“So I guess the next problem is to figure out where we can move Rag Doll to, and get her there,” Amanda said a few minutes later. “You’re sure we can’t keep her right here?”

“Oh, we could, assuming you want to pay through the nose for dockage, and have the marina manager on you about it being an eyesore every ten minutes,” Ron smiled. “He was on my case about it within minutes after I made the bid and made a real asshole of himself in the process. The guy from the bank said he’d been hearing about it from the manager, too. I paid him for a week’s dockage and paid through the nose for it. He’d have been an even worse jerk if Chief Barnes hadn’t been standing right next to me.”

“Why’s that?”

“It could be that maybe he didn’t want to have one of our 25-footers sitting outside the entrance stopping people for safety checks every time someone goes in and out.”

“Sounds like a pretty good reason to me,” she giggled. “I guess we’d better be finding a place to keep her,” Amanda smiled. Already there was a certain pride, or at least possessiveness of ownership coming over her. She made a mental note that she was going to have to straighten out the paperwork with Ron as soon as she could, but that didn’t have to be done this instant. And while I’m making mental notes, she thought, I’d better make one to not cut any corners on required safety items since I’m going to be up to my neck in Coasties all through this – not that it was necessarily a bad thing.

“Well, Chief Barnes suggested this Sims Boat Yard place. I know where it is, but I’ve never been in there. It’s not real close to the station but not impossibly far away, either.”

“Then I guess we’d better go take a look,” she grinned. “We owe your Chief Barnes a couple already, and somehow I don’t think we’re done adding to the list.”

Sims Boat Yard took more than a little bit of finding; the road into the place was not obvious and not very well marked. It was located on a backwater, near a grove of cypress trees that overlooked a wide field of weedy marsh. Amanda’s first impression of the place mirrored Ron’s: it was a dump, but on closer inspection she realized that wasn’t quite honest. Weathered and beat-up and run-down, for sure; there was no question about that. There were several abandoned boats or parts of them back in a swampy corner of the property. While there were some boats that were more or less pleasure boats sitting around, either in slips or on cradles, the boats seemed to run more toward work boats of one kind or another.

In a way, that made Amanda a little more comfortable; this was not a yachtie place. After all, she’d seen plenty of yachtie types around Winchester Harbor and at the fuel dock at the Channel Stop over the years, and even considered some of them to be more or less friends. But there was always a bit of distance there, since she was a person who worked on a boat and liked doing it; she was there to make money, not show how much she could spend.

There was an office at the boat yard, but the two of them didn’t find anyone there. They heard some work going on in a battered metal shed next to the office, so decided to take a look in there.

It was dim and cluttered inside the shed, but toward the back they could see a work light and a man doing some work on the stern of a boat with some sort of air-powered device. Once the racket died down for a minute, Ron called out, “Hello? Anyone here?”

“Yeah, just a minute,” they heard a man call. “Lemme get this knocked loose. It’ll only take a second.”

It took a couple minutes of the brrrt-brrrt-brrrt of the air tool, whatever it was, interspersed with a couple breaks that involved cuss words. Finally they heard, “Got you, you son of a bitch,” before the man put the tool down and came toward the door where they were standing. “Can I help ya’ll?” he said in a thick southern accent. They could see he was an older man, maybe around fifty, give or take ten years, a little messy and needing a shave.

“Yeah,” Ron said. “We’re looking for a place where we can put a boat in a slip for a while so we can work on it.”

“What kind of boat?”

“A sailboat,” Amanda explained. “A Triton 28.”

“Dunno,” the man scratched his head. “Might could do it, but you gotta realize this ain’t no yachtie place. It’s pretty much workboat stuff.”

“I understand,” Amanda smiled. “Both of us work on the water, so we hear what you’re saying.”

“You do?” the man said, eyeing them with disbelief.

“Yeah,” Ron said. “I’m in the Coast Guard over at Mayport, and Amanda here is a deckhand on a fishing boat on the Great Lakes in the summer.”

