Barnacle sauce
Fall 2024
By Mark Barrett
One fine Boston morning in the fall of 1995 I was informed by my wife that we were moving to Cape Cod. She had been hired – her first job out of Suffolk Law School – as an assistant district attorney for Barnstable County. That career opportunity easily trumped my current job as a bartender, so off we went.
Bars and restaurants were plentiful on Cape Cod, but I was tired of the late nights and dealing with the drunken public. This was as good a time as any to look for another line of work. Back in those days there were still want ads in the newspaper. I called on one in the “Cape Cod Times” for a position on the hauling crew in a boatyard.
I didn’t know what a position on the hauling crew in a boatyard entailed, but it was obviously an entry level job, judging by the meager hourly wage offered and the fact there was “no experience necessary.” When I pulled into Crosby Yacht Yard, which was tucked away in a beautiful residential neighborhood in Osterville, it felt like I had traveled back in time. A sign said that the business was established in 1850, and most of the old wooden buildings looked like they were built back then. The soft-spoken man who interviewed me, the general manager at the time named Rick Egan, hired me right on the spot. I was proud of myself for doing so well in the interview until it dawned on me shortly afterwards that Rick would have hired anybody for that job who walked through the door under his own power and could fog up a mirror.
It was physical labor. A large part of the job involved lugging around iron boat stands and the heavy pine blocking that was used to set the boats on. (No need for a gym membership anymore.) I was required to army crawl underneath boats, some of them very large boats, to arrange said blocking, a frightening task that activated a kind of claustrophobia that I didn’t realize I had. It was no exaggeration to say that I feared for my life when I had to do that. The first few weeks on the job I had nightmares almost every night. “What the hell is wrong with you?” my wife would ask when I woke her up yet again in the middle of the night with my frantic yelling and thrashing around. “It’s that damn dream again,” I would whine. “I’m trapped under a boat and I can’t get out.”
Another major part of my job that fall entailed scraping the barnacles off the bottoms of the boats when we hauled them out of the water with the Travelift, and then washing the rest of the slime off with a noisy gas-powered pressure washer. It was exhausting work, and with the wind coming off the water that time of year, it was hand-numbingly cold.
My direct boss was a half-crazy Irishman named Ed Burke. I was his “’mon back,” which is that guy who stands behind a trailer and waves his hand yelling, “’mon back, ’mon back.” Ed was prone to losing his temper and throwing whatever he was holding in his hand – a tool, his coffee mug – against the nearest wall while he cursed a blue streak. But he could back the hydraulic trailer under any boat on the first try and squeeze the boats into the tightest places and fix any of the old equipment when something broke down. He also knew exactly where to place every boat in the yard so they could be launched in the correct order in the spring. Ed didn’t have much patience dealing with a new guy like me. After the first couple days of getting yelled at, the idea of mixing cocktails and getting home late at night didn’t seem like such a bad lifestyle after all.
But then a funny thing happened – I started looking forward to going to work. Being outside in the fresh air for the workday was, well, refreshing. I was intrigued by the way the water out in the harbor looked different every day. The wind conditions and the timing of the high and low tides determined what we could or couldn’t do. The connection and dependence on nature for work was a new experience for me. Plus, I could wear the same dirty clothes for multiple days in a row and nobody noticed or cared. We worked five days a week, 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., no nights or weekends like the restaurant business. Hallelujah for that! It was what I imagined a union job was like. At exactly 9:00 a.m. every morning we dropped whatever we were doing and headed inside for the morning coffee break.
Crosby Yacht Yard (CYY) has a long and storied history. The first cat boats were built there in the mid-1800s, gaff-rigged sailboats with a mast set far forward that carried a single large sail. The Crosby Cat was a centerboarder with an extremely wide beam and shallow draft, designed as a work boat that was able to sail right up onto the clam flats. They were still building boats at CYY when I came to work there, most notably the Crosby tug and the Crosby launch, which can be found at yacht clubs and harbors all up and down the East Coast, and the Crosby Striper, a sturdy “bass boat” with traditional Downeast lines. They also built and maintained a fleet of Wianno Seniors, a 26-foot gaff-rigged sailboat that is one of the oldest racing classes in the country. These graceful sailboats are still actively raced to this day and made most famous by JFK and other members of the Kennedy family, who owned several over the years.
This old boatyard was steeped in history. Relics from the past were everywhere in the shops and the lofts. There was a railway with a wooden cradle that ran down into the water that was once used to haul boats. We primarily used a modern hydraulic trailer to move boats around the yard, but we still moved certain boats around with an old farm tractor and set them down on beams using house jacks. There was a ramp leading to a boarded-up door where bootleggers during prohibition once rolled out kegs of liquor to be loaded onto waiting trucks. At break time we sat around an ancient cast iron wood stove in one of the equally ancient wooden sheds drinking strong, bitter coffee from a dusty coffee maker and eating cold Pop Tarts from a vending machine. The old timers on the crew had their designated seats in the front row up close to the stove while the seats for any “new guys” were way in back where we sat shivering while we listened to their stories.
Crosby Yacht Yard was sold to the Egan family sometime in the ’80s and is owned by them today, but there were still Crosbys working there when I was hired, two brothers named Teddy and Malcolm. They had worked at the boatyard since they were little kids and at that time, in the mid ’90s, Teddy was on the verge of retirement and his younger brother, Malcolm, was not far behind. Malcolm oversaw all the painting and varnishing, and Teddy was the chief boatwright and carpenter. They had seen so many hauling crew workers come and go over the years, some of them very quickly, that Teddy and Malcolm didn’t pay attention to any of us new guys on that crew until they figured we would be there a while. Consequently, neither Teddy nor Malcolm spoke a single word to me or acknowledged my presence until I had been working there for several weeks. I remember very distinctly the day when Teddy first spoke to me.
