The frustrations, joys, and family of marina friends.
I was walking down the docks toward my 1967 Rawson 30 Ave Del Mar when I heard my name being called out. I immediately knew where and from whom it came, so I poked my head around the side of the marina office where I saw the dock manager, Peter, leaning against a piling having a smoke. It wouldn’t really be fair to call this a cigarette “break,” as I’m pretty sure that it was the work, not the cigarettes, that constituted the “breaks” in Peter’s day, but he ran the marina well from that piling with a cordless phone in one hand and a lit Camel in the other.
“I’m gonna have to move you again,” he said to me. “They’re about to start on C dock.”
The marina was plodding slowly through an extensive rebuild as questionable old wooden docks were slowly being replaced with brand new floating ones. In only six months of living there my boat had already been in three different slips. Peter always broke the news to me the same way—outside his office leaning against that pilling, sucking on a cigarette.
I liked the marina despite everything that I didn’t like about it. It was convenient. It allowed liveaboards. It was big enough that it was easy to stay lost in the crowd, if that was your goal. But it was also under a bridge that never went quiet, the facilities manager was constantly scowling and barking at the folks he was hauling out, and despite my pair of dedicated shower flip-flops, the men’s room shower stall gave me a case of athlete’s foot that took me a year to get rid of.
Oh—and no one told me that there was a problem with the drinking water. I spent three months with a quite-rumbly gut that abated only when a neighbor saw me topping off my tanks one sunny morning and warned me to stop. He pointed to a small photocopied sign on a piling that was nowhere near the water tap. It read: “Not Potable. Do Not Drink.” Welcome to marina life. I referred to my home base as a sort of “floating truck stop.” It was an endurance test of sorts.
A year was enough on the river under the bridge. When friends of mine moved out of their slip in a small, private marina on Back Creek in Annapolis, I moved in in their stead. Gone were the Friday night barbecues at the old marina’s picnic tables, and gone, too, was the plentiful parking and the easy access to Route 50 which took me to my job in Washington DC, four days a week.
I went from being one of several hundred boats to one of about two dozen, four or five of which housed liveaboards like me. We shared one small bathroom that was always clean. We had laundry facilities that didn’t require quarters. From my new home I could walk to town in a matter of minutes. My rent had gone up a bit, but my quality of life had risen along with it, hand in hand.
My marina neighbors became my friends. There was Paul, who was a sailing instructor. His wife was a chef, and she would bring home bottles of wine that were opened but not consumed at catering events and drop one or two off with me as she walked down the docks. Curt was a former Navy sailor but had, upon retirement, moved into the trawler world. He would visit his boat every day, Monday through Friday, tinkering about on it all day long as we boat people often like to do. The little community we formed was tight and felt more like family than not.
And believe me, marina families talk. Once, en route from Annapolis to St. Martin, I pulled into a Norfolk marina for a few nights to visit a friend. As I approached the T-head, every person from that marina who showed up to help tie me off knew who I was, where I had come from, and where I was headed. I felt as if they’d all gotten a dossier on me before I had even arrived. The same wellspring feeds the gossip mill and the help network—the folks who knew me before I managed to toss a bowline off the boat would have shown up with bags of tools and an infinite pool of ideas and suggestions had it been known that I needed help.
As inside any other community there can be rifts, too. You know who habitually forgets their laundry in the washer. You quickly learn who plays music too late or too early, whose dog barks incessantly, and whose boat might leave you with a contact high as you walk by. You have your sovereign space and they have theirs, but there is a veil of privacy that you live collectively behind. There are precious few secrets behind the veil.
Marinas, like people, are all different, of course, but if you’re in one, you know that behind the strange facade lies a community of folks who will form the fabric of your life—entertaining you, frustrating you, and ready to lend you aid at the drop of a hat. Just like family.
By John Herlig
About the author: John Herlig lives aboard his 1967 Rawson cutter Ave del Mar and teaches at Cruisers University. Find him on Substack @jherlig.