“What ya got to do on this boat?”

“Just about everything,” Amanda sighed. “It’s a restoration, and it’s in pretty sad shape.”

“I dunno,” the man said, moving a greasy ball cap to scratch his head. “That can be a helluva lot of work. I seen young couples get into them kind of things and pretty soon I’ve got another boat sittin’ around with no one workin’ on it and no one payin’ for a slip.”

“I believe you,” Amanda agreed. “But this isn’t my first restoration. I did another one last winter up at home, a boat a little smaller. Made a good profit when I sold it, too.”

“You did it?” the man said in disbelief.

“Well, my dad helped some with the heavy and tricky stuff, but he had a restoration job of his own he was working on. The one I did last winter wasn’t the first restoration we’ve done, either. He’ll probably come down to help me out with this one, at least some. My brother here will probably help out from time to time, too.”

“Your brother, huh?” the man said, removing his ball cap to scratch his head again. “I figured you two for a young couple with stars in their eyes, not knowin’ what they’re getting’ themselves in for. How long you figure it’s gonna take you?”

“I have to head back home to go to work in March,” Amanda told him. “I’d be real surprised if I have it ready to go by then. Like I said, it’s in sad shape and going to need some work. I’ll pay you for dockage for the summer before I leave, though. We might want to put it on the hard for the summer, I don’t know yet.”

“Well, shit,” the man shook his head. “That makes things a mite different, I guess. How much does that thing draw?”

“Somewhere around five feet, at least according to the specs,” Amanda told him. On her last night at home she’d reviewed some web pages about the Triton 28, so she had some idea what she was talking about. “But from what I can see the hull is dirty as hell, so it probably sits lower than that. Maybe five and a half to be on the safe side.”

“Well, we could do it, I suppose,” he replied. “I’d haveta put ya’ll inta one of them slips over on the left. It might could get your keel down in the mud when we get a real low tide, but the mud is soft. You don’t want to try and get in and out of here if it’s less’n half tide, though. They’s a sand bar I gotta get dredged out sometime.”

“Is there water and electric there? I’m planning on living on the boat, or at least camping out on it, once I get it cleaned up a bit.”

“Ayeah,” he nodded. “Don’t got no way to pump a holdin’ tank, though.”

“I can make it work if I can use a rest room once in a while. I can make do with a bucket if I have to.”

“That ain’t gonna be no problem,” he smiled. “Ya can use the one in the office when it’s open.”

“That’s good to know.”

“One thing,” he went on. “They usually ain’t much of nobody around here at night, but me an’ Maybellene and Cordy live in a trailer back up the road a piece. Ya want ta be careful about where ya walk around here after dark, though. Sometimes gators like ta come up an’ get on the lot where the ground is warmer than the water. Take a flashlight with ya an’ look where yer goin’.”

Amanda could see he’d been won over, at least part of the way. “I suppose I’ll get used to it,” she sighed.

“Lemme know if I kin help ya with anythin’, ’specially engine work,” he continued. “I’d haveta charge ya for it, though.”

“Wouldn’t expect anything else,” she smiled. “I’m doing this project on a shoestring so I’ll want to do everything I can by myself, but I’m sure there will be times when I need a hand. I know the engine on the boat is going to need work. I haven’t gotten far enough into this project to figure out what I’m going to do with it yet, though. Beyond that, the boat’s going to have to come out of the water sooner or later so I can work on the hull. That might not be real soon.”

“Well, lemme know,” he smiled. He quoted them a price for slippage on a monthly basis, and it sounded pretty reasonable to Amanda. They quickly concluded a deal. “By the way,” he added, “the name’s Sid Sims. I’m right glad I can help ya out. It’s a right pleasure ta see a young girl that works on the water and doesn’t mind gettin’ her hands dirty.”

“Amanda Lewis,” she said by way of introduction. “And this is my brother Ron. He’ll probably be around now and then. Now, the next problem is to get the boat over here. The engine is a long way from working and I doubt the boat is ready to try to sail. You don’t happen to know someone who could give us a tow?”

