True Colors -- Molly, The Singing Dog

Dog may be a man’s best friend, but dog may also be a woman’s best singing partner. On a Sunday morning in August, a serenade broke out near the Town Dock.

Helen Brown started singing “I’ve been working on the railroad,” but before she got to “all the live long day” Molly, the Jack Russell Terrier she held in her arms, was right there, crooning along for several bars.



Across the street at the Porch of the Bean cheers broke out. And, after the 2 encore performances, so did the score cards. The Porch judges, who usually rate dockings by incoming boats, gave high marks to the Helen and Molly duet.

With 10's and 9's scored, the "6" score came from a judge who thought he was displaying a "9"

Molly is part of the crew of “True Colors” the Manta catamaran that Helen and her husband George have been living on since Easter.

Molly, who is four, has performed in a number of stops along the way.

In Key West, Molly sang in Mallory Square, and Helen says, "people tried to give us money." She also became a favorite among some Bahamian schoolchildren a few months ago in Georgetown. Helen says that one day she was with Molly when a school bus stopped nearby. She couldn’t see in because of the windows darkened to keep out the sun, but from inside she could hear a chorus of voices singing and prompting, “I’ve been working on the railroad….”

So how do you train a dog to sing? Helen says it was nothing particularly special. She says she simply told Molly to sing, and she did, just as she would train a puppy to ‘sit’ on command.

Molly can do a great rendition of "Railroad". If she ever tried her paw at writing songs, they might be about the adjustment to life on board a cruising catamaran after four years of running on acres and acres of land in Northern Virginia. The Browns think she does well going to new places and just being around them, but as much as they’ve tried, they say, one aspect of boat life eludes her. As George puts it, “she has held it for 28 hours” at a time.

It’s also been an eventful few months for Molly. 9 weeks ago, she gave birth to her first – and last – litter of puppies. They sailed from the Bahamas to Florida as the puppies were about to be born – Helen wryly notes that the “wanted to make sure the puppies would be US citizens”. (Ed note: if the mother could sing, it’s never too early to think about Presidential ambitions for the offspring) As it turned out, Molly needed a C-section and the Browns were glad to have found veterinary care for her in Jacksonville.

For a while, “True Colors” carried a crew of two humans, Molly and her four pups. Three have since been given to family members. The remaining pup that was with them when they visited in Oriental didn’t have an official name yet. Helen says two of her granddaughters wanted him named “Patches” and two grandsons were holding out for “Pirate”.

Something nautical may be in order. Helen says that if left loose on the dock, he’s been known to help docking boats, by pulling on the dock lines. But just as his mother has made the adjustment from life as a land dog to life on a boat, Patches/Pirate is about to make the opposite transition.

The Browns were heading north to Annapolis where they planned to give Patches/Pirate to Helen’s father who lives on a farm in Ohio.

After that, Helen, George and Molly, the Singing Dog planned to sail back south in October. They may be taking their time. Helen says she’s interested in seeing more of the US coast. Oriental is a case in point. They’d never stopped in here before, because when they chartered boats on trips there wasn’t time to tuck in to a lot of places. The more leisurely pace of living on the boat allows that now.

The Browns hope to live on the "True Colors" for three years, perhaps sailing to the Mediterranean “as soon as we’re brave enough and good enough.”

In the meantime, perhaps other coastal US communities will be treated to Helen and Molly’s duet. Oriental looks forward to another encore as they pass the time away.

Rock Soup, Anyone?

Most boats that come through Oriental have a name painted somewhere on their hulls. A Tartan 30 that pulled up to the TownDock this summer had a few of them.



At least, she did at one time. There was no name clearly painted on her now, but if you looked closely at the faded red transom you could see the ghosts of several names – and ports of call – from her past.

Drew Swanberg bought the boat this spring in Charleston and has been taking her on what he calls a “shake-down cruise”. He passed by Oriental’s TownDock twice – first in June and then again in early August -- on his way to and from the Chesapeake.





Though the boat carries no name on her hull, Drew has named her. And he has two stories about how she got the name.

The first story he tells is that of the Samurai leader who rolls in to a village and orders people to make a rock soup. As he describes this, Drew takes on the imperious tone of a Samurai, pointing his finger at imaginary villagers. “He said, ’You, over there... you make the fire. And you? You put the water in the pot. And you? You add the rocks.’”

