by Mitch Lee
My days were pretty much filled up with outdoor activities back in the summer of 1977. I certainly had no trouble staying outside from 7:30 in the morning till well after dinner.
As an 11-year-old boy on Limekiln Lake my cut-off Levi shorts were tattered and damp 12 hours a day.
My knees were skinned and the other exposed parts of my legs were pretty much filled with bug bites and briar scratches.
My deep, dark tanned skin ended at the ends of the white pockets that peeked out from below my frayed shorts.
Every morning was filled with adventurous options.
One particular late July day Eddie and I decided we would build our own pirate sailboat out of an old aluminum pram and the remnants of a canvas tent.
We had no trouble with the conceptual designs as we both wanted working sails, cannons, and a black flag.
We found a sturdy set of rocks in a small cove between the campsite boat launch and Tamarack Road where we stashed the boat in a makeshift Adirondack dry dock.
There we could get our rigging done with the use of some old ropes and a cedar tree that leaned out over the lake.
It was time-consuming dragging all the necessary items to outfit the ship through a quarter-mile of trail-less woods to the edge of the shore.
But it was a great way to spend the hot days in that shaded cove with the lake to jump into when it got too hot.
The worst part was trying to make sails from the smelly, musty, rotting and slightly moldy canvas.
The fabric was so frail we carefully ripped it to size with our bare hands.
Our latest addition was the 50 feet of cotton clothesline—complete with clipped clothespins—we had procured through the policy of pirate plundering.
We stretched it to a sawhorse we had drilled through to help hold our main mast firm and out to the corners of the pram to help with our rigging.
The sawhorse was steadied by about four rolls of duct tape to give it a great finished look.
The amount of knots in our various ropes alone betrayed our sailors’ seamanship abilities.
Our main mast was made from an old 10-foot-long handrail and cross-braced with a five-foot closet rod.
Hanging from it was the tattered and carefully tied canvas that we were hopeful would hold up in gale winds.
Our final obstacle was figuring out what to fashion our cannons from.
Then Eddie came across some round clay tiles that were perfect in size to hold about two dozen bottle rockets.
Our maiden voyage was a bit shaky. The normally calm waters of Limekiln Lake were white capping and didn’t subside for almost an hour of rowing out towards the islands.
We fired our guns several times and let fly our bottle rockets.
Our sail ended up being too flimsy to be of any real use, but I suppose it made us look rather imposing as Limekiln pirates.
—
Mitch Lee, Adirondack native & storyteller,
lives at Inlet. ltmitch3rdny@aol.com