THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 30, 1995 TAG: 9507280212
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Random Rambles
SOURCE: Tony Stein
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines
There's one good thing you can say about barnacles: They're democratic.
Barnacles don't care if you are at the helm of a million-dollar yacht or the tiller of an over-age little sport fisher. They will foul the bottom of your boat. Barnacles thrive in warm saltwater with a low flow rate and you had better fight them with coatings of special paint.
I learned all that from William Hull and James Taylor. Hull is president of Atlantic Yacht Basin and Taylor is vice president and general manager. Yes, there is a James Taylor who is a singer, but not this one. Definitely not. ``If I sang,'' he says, ``the customers would run.''
Actually, they wouldn't run. They'd float. The basin is a full-service garage and body shop for yachts, a place that Hull and Taylor say can do just about anything to a boat that needs to be done. Except make the payments. That's still your job.
The yard is hard by the Chesapeake and Albemarle Canal in Great Bridge. It's been there since 1936, when it was founded by Hull's father-in-law, Dunwody Atkinson. Hull graduated from Norfolk's Granby High in 1952 and the Naval Academy in Annapolis in 1956. He chose service in the nuclear Navy and that meant he had to survive one of those legendary interviews with Adm. Hyman Rickover.
Rickover, the cranky genius known as the father of the nuclear Navy, used to screen every hopeful officer face-to-face.
``It was very one-sided,'' Hull remembers. ``He was very assertive. He would ask a question and, if you started to answer, he would cut you off. He just wanted to see how you held up under pressure.''
By 1964, Hull says, he was tired of going to sea, and he resigned his commission to come aboard the yacht basin. But he confirmed for me something that other Navy veterans had said. It was that real coffee, the kind of coffee that could kick-start an Egyptian mummy, must be made with water from the boiler of a destroyer. ``I've had many a cup,'' Hull said with a certain nostalgia in his tone.
Taylor is a North Carolina native who grew up along the Pasquotank River. He came to the yard 28 years ago and worked his way up from mechanic to foreman to assistant yard superintendent to superintendent to the job he holds now.
Besides being a garage, the yacht basin is kind of a hotel. Birds aren't the only critters who migrate. Lots of boat owners do, too. The Chesapeake and Albemarle Canal is part of a soggy super highway from here to Florida. Folks traveling back and forth make the basin a frequent stop.
``You can almost set your clock by them,'' Hull says. ``They come every year at the same time. And we see people who have never owned a home. They live aboard their boats.''
These ``boat people'' are frequent customers at stores like Great Bridge Pharmacy and Cooke Hardware. ``You can tell them,'' says Robert Cooke. ``They have weathered skin, backpacks and little, tiny fold-up bicycles.''
The yacht basin also serves as a regional refuge when hurricane winds threaten. It's a safe haven, Hull says, well protected by its location and shield of trees. Hull can tell you first-hand about hurricanes or their Pacific Ocean equivalent, typhoons. His ship, the destroyer USS Wiltsie, took a battering from a couple back in the late 1950s.
``It was bobbing around and we were being thrown against the bulkheads,'' Hull says. ``Some people even strapped themselves in their bunks.''
But the basin mostly repairs and refurbishes boats. Lots of refurbishing. Boat owners can be downright emotional about their craft. ``Every one of them wants his boat to shine,'' Hull says. The sea-going phrase is ``Bristol fashion.'' That means everything is gleaming and absolutely shipshape. It's a term that originated in the 1800s at the British seaport of Bristol.
The basin has seen them all, Hull says - from $10 million yachts to homemade vessels of concrete and chicken wire. There's a Chinese junk from Norfolk. There was a retired Episcopal priest's boat with overstuffed chairs in the cabin and a style like a comfortable parsonage living room. There have been two boat-owning brothers and their friend who for years have had an on-going competition, each to keep his boat just a tad nicer than the others.
However, not everything boat owners covet is lily-gilding. The yard has been installing a navigational gadget that uses satellite guidance to pinpoint exactly where you are on the whole humongous ocean. Hey, I could use one myself. I am a total landlubber with a sense of direction so bad that I lose my rubber ducky in the tub. by CNB