“Shouldn’t be no problem,” Sid smiled. “Where’s this boat at?”

Ron named the marina where the Rag Doll was sitting. “They’re pretty antsy about getting it out of there, though.”

“Ayeah, they would be,” Sid chuckled. “It’s all fulla them snooty yachtie types that got money to throw away.”

“Believe me, I know the type,” Amanda grinned. “They can be a pain in the ass where we come from, too.”

“Don’t I know it,” Sid chuckled. “We’d best be gettin’ a move on. Tide’s comin’ in now but it’ll be goin’ out by the time ya can make it back. I’ll have Cordy take ya over there with the push boat ta bring ya back an’ tell ’er to move along smartly.”

Sid led them out of the shop and into the boat yard a ways, to where a girl about Amanda’s age was working on the hull of a wooden workboat with a paint scraper. The girl was smaller and solider than Amanda, with blonde streaks in brown hair; her jeans and sweat shirt were flaked with paint chips. “Cordy,” Sid said, “I need ya ta take the push boat an’ these two over ta where they’ve got a boat tied up. It’s gonna come back here so they can work on it.” He explained where it was they had to go.

“I can do that, Pa,” Cordy replied in a southern accent about as thick as her father’s. “It means I ain’t gonna get this hull done today, though.”

“It’ll be there tuhmarra,” he smiled. “Need ta get this done right smart though, or the tide’s gonna fall too low ta get their boat in there.”

“I guess,” she sighed. “I’d just like to get this thing done and get it outa my sight.” She turned to Ron and Amanda. “Come on,” she said flatly, still apparently a little irritated at being taken from what she had been doing. “Let’s be doin’ it.”

Cordy led them through the boat yard, around vessels of various sizes and in various states of disrepair, out to where a rough-looking steel-hulled workboat about thirty feet long was tied. It was mostly square in the bow, and had a pair of towing knees mounted there, obviously for pushing barges and the like. The “push boat” looked as if it got used a lot, and had plenty of scratches, dents, scrapes, and places where paint was missing. It had nothing resembling a cabin, just a control station in the front half of the boat. The girl went up there, threw a switch located near the wheel, and pushed a button. Under the deck behind them they could hear a diesel engine trying to start. After a few turns the engine bellowed to life, leaving a small cloud of black smoke for a long moment before it settled down.

“Can one of you get the lines or am I gonna have to do it?” Cordy said in a sharp voice.

Amanda glanced at Ron and noticed him shrugging back. They apparently shared a thought: it must be somewhere around this girl’s time of the month to be cranky. Amanda nodded and headed toward the bow line, while Ron headed for the one at the stern. Both lines were taut, but in the skill learned over years she stepped on the line to draw the push boat toward the pier, to give a little slack to loosen the line, while Ron was doing the same thing at the back. They stepped aboard, and both stopped to coil their lines in a seaman-like fashion. Cordy said nothing, but opened the throttle to ease the push boat away from the dock.

It was apparent within seconds that whether the girl at the helm was just naturally surly or what, she knew what she was doing. In only seconds she had the push boat pointed out into the murky waters of the backwater, and opened up the throttle. The push boat clearly wasn’t fast and was putting up a pretty good wall of water for its modest speed. Amanda took a moment to look around; this grass-filled swamp was a lot different than the clear open water of Winchester Harbor and Lake Huron, after all. There were no visible channel markers, but apparently Cordy knew where she was going.

They went around a bend, straight for a ways, then joined the wider path of what looked like a river after a few hundred yards. There were boats in both directions, and a barge with a big push boat running ahead of them. Ron glanced around. “OK,” he said, “I know where I am, now. We came up this way three or four weeks ago. He glanced back at the backwater where they’d come from. “Boy, you could miss that real easy if you didn’t know what you were looking for.”

