is going to grant me to deal with the creeping arthritis. This officially was visit number two, and the Doc is trying all sorts of things.

He got his training for pain in the Navy, of all things, and we have a pretty good rapport. I gave a short presentation on the effects of the first three drugs he had tried on me, and he recommended another. I got the prescription filled on the way back to work, and took one when I got home. The sun was shining and I took the hand-weights and ventured out for a power walk.

The drugs must be pretty good. I walked for an hour in no pain at all. In fact, better than no pain. I took an extra victory lap and approached the building from the rear, where I saw the Former President and Hank, the real estate entrepreneur.

Hank brokered the deal that got me the efficiency apartment down at pool side, and he and the President were thick as thieves in the hot-house market of the bubble. They specialized in Big Pink properties, and at the peak, they must have owned seven of the units in the building.

They both had long faces. I disconnected myself from the iPod and put my weights down in the bed of the President’s red pick-up.

“So how is the market, titans of commerce?” I said, fishing in my shorts for a post-exercise cigarette.

The President gave me a crooked grin and Hank scowled. He gestured over my shoulder to the towering bulk of The Madison across the parking lot.

“Depends on what that building over there does to the rental market. I understand you visited?” The President has a soft Texas drawl a little like Huckleberry Hound.

“Yep. It is expensive. At least it is for what they are calling the market rate units. I don’t know what the subsidized housing is going to go for. There are not supposed to be more than half of them, and I assume they are going to make the thing self-sufficient, with the Yuppies paying more and the working poor paying less.”

Hank always has a doleful look even in the best of times and this is not one of them. He said “I hope the whole thing is subsidized. Then they will know what a good deal we have here.”

“We can’t walk away from what we have here. It would be easier if we could tow the building out to sea and sink it. That is what people are doing with all the fancy yachts they can’t afford.”

“Yeah,” said the President. “I hear there are abandoned and sunken boats from Bar Harbor to Brownsville.” He looked thoughtful, like he was figuring how many trucks it might take to get the big building moving toward the Potomac.

I bade them a good evening as I headed toward the back door, thinking of boats, and the unique advantage they have over real property.

You know the best two days of your life, right? The day you buy it and the day you sell it.

Dad had a great yacht for years, in the times when he and Mom were riding high and he could single-hand and race the roomy Nonesuch, which was an astonishing full-cabin beamy cat-boat. Only twenty-eight feet LOA, she had a beam of nearly nine.

Comfortable, and with a free-standing mainmast way up forward that was a thing of wonder.

I think I know why I lost interest in the boating life. The years of public service and growing children never gave me the reserves to have yachting as a hobby, and power boating seemed somehow....ungreen.

In the back of my mind, though, I always thought that John Wayne's private minesweeper was a good way to go, just the right size. Before the Navy, I had lived on a friend’s boat in Beverly Harbor north of Beantown. The gypsy life gave me an admiration for the other anchorage trash and live-aboard bums.

Some of them would actually get underway and sail out beyond the three mile limit on New Year’s Eve and stay out there until the 2nd of January to beat the personal property tax, which was based on the property that was physically in Taxachusitts on the first of the year.

Sometimes, dreamily, I thought of a little snug trawler as the answer to a lot of life's problems- cast off the lines and head over the horizon.

If you could no longer afford it, you could open the sea-cocks and step off into the dingy. Financial problems solved!

That got me to thinking about the ship's boats in one of the old stories from a long-ago Med cruise. That caused me to go back and question why we called them what we did.

The boats on Forrestal came in three flavors- the Admiral's barge, a long sleek cabin-cruiser with a black hull, suitable for the Commander of the Battle Group to go back and forth, the gray Captain's gig, for the exclusive use of the Carrier's Skipper, and three or four 40-ft Utility Boats for the rest of us.

The official name was exactly that- "utility boat," and that is what they were. Open hills, molded bench seats all around fore and aft of the coxswains station amidships. I don't know why we didn't call them "U-boats," except for the obvious confusion with the Germans, and instead I mostly heard them called Mike Boats, which was a Vietnam-era term for the ramp-bowed landing craft used in riverine operations.

That was definitely not what we had. But of course we didn't care, who took us, so long as we could get ashore.

I read that the Navy, bless it's little pointy head, is going to get rid of the Captain's gig. According to a Naval Air Forces Directive issued in January, all eleven remaining carriers (all nucs, now, with the decommissioning of USS Kitty Hawk) will be required to turn in their gigs before June 30, 2009 to "reduce maintenance costs and free up valuable hangar bay space."

I suspect that is the only real estate that has actually held its value lately.

According to the press release, the Admiral's Barge will remain in the inventory. (Duh).

So far, Enterprise, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Carl Vinson have complied, since they are in selective maintenance periods and can't get away.

The gigs will go into storage until the Navy decides what to do with them. I'd love to bid on one- what a private yacht that would be! Why buy a fancy civilian yacht when you could get one surplus from the Navy offers that is almost unsinkable and sound as a dollar used to be?

So, the barges associated with the carriers are toe-tagged. I don't know if the Utility boats will stay. There were never enough to carry the whole crew on and off the ship anyway, and normally the ship's Porkchop arranged to contract ferry services out to lighters and "bum boats" available in the larger harbors to accommodate the liberty parties.

The Navy says it is not about saving money, but rather a sensible economy that frees up precious space on the hangar bay. I am not one for saving tradition just for the sake of it, but I do think that the message sent by stripping the Captain of his gig is not a good one. But what the heck, I'm retired and what I think doesn't matter. If the economy helps to preserve the larger capability, that's great.

I hope the Administration doesn’t figure out that they could save a hole lot of money if they sent the fleet out over the horizon with sealed orders to sink them outside the three mile limit.

I just think of the gay couple who lived next to me in Beverly- they had a gigantic 65-ft wooden schooner that had not been away from the pier in a few decades. Long tangles of seaweed hung down from below the waterline, and it occurred to me that you could probably put a screwdriver through the planks with only a modicum of effort.

But the owner had a washing machine and a dryer on board, and listening to him fight with his serial lovers at night after a few drinks is the reason I support gay marriage today. There should be legal consequences for intimacy for everybody. Why should heterosexuals be the only miserable ones?

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