Scroll down for more photos of the boat that’s for sale which had me remembering a great read. Excerpted quotes are from the superb young adult book, Driftwood Captain, from 1956 by Paul B Kenyon, a writer and Gloucester Daily Times columnist and editor, with illustrations by Louise Kenyon, folly cove artist. The book is dedicated to their sons.  I guarantee explorers young and old will be inspired to seek treasure and adventure all about them and persist. Kids you know will want to befriend characters so real they jump off the page and grab your heart. Sometimes authors get in the way of their own writing, especially with children’s books, trying too hard and overwriting the kid’s perspective. Not Kenyon. Boy is he a timeless ease. You can find the book at Cape Ann Museum and local book stores.

“…But Pete had the faith of a twelve-year-old in his sailing skill and in his flighty boat, a hunk of a fisherman’s dory. He had been sailing in Lobster Cove since he graduated from floating logs. He knew the breezes and currents and even the ways that certain boats swung at each other. He would put on dark glasses to shield his eyes from the angry glare of visiting yachtsmen, and sail close to the boats of his customers so that he could toss folded newspapers into cockpits and cabins. He was a seagoing paperboy…

“He’d rather have the old hull lying on shore, tied to a tree just above the bridge. He liked her rugged looks and her air of being what Gloucester men called “able.”

“The old hull reminded Pete of the famous sloop Spray, Captain Joshua Slocum rebuilt the Spray, timber by timber and sailed her around the world singlehanded, after he finished fitting out at Gloucester. The Spray was thirty six feet long, not counting her bowsprit. She had a lot of room for a boat of her length. So had the hold hull that had lain unused for years. That’s where Pete had begun the daydream that had led to the Hunkadory-Harbor-Queen argument. Pete wondered why his family did not share his fondness for the hull. Pappy Leonard talked a lot about getting a boat big enough for cruising along the coast.

Here was a boat in the rough, just the right size…” 

1959 Lyman boat for sale as is, dry dock @ Shaw’s shopping center, Gloucester, Mass,