Richard Senneville is a sailor.

When I was 18, I didn’t have much money to my name. My family went through some rough financial patches and I used to scrounge for aluminum cans. I wasn’t going to be able to afford to go to college, but I wanted to do something. I had $2,000 that I’d saved up from working at a Boy Scout camp and other odd jobs. I knew boats can be really cheap, if you know what you’re looking for, and I’d learned how to sail when I was pretty young. I’d sailed a fair bit in middle-of-nowhere Maine on little dorys. So I went to one of my friends and I was like, “Dude, what if we did something really dumb and bought a cheap boat?” It’s become more and more clear to me that there’s nothing more expensive than a cheap boat.

We started to rope more and more people into it. It ended up being a total of five of us. We traveled all over New England trying to find the right boat. We wanted to take it all the way from New England to the Bahamas, or further if we could get it. We wanted something durable and reliable, which is very funny given what we ended up getting. We found this boat in Quincy, Massachusetts. It was a Crealock Tahiti Ketch made in 1970, the fiberglass layup of an even older style from the ‘20s called Tahiti Ketches. It was a very old-school boat, not far removed from the type used by Joshua Slocum, the first guy to sail solo around the world. It had a tiller that you push back or side to side to turn. It was a full keel, which means it doesn't have a keel that goes deep in the water, so it tends to heel and tip over a lot. It didn't matter what the wind was, we would be rails in the water. There would be water coming up over the sides and onto part of the deck every single time we sailed.

After we closed the sale on it, we snuck into the boatyard near Quincy at night because we all had jobs and couldn’t get there during the daytime. We would throw a travel blanket over this barbed wire and hop the fence to work on it with flashlights. We wanted to get it ready to move. We must have worked on it for a year and a half, fixing up the mast, hoping we could get the engine running. I swear at least twice that engine was fully disassembled and reassembled. We had a local engine guy working on this thing with us that we paid in beer, but we never got it running. It came with this old wooden dinghy, beautiful little thing. We put a board through and bolted it into place in order to put an outboard engine on the side of this wooden rowing dinghy. We were antsy to get this thing in the water and we said, “Fuck it, we’re gonna get this thing going.” The dinghy towed the 32-foot boat when we couldn’t get enough wind in its sails. We made it work.

We were hoping to go south, but there was no way in hell we were going to make it very far. We ended up exploring the Boston Harbor Islands, sneaking in and checking out abandoned forts. From there, we sailed north from Gloucester. I remember that day very clearly because it was beautiful big rolling ocean waves that were tall, but steady and smooth. You could sit out there and feel this deep rhythm beneath you. 

We made it through the Cape Ann Canal, somehow, and ended up at this place called Newburyport. It’s the outlet of the Merrimack River where it passes through this narrow channel that leads into the open ocean. When the tide is going out, it meets the current and the waves. It combines to make this very shallow area with big standing waves. If we had been any amount less lucky, if the wind wasn’t coming from the right direction, or if we had a normal keel on our boat, we would have been screwed. We didn’t know how sketchy and dangerous this was going to be. The wind was coming from directly behind us, so we could put our sails full out, wing on wing, and power our way through these big standing waves, surfing our boat through them.

We ended up at this tiny yacht club. We knew we were supposed to pay for the moorings, but we figured we’ll be here for a couple of days and nobody would notice us. The yacht club definitely noticed. At first, it wasn’t an issue because the commodore of this club was a really nice guy. We didn’t have the money to pay 20 dollars a night to stay on these moorings, but he turned a blind eye. He ended up driving a couple of us to pick up groceries, and people in the town were pretty cool. One guy gave us free motor oil for our tiny two-stroke gasoline dinghy engine. We were able to go into the yacht club a couple of times to shower, because we couldn't do that on this tiny little boat with our limited amount of freshwater. 

Because of the conditions in that area, without an engine, without the wind and the tides, we were stuck. We would go into town busking, singing folk songs and sea shanties. We made a bunch of money busking one day, so we decided to get ourselves a big meal at this Indian place. By the time we got back to the yacht club, they were running a meeting. The people running the place were great, but everyone else in the meeting got pissed at the smelly, gross, begging, crusty kids stealing one of the moorings. The guy tried to argue for us, apparently, but they ended up voting to kick us out. They were like, “Never come back.”

Thankfully, by that point, the wind lined up right. We had tried getting out a couple of times using the tiny two-and-a-half horsepower dinghy engine, but we couldn’t fight the currents. We were able to get a bit of a beam reach out and fully power up our sails. We hit the slack tide at the right time and got ourselves the hell out of there. It was a hell of a lesson, and the first time we proved ourselves to be willing to beg, steal, and barter our way through.

We turned north towards Portsmouth. It was kind of a shit day, but it was still good sailing and we were all done up in our foul-weather gear. We ended up getting caught, a lobster pot fouled our rudder. So we're dragging this lobster pot along. We put our dinghy in the water and I had to crawl down into it and lash a folding saw to the end of a boat hook in order to cut one of the buoys off of this lobster pot. 

