The Detour was moored ahead of what turned out to be Harry’s boat. Faded lettering was stencilled on her bow and read “Linnea.” Her deck was a tangled mess of rusting, commercial fishing antiquity. Typical of retired North Coast vessels, she had decayed into a dock disaster through lack of maintenance and use. She had once been a one-lunger — a combination troller and gill-netter — but today her peeling cabin paint and barnacle-encrusted hull was a faded version of herself. She was overdue for the graveyard. If she were moored anywhere else on the coast, that old grey lady would have already been condemned by several arms of the paper-pushers in government, the sentence to be towed out to sea and scuttled.
It’s probably only the mooring ropes are keeping her off the bottom, anyway.
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