I was over at the pit using a long-handled garden spade to scrape the bottom of a boat that we had just hauled out of the water. It was hanging in the straps of the Travelift. The bottom was especially bad on this boat, with barnacles and seaweed several inches thick. I was chipping and chiseling away at it, leaving a big pile of what was an entire ecosystem of living, squirming sea creatures and barnacles and green and orange seaweed on the cement pad under the boat. (What grows on the bottom of a boat is fascinating – for the first five or six boats you clean. Then it’s not so fascinating anymore.) At some point I noticed that Teddy Crosby had walked over and was standing there watching me.
“That looks like a pretty good batch,” Teddy said.
“What’s that?” I said.
“The barnacles,” Teddy said. “Those are some good ones. My mother used to make a red sauce from the really big ones like those.”
“Really?” I said. I knew about clam sauce, both white and red. I knew about steamed mussels and baked scallops, even snails in garlic butter, but barnacles? Well, why not? This was Cape Cod, after all.
“Oh, yeah, you boil them until the meat falls out,” Teddy said. “Then you add the tomatoes, onions, peppers, garlic, you know, to make a sauce that you put over spaghetti. But you need the big meaty ones or it ain’t worth the trouble. Let me tell you, the sauce she made was delicious. Every year right before Christmas she’d make up a huge batch and we’d be eating it all through the holidays. Course, the old lady’s long gone now, so we don’t have it no more. Still miss her, though.”
Teddy shook his head and looked sad as he gazed down at the pile of barnacles and thought about his departed mother and her delicious sauce. He took his glasses off and wiped his eyes, one at a time with his knuckle, and put his glasses back on. I felt sorry that he was sad, but I was also happy that the senior guy on the crew was finally talking to me.
“That actually sounds pretty good,” I said.
“Damn, it makes my mouth water just to think about it,” Teddy said. “Well, keep on scraping, kid, you’re doing a good job.” And with that he turned and walked away. I counted that as the day that I officially became a member of the crew. I still had to sit way in back during the coffee break, with another new guy named Walter who started right after me, but at least the old-timers were talking to me now.
My wife, meanwhile, wasn’t too thrilled with my job choice. The pay was pretty low, and I think she was a little embarrassed when I sometimes met her after work at the Barnstable Tavern across the street from the DA’s office. There she sat, surrounded by her new co-workers, a bunch of dapper attorneys in suits, and here I come in my filthy work clothes smelling like low tide. Oh, well, the die was cast. It was a fait accompli. A random chain of events had led me to work in a boatyard and set me on a course that would lead to a long and not-too-illustrious career in the marine industry.
By the beginning of December that first year we had all the boats out of the water and staged in the yard. I was working with one of the mechanics removing the heavy batteries from boats and storing them in the battery shed where they were hooked to a trickle charger. Hauling season was over and they didn’t need as much unskilled labor. One day they laid off Walter, so when the manager called me into the office, I thought I was going to be next. Instead, he informed me that I would be working with Malcolm Crosby over the winter in the paint shop doing prep work for several big paint jobs they had lined up for the off-season.
The second week in December, on a weeknight, the company held their annual Christmas party. This soiree was held at the swanky private yacht club next door where there was a suitable function room. It was the first time I would be socializing with anybody from work, and I was happy to be there, and relieved to know I still had a job. The whole office crew was there mixing with the yard crew, and everybody was having a grand old time. There was a self-service open bar, and the liquor was flowing freely. The food at the event was catered and there were two waiters passing around trays of hors d’oeuvres. I made myself a hefty Scotch and water – maybe my second or third – and found my way over to Malcolm Crosby. I was curious to find out exactly what I would be doing as far as prep work for the paint jobs.
“You’ll be taping off the boats, cleaning stuff, plus you’ll be doing a lot of sanding,” Malcolm said. “You know what a scuff monkey is?”
“No,” I said. “What’s that?”
“Well, you’re about to find out.”
A waiter came by with a tray full of scallops wrapped in bacon. I helped myself to one and popped it into my mouth. Nothing ever tasted so scrumptious. Malcolm didn’t want any. He shook his head, and the waiter went away.
“Don’t care for seafood,” Malcolm said.
“Really?” I said. “I figured everybody down here on the Cape must eat a lot of seafood, right?”
“Nope, not me. Don’t like it. Don’t like clams, don’t like shrimp, oysters, none of that stuff. Don’t even like fish or lobster.”
“Not even lobster?”
“Nope.”
“Wait a second,” I said. “What about your mother’s spaghetti sauce? With the barnacle meat in it. Teddy told me about it, how she used to make up a big batch every year right around the holidays. You didn’t even like that?”
“Did you say barnacle meat?”
“Yeah, yeah, the barnacle sauce that your mother used to make! You know, the barnacle sauce with the spaghetti.”
“The hell are you talking about?”
“The barnacle sauce, you know, that your mother made. Only from the big barnacles, though.”
“Ohhh . . .” Malcolm said, grinning like the Cheshire Cat. “Teddy told you about that, did he?”
“Yeah, Teddy told me.”
“And you believed him?”
Frequent contributor Mark Barrett is a yacht broker at Cape Yachts in Dartmouth, Mass., and he lives in Sandwich, on Cape Cod. Mark and his cruising partner Diana sail their 1988 Freedom 30 Scout out of Red Brook Harbor, in Buzzards Bay.
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