We still couldn't get our engine working, but we were hoping eventually to get into Portland to find a mechanic who might be able to help us. We figured we had chased it down to the last few couple things. Maybe we’d need to rebore our cylinders or fix our fuel injectors. Some pretty major expenses, but we can busk enough to get it all fixed. We pulled into Portland and paid to stay at this marina in the center. Here's the key: They don't change the codes on things very often at marinas, so we stayed for one night to get the codes to the gates.

We hopped around the harbor trying to find someplace comfortable because we knew we were going to be there for a while. We found this place that appeared to be a marina, but there weren't very many people there, there were only a few other liveaboards there. We pulled in and there was nobody at this low gate with a fence. We found out from the liveaboards that this thing had been sold to another Marina, but because it was in transition nobody had come around for that year. So we hit the fucking jackpot. There’s a water hookup, there’s electricity, there was good cell signal. A couple of us had 5G so we set up a little Wi-Fi hotspot and downloaded some movies. It was this godsend.

One day, we're hanging out on this dock with a couple of the other liveaboards and we saw a fucking Viking longship. I am not making this up. This Viking longship turned the corner and started pulling into the harbor. We were wiping our eyes for a moment looking at the ship. There’s tall ships, there’s schooners, and the occasional, rare, square-rigged ship, but never before in my life have I seen a fucking Viking longship. They lowered their sail. Holy shit. We’re not just seeing things. This isn’t a mirage. We figure it’s going into one of the big slips in the middle of the harbor, but it starts to get closer and closer. We’re joking, “Wouldn't it be funny if it pulled up to our dock? It'd be hilarious. No way in hell.” Eventually, we realized, “Fuck. It is coming to our dock.” It's definitely pulling right out there, lining up. 

We all run down to the end of this abandoned dock and catch these big mooring lines for them, these big hemp cables. We’re like, “What’s going on?” The crew told us they were the Draken Harald Hårfagre, doing a tour of the East Coast. They ended up being our dock mate for a couple of days. We made friends with this guy in town who ran a Scandinavian import shop. He gave us tickets to go on board because we didn't really have the money to pay for tickets to get a tour of this boat. 

I went on board and I asked some kind of tricky questions about sailing it, like, "So how do you fuckin tack this thing? How do you even raise the sail?" because it’s such a weird ship. Eventually, they were like, “You know about sailing, don't you?” I was like, “Yeah, I live on that boat over there.” They’re like, “You should hang out with us. And we need crew. You want to join?” I went back and spoke with my friends. We all said, “Hell yeah.” It could not get any more like authentic 1800s sailor shit. The only way it could have gotten more old school was if we signed our names on a compact with a quill and ink.

Two weeks later, I found myself hitching down to join this boat in Ocean City. We immediately got set to work on this Viking longship, tarring hemp cables and lines. It’s all natural fiber, so you gotta constantly be on top of upkeep and care. We were heating up pine tar and coating all of the lines with it. I brought a big yellow dry bag with me because they told me there's no real storage space on this boat. “Put your shit in a dry bag, or else it’s gonna get soaked.” I did try to bring a pillow with me, but they're like, “No, you don't get a pillow. There's no place to put a pillow.” There's no below deck to speak of, just two wooden framed canvas tents. One that has a galley for cooking food for the crew, and four big shared bunks. We'd all sleep together on one rack, so when it’s time to wake up, you tap everyone’s foot on the end of the rack. The other tent was just engineering space, tools and equipment and access to some machinery for the boat. That's it.

Everyone hated Ocean City. We called it Ocean Shitty. Such a fake place, but they did tip well. One night, just before we left, we decided to give the cooks a break and got a shitload of pizza and beer. We ran through all the beer, because it wasn't that much for a crew of 30. The captain's wife came on board, a little old hunched over woman, very Scandinavian, very thick Swedish accent, kind of quiet. She came up to us with this half-drank bottle of whiskey as we're hanging around sipping the last dregs of beer and she's like, “What are you doing? It’s time. It’s time for the drinking!” The watch leaders of our boat, people who had serious sailing experience, on her encouragement went to the captain's cabinet. These were like miniature bear barrels stored under the wooden boards that sit atop the ribs in the ship’s frame. They pried a couple of these things open and they had a bunch of liquor inside of them, because this ship was sponsored by Highland Park Whisky. We drank almost all of the booze in there. One guy had an extra bottle of rum. We got ripshit that night. Thankfully, none of us low crew members got in trouble, but I know the watch leaders got thoroughly chewed out. Most of the drinking would be done ashore after that.

Our boat had stayed up in Portland. It blended in well with some other abandoned boats there. We had a good firm hold on the bottom with our anchor and a lot of chain out. We trusted it. My friend Cormac, who put the biggest stake into this boat, ended up living on it for years afterwards.

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