This is a continuation of my attempt to figure out what the East Boothbay shipyard guys were carrying in 1951, as laid out in the prior article. I knew Bob Dighton worked off and on at Goudy & Stevens for many decades, so off I went toward Back Narrows to see him in 2007.

Bob Dighton

Bob started at Goudy’s in 1951 at 75 cents an hour on Steve Sawyer's caulking crew, partnering with Gus Tibbetts—one holding the caulking iron, the other—the beetler—swinging the mallet. Bob was either working on the minesweepers or was up in the caulking room in the building just south of the bridge spinning the oakum into a continuous strand. And retired years later he was a great help to me.

Bob thought the image showed the men carrying a rigged yacht mast. Goudy's was limited space-wise; while the yard had a gentle incline very near the water, the ground rose sharply toward Church Street. Riding your bike down the steep back drive into the yard was a carefully thought-out process, at least for those of us who never broke any bones. The topography, much covered with buildings, left little room for mast storage—much of the yard near the water was made land.

Bob said that when the yard took masts out of boats, they usually took them to Hodgdons to mothball them, where there was an area rigged up to store them on horses with tarps to keep the weather off. Of course much of that was made land also—well before the government clamped down on the unchecked filling that went on to gain free land. The water used to lap at back yards on Lincoln Street.

Goudy's stored a number of smallish boats on dry, useable land. But yachts over 50 feet were put up in wet storage—in other words, in the Damariscotta River. Bob explained that while the big ones could be hauled on the railway, they were too big to be taken off the railway and stored on a cradle. The mast was removed from those yachts when hauled, and then they were relaunched and put on moorings and covered for the winter with canvas or some kind of flexible material. There were often four or five of them just off the yard in the river. If a launching was to occur, they'd be moved out of the way temporarily.

Malabar XIII?

It all made sense—that masts were carried back and forth seasonally from Goudy's to Hodgdon's. Except if the date on the photo was right, the mast was coming out of storage in October when normally the men would be carrying it the other way, into the old Hodgdon yard on the other side of the bridge to store. So I looked at Goudy-built ketches. They built only three before 1951: the 55-foot Keok in 1928, designer John Alden's 53-foot Malabar XIII in 1945, and his Quail in 1948.

I thought there was no way to surmise which unseen ketch awaited the mast, but then I remembered a story shipyard boss Jim Stevens told me. It had been hard to build Malabar XIII, the last of Alden's Malabars (that she's the last is disputed by strict constructionists), because of firm wartime rules. The military had first choice of all metal. For instance, many metal fittings, such as turnbuckles, keels, etc. were unavailable and were recycled from Andiamo, a Herreshoff 50 cannibalized for Malabar XIII. One year Malabar XIII ran in the Bermuda race, then crossed the Atlantic in the Havana, Cuba-to-San Sebastian, Spain race, then went on to the Fastnet race in England.

One of those turnbuckles let go in the Fastnet race, and she was dismasted. I started speculating that she was brought back to Goudy's eventually for repair, and the theory looks good, since I found online that those races took place in the summer of 1951. I like the mast as Malabar XIII's, and maybe someone can confirm or refute that. It would be good to know for sure. Unfortunately, no one confirmed or refuted in 2007. So steam crane part? Long mast?

The further away I get over the years from my 1950s childhood in this shipyard village of East Boothbay the luckier I feel for having grown up here. And the harder it becomes to definitively nail down what happened when.