Nat is the co-founder and co-owner of Gannon and Benjamin, makers of wooden boats of the old-school. Pam is his wife, local artist, art teacher, peace activist, and friend of Dear Wife.

For the last 27 years, Nat has been designing and building sailboats for the well-to-do, the rich, the very rich, and the very super mega-rich (and once in a while for the occasional person of normal means). You should check out the gallery of his boats on the G&B website.

Anyway Charlotte is the boat he built for himself. Took four years, sandwiched among work for paying customers.

She's a 55ft gaff-rigged schooner, although you can't tell that yet by looking at her, since the masts have not yet been stepped. (That will be something to see!).

Yesterday morning we awoke to a violent wind and lashing rain. Dear wife and I checked the webcam and our email to see what was going to happen about the 3 PM launch and pot-luck. Would they delay it on account of the monsoon?

But by 2:30 the rain had stopped and by 3:00, when we arrived, the clouds had parted. The place was thronged.  Now, if you look a the webcam, you see to the right of the building a bunch of wooden scaffolding type-thingies. That's the cradle, and yesterday Charlotte was sitting in it. The cradle is mounted on railroad-type rails that go down into the water. The back part of the building is a shed -- meaning, it's open to the weather on the side facing the cradle. A big open area.  That's where they build the boats, and yesterday it was filled with people and tables of food.

What a convocation of the hippies! I knew this island still had a fair number of refugees from the 60's, but I had never seen them (us) all in one place. And not only were there us old folk, but thirty-year old and 40-year-olds and 20-year olds and wee small children, all in ponytails and dredlocks & barefoot & wearing handmade clothes made out of hand-woven cloth, etc, etc. And some not quite so pure hippie, but certainly influenced by the hippie aesthetic.

Among the non-hippies were Tom and Margie Hale, dear friends of ours. Tom, who is 86 or so, is the former owner of the Martha's Vineyard Shipyard, just down the road from G& B. Tom's kind of the eminence grise among boat builders on the island.

So anyway, there was all this milling about, and then Nat got up on a little platform in front of Charlotte (named for his grandmother, btw), and made a little speech (there was a sound system, thank goodness), & then some guy whose name I forget but you don't really care anyway, a boat-lover & president of the Historical Society, gave a 15 minute speech about the maritime history of Martha's Vineyard from 1800 to the present & where Gannon & Benjamin (& Tom Hale & his boatyard) fit into that history, and then a local fellow, a poet, got up and read a very nice poem he had written for the occasion.

I was standing in the back of the shed, by the food. I had gotten separated from Dear Wife, who was standing up near the boat with Tom and Margie, trying to protect them from the swirling masses, as they're pretty ancient. It was too crowded for me to push my way up to join them. Plus, I'm taller than most people, so that would have been rude.

There was lots of beer and wine about, but it was a little early in the day for that, so I was drinking some bubbly water that was horribly flavored with fake raspberry flavor.

So then a youngish guy, friend of Pam's, got up on the stage-thingy and sang Amazing Grace. He was one of only three black people at the affair, and he was dressed in stereotypic urban black-guy outfit, big giant chain around his neck and all. He had come up from North Carolina special just for the launch.

Nat had started out by saying, "I know I can't talk long, because I'm working against a falling tide and you people want to eat."

But you cannot have a hippie gala on Martha's Vineyard without you have Kate Taylor there to sing a song, so she sang a song she had written for the occasion and tried to get us all to sing-along the refrain "Godspeed Charlotte" but I mostly don't do singalongs, so I got a little plate of food. It sounded nice, though.

And then a preacher got up and said a blessing.

It was starting to drag on a bit. More than an hour. The tide was getting lower and lower.

And then Nat got up and thanked by name every single person who had worked on the boat. And then Pam got up, and called up all her grandchildren, who are cute little rugrats all under 5. It took a while to locate them all, and then a little more time to coax them onto the platform, but eventually they got themselves organized, and they christened the boat with water from the five "Great Ponds" off Martha's Vineyard, splashed from children's buckets.

Somebody hollered "Hey Pam, how about putting some water under the damn keel already!"

Eventually after some milling about, Pam and Nat and their hippie daughters and dreadlocked sons-in-law and little barefoot hippie grandchildren climbed up the ladder onto the deck, and then the ladder was taken down, and then the winch was engaged, and slowly, slowly, slowly, the cradle rolled down the rails until finally the boat was floating free in the water, to much cheering and whooping, and many boats were in the harbor waiting for her, and they fired cannons (what sounded like cannons anyway, with lots of smoke).

With Charlotte in the water there was much more room for milling about, and I was able to connect with Dear Wife, who was dismayed to find that all the food had been eaten up during the hour and a half of speechmaking & singing & so forth.

So, we spent half an hour chatting with friends and looking around the cool boat shop at the cool old tools and so forth, and then we left.

And we went down to the beer store and then to the grocery and the video store, and then I said, now let's go see that boat!

So we went back and the party was still going on, but with maybe 1/3 the original crowd, and a bluegrass band was playing.  It was now after 5 PM so I asked Dear Wife Betty if I should get her a beer but it was all gone!

However, Charlotte was tied up at the end of the dock, and visitors were getting on and off. We waked down and took off our shoes and hopped on. Nat and Pam were on it & all their grandkids were running around, and the sun was shining. And the black kid from North Carolina was there, with his mother. Turns out he's a grad student in Library Science, a subject that I found out he is extremely, extremely passionate about. He's a Bill Gates Scholar, and boy is he earnest! I think perhaps too earnest to be a hippie, but he'll make a good library director some day, I have no doubt. (Plus, he's a great singer!) Betty and Pam were hugging and laughing and everything was beautiful and serene as the sun was getting ready to set.

There was a small pontoon airplane tied up next to the boat, and it started is engine and pulled out into the open water. Pam said, waving to the pilot, "That's ___. He's our sailmaker. Flew in from Mataket. Said it took him ten minutes."

Oh my goodness what a beautiful thing that boat is. All the woodworking and planking, each board carved and shaped, 15 different kinds of wood, each selected for a specific purpose. A true work of art, built by a craftsman at the peak of his powers. Wow, what a thing.

So we were hanging out and talking when suddenly there was a buzzing overhead, and here comes the sailmaker, flying  in low, literally amid the masts of the boats in the harbor, and he tips his wing and flies by Charlotte about 15 feet off the ground, flying sideways between the boat and the boatshed; then he righted and aimed towards the Cape at a reasonable altitude. Everybody laughed and waved and cheered. A fitting salute, we all agreed.

We asked Pam about her sailing plans and she said after Charlotte was rigged they were going to take her out for a day or two, proably overnight on the Elizabeth Islands.

I said, "No, no. When are you going to take her on the ocean? Bermuda or Greece or Scotland?"

"Oh, we haven't decided yet," she said. "But we'll probably take her down to the Carribbean next winter."

Well, I've never been much of a sailing man, although I have greatly enjoyed a day cruise with iGrrrl and her family from this very harbor. But after yesterday I'm trying to figure out how to come up with a few million bucks to build me one of those so I can be an ocean-going carefree barefoot hippie too.