Bringing the ARGUS back from the brink
by Michael Duke
The ARGUS began taking on water. Seeing our strife, a neighbouring vessel, also crossing Lake Alexandrina homeward bound, began following, collecting our cargo, just as quickly as it was being jettisoned.
Feet wet, we ran her aground on the nearest land we could find and, with the aid of the crew from our neighbouring boat, we secured her for the night. Then, in one of those bizarre inversions that come with entering middle age, we phoned our kids to come and pick us up.
Our boat was a shipwreck. What should we do? Could we fix her? Should we fix her?
The course ahead seemed obvious and logical. Our insurance payout covered her full market value. Then, a man with the necessary and often illusive combined commodities of time, money and skill offered to buy our wreck!
“We can come out of this ahead. Besides, I am not a boat builder’s hairy armpit!”
But something inside me adored this humble old hulk and I couldn’t let her go. She reminded me too much of… well… me! This broken empty shell still possessed an inherent beauty and, beyond the constraints of reason and logic, she had potential. I guess I did too.
I was rebuilding my life because not long ago, I was also shipwrecked.
A little over two years before the mother of my children and cherished wife of 20 years, left me after her love for me had died. Not quite broken enough, I then crashed my bicycle resulting in a head injury.
Many say that in suffering, consolation is where you find God. The consolations for me came in the form of a church who didn’t give up on me and in Sally, a high school crush I ran into in a local shop she was keeping. In the solace of empathy that can blossom in shared brokenness, Sally also, somehow, found consolation in me. How does this happen? Coincidence?.. God?..
How should a fledgling couple, juggling the myriad of complications that go with epic events neither had ever planned for, begin a new life together? Buy a boat? Sure! What could possibly go wrong?
We had admired the ARGUS at the 2013 South Australian Wooden Boat Festival. Just for fun, we regularly romanced about the “slow down” solace this pretty old tub might offer, putting along the ancient river of our childhoods that we held such affection for. Later that year, a Gumtree classified ad flashed her across our screen while we were searching the site for something completely unrelated.
Sold!
And we snapped her up for a good price. She was honest, if a little rough, her wooden bones whispering secrets of a
much harder life. At nearly 70 years old, she required regular dabs of putty and paint, and I was happy to oblige. Mostly though, we gently rode the river as we were kissed by the sunset.
A year later, Sally and I married. We began our blessed union of souls on the Murray, in the ARGUS. Ten winter days of warmth inside her organic-esque belly amidst the splendours of creation. But for the tyranny of responsibilities, we could have kept going and going.
So there it is. There is a lot of history between the ARGUS and us. Even more now and much more still to come.
Somehow this strange obsession with the restoration of the apparently obsolete also has a peculiar spiritual resonance. Around the ARGUS has assembled an eclectic community who, so inspired by the folly of fixing, are only too happy to impart their skills and knowledge just to see her sail again. I have met most of them by accident and just at the right time. Now, inTasmania, I find myself drawn into the folly of other’s pursuits of passion.
The ARGUS bears all the mistakes of skills not yet formed, all the scars of timbers salvaged from the frames of former factories. She is a beautiful life restored. Not to perfection, but to wholeness. And most significantly… she floats.
Editor // Many thanks to our friends at the Australian Wooden Boat Festival for allowing us to republish this article.