Amanda glanced back and could see just exactly what he meant. While the opening was there, it sure didn’t look like it led anywhere but a dead end in the marsh grass. “No fooling,” she agreed. “Things are sure a little different from home, aren’t they?”

“Takes a little getting used to, but not that bad,” Ron told her. He looked around and commented, “Boy, this thing is really basic, isn’t it? I mean, I don’t even see a place to sit down, not that I’d want to get my pants messed up on this deck.”

“Me either,” she replied, sure that Cordy couldn’t hear them over the sound of the push boat’s diesel. “She sure seems to have her tail tied in a knot though, doesn’t she?”

“Sure does. I mean, I’d be willing to take what break I could from scraping paint. I suppose we’d better try to be nice, just on general principles.”

“I suppose.”

The two of them went over to where the girl was at the control stand, driving the push boat with a scowl on her face. “Hey, look,” he said loud enough to be heard but trying to sound casual. “If there’s anything we can do to help out, let us know.”

“Yeah, sure,” she replied with a sarcastic sound in her voice, as if neither Ron nor Amanda was capable of doing anything useful at all.

“Just saying,” he replied, realizing that she obviously wasn’t in any mood to be friendly. He wasn’t really in the mood to push further, so he and Amanda walked up the deck a little with nothing to do but stand around.

“Well, whatever her problem is, it’s her problem,” Amanda said after a minute.

It was noisy enough that talking wasn’t appealing. “Yeah, I guess,” he agreed. There wasn’t much to do but stand and watch the shore go by.

The push boat wasn’t fast but moved along steadily. After a while they came out on the St. John’s River; without comment Cordy turned the push boat and began to run down the south shore, just inside the channel markers. After a distance they turned onto the Intracoastal. “It’s still a ways,” Ron told her, “but we’re real close to the station now.”

There was still several miles running to the south, still through an open area of marsh, although now civilization could be seen well back from the waterway. They passed several places that had apparently been dredged out to provide for a marina, and finally Cordy turned into one that began to look familiar to Amanda only when they’d gotten in the entrance.

Cordy throttled the push boat down to an idle. “This is the place, right?” she said, the first time she’d spoken in the couple of hours it had been since shortly after they’d left the bayou.

“Right,” Ron told her. “The boat is back toward the back in one of the far slips.”

Even idling slowly, it didn’t take long for the push boat to get back to near where the Rag Doll was tied up in one of the slips. “I can’t tow you right outa the slip,” the sullen girl said. “You’re gonna have to untie it and back it out. Once you get it out, I’ll back down and throw you two a line.”

“That’ll work,” Amanda nodded. “Can you nose this thing up to one end of the finger pier so we can climb up on it?”

“Hell, yes,” Cordy snorted, making Amanda wonder once again what she had her panties all in a wad about. “Get up front and get ready.”

However nasty the girl at the controls may have been feeling and acting, she showed very soon that she had a sure control of the push boat. Ron and Amanda got up by the towing knees as Cordy approached the pier; at just the right instant she dropped the boat into reverse and gunned the engine, bringing the boat to a dead stop just inches from the pier. Amanda, then Ron scrambled up a couple of rungs of a ladder mounted on the pier as Cordy backed the boat away.

“Let’s just hope this thing isn’t tied down too tight,” Ron said.

Somehow the Rag Doll looked even grubbier than it had a few hours before. God, Amanda thought as she went to untie the stern line, maybe this is going to be more damn work than I really want to deal with. I guess I’m stuck with trying it now, though.

Fortunately the line wasn’t stuck, making her wonder if the boat had only been moved here for the auction. She got it free easily, then went up the dock a few feet to where she could climb aboard the boat. Ron was still messing with the bow line, so she untied the tiller, which had been tied so it couldn’t move in the wind and the current. By then, Ron had the bow line loose, and standing on the dock began to pull the boat backwards out of the slip. Amanda tried to help him by grabbing one of the posts near the boat and pulling.