Drew drops the Samurai voice for a moment to explain that on hearing these commands, the villagers question the samurai’s wisdom. Or as Drew put it, “They thought he was bananas."

He continues his story. "The Samurai turned to one villager and said, ‘You must have something at home. What have you got? A little onion? Bring that. And you, two little carrots? Bring ‘em’”

And then, Drew says, "the pot was full and everyone ate. “

Drew says something similar happened to him back on Long Island where he lived much of his life. In the early 90’s he got a little boat. Times had been tough, the economy in a tailspin and previous owners had left a boat that was, he says, “stripped of everything.”

Soon after Drew got the boat, a friend stepped in. “Jeff said to me, ‘Be here Saturday morning.’” Drew says he showed up… and so did many of his friends, all of them bringing him boat parts. “I got a compass. And chain. And rope and everything you need on a boat.”

It was the Rock Soup story playing out near Moriches Bay on Long Island.

That was another boat and not the one that Drew is living on now. But because of his friend playing the role of samurai a dozen years ago, Drew is naming the boat “Rock Soup.”



Although the boat’s name has a very rich background, you won’t see the name anywhere on the boat yet. That’ll have to wait Drew says, until a few months from now, and a full paint job.

“I’m going to go down to Florida to find a ‘work on it yourself boatyard’” There, Drew says, he’ll cover the hull’s dusty red paint with “Ice Blue” (or as he emphasizes it, ‘Ice Ba-Lueeeeeewwww’) Once that’s done, he’ll put the name on her, before heading even more to the south, and the Dominican Republic.

TEVAKE

Chris Boyle is traveling on his boat Tevake this year. It's the first time he’s ventured out on the waters north of Florida.

For the last few years, he’d been living on the Bristol sailboat at a marina in the Florida Keys, but 9/11 and the aftermath led him to cast off the dock lines and travel north. “I haven’t seen a lot of the country by boat,” Chris says “and there are places I wanted to see.” That venture north brought him to Oriental this spring.





His destination: Maine. He hoped to be up in New England long enough to see the change of leaves in the fall, a trick that palm trees back home just can't pull off.

But Chris wasn’t sure if he would make it that long. A few years ago he suffered a shoulder injury –“I fell off a loading dock” – which forced his retirement from the Hollywood, Florida Fire Department.

That injury was still haunting Chris when he stopped at the Town Dock for few days. It was one of those stretches of spring when it was cooler and rainier than usual. The damp and cold made his shoulder worse and he was talking about perhaps cutting short his northern travels.

Two fellow passengers were coping better with the weather. Patty and Knuckles are Chris’ golden retrievers.



Knuckles, Chris says, "knows to go to whatever side of the boat I’m not using… but will be on the sheets I may need. He's a goof." Coming in to anchor Chris says, Knuckles will stride forward on the decks so that “he looks like he’s going to the bow to set the anchor.”

Patty, however, sticks closer to her owner. “She’s at the wheel til I shut off the motor.”

As almost anyone who's lived aboard a boat with a dog can attest, there's one peculiar facet of human behaviour: conversations will eventually get around to The Question: Which is: how do you train a dog to ‘go’ on deck when you’re at sea and taking a walk ashore is not an option?

That line of questioning came up at The Bean one morning and Chris was heard explaining that he trained Patty and Knuckles to go on a plastic welcome mat (“the green one with the plastic ‘grass’ and the daisy in the corner”) that he put forward on the deck. The training worked well. Perhaps too well. Chris found that out when he and the dogs got off the boat one day and visited a relative’s home. There the dogs did as they were trained. Right at the front door, where they found the exact same welcome mat with the green plastic tufts and the daisy in the corner….




At the companionway on Tevake there is no welcome mat (the dogs have since been weaned of that) but there is something we don’t see on many cruising sailboats. Chris says he goes to antique stores and shops and on one trip he found two leaded glass panels. They fit perfectly at companionway doors. (with a harder plexiglass installment on the other side)

The name, Tevake, came with the boat when Chris bought her three years ago. “It’s bad luck to rename,” he says.

The name originates with a famous navigator. But on this trip, Chris hasn’t been navigating far from land but has instead worked his way up the ICW. That may explain why when he arrived in Oriental, some of his herb garden in the cockpit looked to be in good shape. Rosemary in the shape of a small Christmas tree was growing near the aft. He credits fertilizer spikes for their success.

If the plant can make it in this wet and cool summer, here’s hoping Chris can too.