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“It’s a crazy life we got.”

David Moore says this at one point in our conversation in the cockpit of Nantascot, the boat that he and his wife, Virginia Wilcox, had tied up to the Town Dock in late August.

The Joshua Slocum “Spray”-inspired boat is 28 feet 9 inches and 8 tons of very bright yellow steel. That alone would be worthy of a story. But it comes with stories about other boats in David’s past. One small. And one very, very big one.

“Nantascot”

Before we even had a chance to talk about the unusual-looking “Nantascot”, Virginia was saying that it wasn’t as exotic as David’s previous boat. That would be “Tean”, the one he lived on for 7 years and sailed three times across the Atlantic, before it met its end in the South Pacific.

“It was made of wood. 25 feet long. No engine,” Virginia starts. “It had a broken rig for the 5-1/2 months after he left Panama. He put in at Rarotonga in the Cook Islands. He didn’t want to ask for directions. He hit a reef. It sank.”

“So, he built this one out of steel so he could go back and ram that reef.”

Virginia Wilcox enjoys telling the story. David laughs often through it. The sinking happened in 1996, a few years before they met on Cape Cod.

David Moore and Virginia Wilcox.

Massachusetts is where David went after his boat went up on the reef. Well, actually, it wasn’t quite as simple as that. Massachusetts is where David went after scraping together fare from the remains of his boat and that task was more difficult that you might imagine, because he wasn’t the only one picking thru the wreckage of “Tean.”

He says that as high tide covered his boat, he went to shore and later from there, watched as other people wielding crowbars scavenged, and “pinched stuff off the boat.” He managed to get himself a “couple little things” to sell and pay for his trip back to Massachusetts. He traveled very light on that flight. All of his possessions fit in to “a little hand bag.” He speaks of it with no hint of regret. It was, he says, “a good cleaning act.”

The cockpit area of “Nantascot”.

A native of Weymouth, England, David had first sailed to Weymouth, Massacusetts a few years earlier, and wound up in the nearby town of Hull. Post-Cook Islands, he went there again, supporting himself by making pen and ink drawings. Selling them is how he met Virginia, a native of Missouri who had lived in East Africa before moving to Massachusetts.

“She bought one of my calendars and got more than she bargained for.”

One day, over a cup of coffee, he laid out his plan. “I’m gonna build a boat and go around the world. Want to go?” David grins at the story. Like Virginia, he laughs and smiles a lot (and in doing so, flashes a front tooth with an anchor cap.)

Smiling at anchor.

David says he found a boat that was “half finished by a guy in his back garden.” He worked on it in Hull, out in the open. Having no workshop meant digging thru snow to get to the boat when he wanted to work in the winter. He also didn’t have much in the way of power tools. Just, he says, “a bag of handtools.”

With a stick welder he redid a lot of the existing welds and then added more as he modified the Spray design, most notably by adding a pilothouse. It too, was made of steel, and as you navigate toward the cabin down below, both Virginia and David repeatedly issue warnings. In American and British variations you hear a lot of, “Watch your head.” “Mind your head.” Standing up too soon, say these voices of experience, “can hurt like mad”.

Virginia and David.

By their description, “Nantascot” has “a lot of recycled stuff.” Windows in the pilothouse did previous service on a Mitsubishi truck. The steering gears feature four bike chains. Down below the hot water is held in a five gallon Coca Cola stainless steel tank that David says ‘“came off the dump.” The shower features a small tub. (”$10 out of an RV,” he laughs.)

The Coca-Cola tank put to a new purpose — hot water tank. At lower left you can see part of the square bathtub/shower area.

The cabin’s flooring is laid with “chopped up bits, off-cuts” of parquet and wood from flooring jobs on land. The v-berth (that converts to a couch David designed) sits behind a solid teak door that was scavenged from a Lancer. (That boat, David says, is now in the Hingham dump. At first, he had shown up at the dump with the boat on a trailer, and was told he couldn’t leave it there. So David went back home, he says, cut the boat into one foot pieces, then returned to the dump where the pieces are now interred.)

Forward on “Nantascot”, Virginia near the door (from another boat) and the v-berth that converts to a settee. “Isn’t it fun?” she says, calling her boat, “The Little Boat That Could.”

Into the engine room on Page 2 of Nanascot >>>

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Posted Friday September 12, 2008 by Melinda Penkava

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