The Rag Doll wasn’t real easy to move – it probably weighed four or five tons – but with a steady pressure they soon had the boat moving backwards into the stream. Amanda glanced up to see that sometime in the minute or two they’d been working on getting the boat free Cordy had swung the push boat around and was backing close to them.

After another minute or two they had the Rag Doll mostly out of the slip. At the last possible instant Ron hopped nimbly onto the bow, and gave a dock post a final push to get them away from the dock. By then the stern of the push boat couldn’t have been ten feet away, just idling as Cordy stood on the stern with a coil of line in her hand. “Ready when you are,” Ron called.

The girl didn’t say anything, but just tossed the loop of line to him. He caught it and found a good place up near the bow to tie it off. “All right,” Ron called to her. “We’re ready. Take it away.”

“Good enough,” she said, the first thing she’d said that was even halfway approving since they’d left Sims Boat Yard. “I’m gonna have to tow you pretty fast if we’re gonna make the tide back home.”

“Do what you have to do,” Ron called back. “We’ll hang on somehow.”

Cordy pulled the push boat ahead slowly until the line grew taut, giving them about three boat lengths behind the towboat, while Amanda put the Rag Doll’s helm over to help the boat follow the tow boat. The pull of the towline did as much to get the Rag Doll turned down the channel as anything, and soon they were following along behind.

The girl on the towboat kept the tow roughly no-wake slow as they crossed the marina, but once they were back out into the Intracoastal she opened the throttle. Black diesel smoke blew into the sky from the exhaust stack as the boat picked up speed.

Ron decided it would be best to keep an eye on the tow line for a few minutes just to make sure everything was firmly in place, while Amanda sat in the cockpit steering the Rag Doll. It was not difficult to control since the towline was doing most of the steering, although the boat had a tendency to pull to starboard a bit, so she had to keep a little pressure on the helm to keep the towline straight. She had no idea what the problem might be, other than to guess that the crap on the hull must be thicker on the starboard side of the boat, but there didn’t seem to be any logical reason for that. There was no way to be sure of it until they had the boat out of the water, and it might be a while before that happened.

Just going by eye, it appeared to Amanda that they were going slower than they’d been on the trip down to the marina; that was no surprise. One of the things that’s foreign to Great Lakes sailors like she was were the tides, but she figured they had to be somewhere around the deepest water right about then. As the tide started to fall it would probably help them while they were headed down the Intracoastal, but would slow them down once they got out onto the river. I’m going to have to learn something about tides and tide tables, she thought.

After a while Ron must have figured that everything was fine with the towline, so he came back to join Amanda in the cockpit. “Well, Sis,” he said, “I guess you got your boat.”

“I did,” she nodded. “But I’ll tell you what, I look at it now and wonder if I’ve bit off more than I can chew. God, this thing is a mess. I guess the first thing I’m going to have to do is get a notebook and start making a list of what needs to be done.”

“I hate to say it, but it’s going to be quite a list,” he shook his head. “But I was just thinking about it. If I were you, the first thing I’d do is rent a good commercial grade power washer and go over the topside pretty thoroughly. If nothing else, it’d clean off all the crap and grote so you could see what you’ve really got to work with.”

“Not a bad idea,” she agreed. “But I was just thinking that I’d like to rent a storage shed somewhere and get everything out of the inside of the boat. It probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to power wash the inside, either.”

“Yeah, but as far as I know the battery is dead and we don’t know if the bilge pump is working,” he pointed out. “Maybe that’s something we could fiddle with tomorrow. We’ll just have to hook it up and see.”

“If we get back in time, maybe we can rent a storage shed and find a power washer,” she said. “Tomorrow is Sunday, and if this place is like anywhere else some places are going to be closed.”

“You’re probably right,” he agreed. “We might not have a lot of luck with it as late as we’re going to be when we get back, but I suppose we can take a look. If we can get it, maybe I can get a couple of guys from the station over to help out tomorrow. A few extra hands and a little serious work might make things look a lot better.”

“I hope so,” she shook her head. “It sure looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me.”

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