Long may your big jib draw
DELAPS COVE, NS – Colin Sproul probably won’t be running rum to the United States. And he won’t be channeling the ghost of Captain Jack Randell and defying the United States Coast Guard.
But he’s got a big boat named after Randell’s famous rum-running schooner ‘I’m Alone’ and a penchant for history – including the days when Nova Scotia was notorious for delivering ship loads of illegal liquor to the Boston states during Prohibition.
“I’m a history geek,” he said. “I was kind of obsessed for a while with the days of wooden ships and iron men.”
April 3, 2021 the tide came in at Delaps Cove late in the day and Sproul’s new 60-ton lobster boat floated off the trailer and made history as the big diesel engine rumbled and she eased over to the wharf on glassy water. First new fishing boat built here in more than half a century.
It seems like everybody is here to watch ‘I’m Alone 21’ float into history. They came from miles away. Old men with gnarled hands and weathered faces stand silently. Knowing nods. They’ve seen this before. Gawking youngsters haven’t. Cars and pickup trucks crowd the wharf. More vehicles line the tiny road that snakes steeply down to the water.
BOAT BUILDING
“I’m a fifth generation lobster fisherman, and now a boat builder, in Delaps Cove, Nova Scotia,” Sproul says. “We’ve just launched our families’ new lobster boat that we built here in Delaps Cove. And it’s the first boat built in Delaps Cove for more than 60 years and the first boat built on the Bay Shore in 33 years.”
He’s standing in the crew’s quarters. Six bunks in a V formation deep in the bow of the vessel. She’s floating high above the water line waiting for fuel and seawater ballast to bring her down and make her stable.
“We’re really excited to be bringing boat building back to where it all began,” says Sproul, who with his brother David and a crew of friends and relatives, built the boat. “The Bay Shore here in Annapolis County has the longest history of boat building in North America and it’s been a ship-building centre.”
Delaps Cove was founded by a man from Granville Ferry named Laurence Delap who came there because he’d exhausted the lumber supply on the south side of the mountain, Sproul says. “So we’re really proud to be carrying on his tradition here again.”
THE BOAT
“It’s a 60-ton lobster boat 50 feet long and 27 feet wide,” he says. “It’s 59.99 tons.”
The original ‘I’m Alone’, the schooner sunk by the US Coast Guard on March 22, 1929, had a 27-foot beam as well, but was 205 tons and 75 feet longer than its lobster boat namesake.
“We’re going to go lobster fishing with it in the Bay of Fundy,” says Sproul. “And we’re also going to fish for halibut.”
No mention of rum.
The sleek composite hull shines a deep blue and sports both the Nova Scotia and Canada flags on both sides of the bow – with a giant ‘S’ on the stem. That stands for the two Sproul families that came together to make it a reality.
“There’s been a long tradition in these fishing communities and boat building communities of a boat launch being a major community event,” says Sproul. “I remember being a little kid myself back in 1987 when my friend’s dad launched his boat at Parkers Cove wharf. The whole school was let out to come down and watch the boat launch.”
Sproul couldn’t stop the nostalgia from welling up in the days leading to the April 3 launch.
“I found myself yesterday thinking about it all day long and wondering if it was going to put the same memories in my son’s and in my nephew’s heads 30 years from now. I hope it does. I hope 30 years from now they’re still here building boats on the Bay Shore.”
Photo: Lawrence Powell
SOME SETBACKS
A global pandemic slowed progress at the new Delaps Cove boat shop.
“We shut down. We had employees who had compromised immune systems and lung conditions,” says Sproul. “So we shut down building boats for four months.”
And while health of his workers was his top concern, getting materials was the biggest issue.
“The real killer was, for us in business, was the slowdown in the world economic chain and not being able to source supplies from Asia or source supplies from the US,” he says. “It really, really slowed us down and just put a drag on the boat building.”
Despite the delays, they did finish. The boat gleams in the sun. It’s almost as wide as the channel out to the Bay of Fundy.
“We were successful and we feel like we have a really good product,” says Sproul. “We would say the proof is in the pudding because we already have a contract to build another new boat. We’re very happy about that.”
DOWN THE SHORE
A scant dozen kilometres away, directly across the North Mountain from Delaps Cove, is Port Royal, where Samuel de Champlain and Pierre Dugua de Mons established the first permanent European settlement in what would become Canada.
Down the shore are places like Culloden, Dark Cove, Awkward Cove, Long Island. Brier Island where Joshua Slocum, the first person to circumnavigate the globe alone, spent much of his youth. Round the tip of Brier Island and sail across the mouth of St. Mary’s Bay and you come to Smugglers Cove. There’s a history here that has pitted brave and adventuresome men and women against the sea.
This all happened a year ago – the launch, the sea trials, the rigging. But it was a day few will forget. Sproul would like to think some of those youngsters watching that sunny April day will grab hold of that boat-building tradition and carry it on. He did.
Local resident Ken Maher was one of the many people who watched the new boat slide into the water.
“Long may your big jib draw,” he said.
From the journalism of Lawrence Powell