Stories From An Old Dory In Gansett
Bennett boats considered artifacts
 Morgan McGivern |
(4/10/2008) With a fallen oak crushing its starboard side and with its tamarack knees — the right-angled braces Tom Bennett had fashioned from trees — starting to bond with the ground behind Stuart’s Fish Market, it was as if the old wooden dory were taking root, returning itself to the soil of Amagansett.
Not a bad way to go for a dory built around 1890 and used by Amagansett fishermen over the course of 100 years, but not, members of the East End Classic Boat Society decided, before the dory has a chance to tell its story and before a replica can be built.
Last week, the Bennett dory, most recently owned by Stuart Vorpahl, was carefully lifted onto a flatbed trailer and taken to the society’s boat shop beside the Town Marine Museum on Bluff Road in Amagansett.
What happens next might be described as an exercise in maritime forensics. The dory will be examined thoroughly, her parts documented, her lines lofted — copied and checked for accuracy using photographs, boatbuilding standards, and mathematics. Pat Mundus, a society member, will be preparing the dory’s oral history. She said the physical record, when combined with the history, will “establish the boat accurately in its historical context.”
Ms. Mundus described Tom Bennett as an all-around craftsman who, in the late 19th century, “cranked out skiffs” for fishing and gunning. The East End boat society cut its archiving teeth on another Bennett boat, a sharpie: “For us, these Bennett boats are considered solely as artifacts,” Ms. Mundus said.
“Historically, any boat is always an empirical product — a perfect representation of the service the boat was put to in its era. And therefore the boats that preceded the one before teach us something about the one we’re building anew. A design doesn’t just appear, it springs from the demands of its period. Of course we’re talking about real boats here, not factory pop-outs.”
It’s hard to think of a boat more authentic than one built for the near-shore whale fishery that was alive and well when Mr. Vorpahl’s dory was crafted by Mr. Bennett.
 East Hampton Star Archives |
“He built it, that one, for Capt. Gabe Edwards, and another for [his brother] Capt. Clint Edwards around 1890. Captain Clint’s had a wider stern than mine,” said Stuart Vorpahl, the dory’s present owner. Mr. Vorpahl said he was convinced it was built, at least in part, to be used in the Amagansett near-shore whale fishery because it had a step forward for a mast and sail. Both men were whalers.
“It had a notch in the original transom for a steering oar and oar locks for three sets of oars. That was for whaling too.” The last adult whale taken from the shore by an East End crew was killed off Amagansett in 1907.
Milton Miller began fishing with the Edwardses at the age of 14. He is 93, living in Florida, and remembers the dory well:
“That was a big dory, one of the biggest they built. I was a kid. Grew up with Captain Gabe. I lived across the street from the Amagansett Coast Guard station. He had a shanty and boathouse there. They used that dory for every type of fishing when boats were rowed by hand, before the Jersey skiffs with marine engines. That’s an old boat,” he said.
“I fished with Captain Gabe when I was 14 years old,” he recalled, “and Captain Clint — the only two ex-whalers that kept fish shanties off the beach. Captain Clint, he sort of brought me up. He didn’t have no son. The Edwards family was family to me. I didn’t row that one because that was a three-man dory. That’s a big dory.”
“It was used for cod and sturgeon fishing. There were three or four crews back then. It was built for carrying a lot of weight. The ones for gillnettin’ and haulseinin’ were smaller, about 16 feet.”
Mr. Miller said that by the time he began fishing in 1929, the dory had been in storage for years. “I’ll tell you now, all the while it fished for Captain Gabe, she was just like the day she was built. He made a special boathouse for her. I fished his nets for him in a smaller boat. It got to the point they hadn’t used that boat.”
“There wasn’t any sturgeon and cod fishin’ left, but them old whalers wanted to be on the beach. Captain Clint, Gabe, and Captain Posey [Nathan Talmage Lester] were the last on the beach. Everything moved to Montauk, let’s say that. After they moved the train to Montauk [in 1895] they could get more fishin’ in there and they didn’t have to risk their lives in the surf.”
Rob Barker, a former resident of Amagansett, is a member of the boat society and a boat builder who apprenticed to John Gardner, who kept century-old boat-building skills alive through his teaching and writing. Mr. Barker, who is considered a guru in the world of small traditional craft construction, was drawn to the old dory many years ago.
“It’s got all the elements of a classic dory; flat on the bottom, transom tall and narrow, not as narrow as a classic Banks dory, planked vertically, a large rake to the stem, quite a bit of sheer — a consequence of using more or less straight boards.”
“It was in back of the Stuart’s [fish market] freezer. I looked at that boat 20 years ago when I first became interested in wooden dories. I went over to it and took notes, and a photo. It had been sitting there a long time.”
“Originally it had ‘grown frames,’ knees taken up the sides [from bottom to side] as one piece. The knees were made of hackmatack, also called tamarack, or eastern larch. When the tree goes into the ground, the roots go out horizontally, the grain going 90 degrees making for strong braces, particularly well with dories.”
The 19-foot-long dory was built using the lapstrake method of overlapping cedar planks on an oak frame. Mr. Barker said the boat has copper rivets holding the laps. “It would have been expensive. Usually they used galvanized clench nails.” Another distinguishing feature is the “beading,” the decorative line Mr. Bennett carved using a plane the length of the dory on the lower edge of each plank. Mr. Barker said the boat builder’s signature, “T. Bennett, Amagansett,” normally stamped into the transom, was missing. “The transom is too far gone.”
Stuart Vorpahl said that in the late 1960s, his brother, Billy, and Harry Lester brought the dory out of mothballs to set sturgeon nets in the ocean. He said that when they found it, the dory was still ready to go whaling — all the whaling equipment was in it.
Mr. Vorpahl said he replaced the transom when it became “nail sick,” weak from the number of nails that had been used to fasten it to the framing.
After another hiatus, the dory was used again by Mr. Vorpahl to set cod trawls (long baited lines) in the ocean with his partner, Dominic Grace. He said it was not the kind of boat used in the Edwards brothers’ ocean-trap fishery because “the sides were too slanted. They had big sharpies for that. You can’t get near the gunnel (to bail fish from a trap) at all because of the angle.” By contrast, Mr. Vorpahl described the quiet spot in the center of the Bennett dory even in rough seas.
In the winter of 1964, he and Mr. Grace were fishing off of Southampton from the dory. On the way back to Amagansett the ocean swells grew bigger and it began to snow. It was getting dark. “We were just about to get across the bar, Dom and I, and if it hadn’t been for Elisha Osborn, there would have been no boat. It would have been busted up in the surf.”
Mr. Osborn, who had come down to the beach by chance, saw the fishermens’ truck and trailer and was able to get the equipment to them to pull the dory out of the water before it was broken by the shore break. “You ain’t got 10 minutes to think about it, 2 or 3 at most. If it wasn’t for Elisha we wouldn’t be talking today,” Mr. Vorpahl said.
“By the end of the ’60s, the cod disappeared again. Nobody knows why, so the dory sat in the yard,” he said. “It was a good sea boat.”