Off The Record

The Marina Owner’s Son Told Me My Old Newfoundland Had To Get Off My Boat Because “Dogs Aren’t Crew” And Gave Me 30 Days To Clear My Slip. On Day 27 The Fog Came In, And His Brand-New Boat Didn’t Come Back

Published on November 11, 2026

I have kept a boat at the end slip of Hartwell’s Wharf in Stonington, Maine, since the spring of 1976. That is forty-nine years of tying the same lines to the same cleats. My father kept his boat two slips up before me. If you walk out there today you can still see where he carved a little “P” into the pine piling with his jackknife, back when you could do that kind of thing and nobody called it vandalism.

My name is Linwood Pickering. I am seventy-four. I hauled lobster for a living for fifty-one years and these days I haul sixty traps instead of eight hundred, mostly because I do not know what else to do with my mornings. My wife Rosalee passed three winters ago. The boat is named for her, the Rosalee II. The first Rosalee sank at her mooring in the Groundhog Day storm of 1978 and we did not talk about it for ten years.

My sternman these days is a Newfoundland dog named Bosun. He is eleven years old and he weighs one hundred and forty pounds, about a third of it hair. He does not haul traps. He does not band claws. What he does is stand in the stern with his front feet on the rail and his nose in the wind, and every time a trap breaks the surface he barks once, like he is telling me good job. Rosalee bought him as a puppy the year she got sick. She said, “When I’m gone you’ll need something on that boat to talk to.” She knew me.

Newfoundlands were bred for this. They have webbed feet and an oily double coat, and they used to pull fishermen and nets out of the North Atlantic. Bosun has never had to pull anybody out of anything. He has mostly pulled me out of a bad mood.

Elden’s Boy Comes Home

Elden Hartwell owned the wharf for fifty-two years. He is eighty-two now and his hands shake too much to tie a bowline, so last spring he handed it over to his son Garrick and moved up to the gray house on the hill where he can watch the harbor from his kitchen window with a pair of binoculars and a cup of coffee he is not supposed to drink.

Garrick is forty-six. He went down to Boston after college and did something with money for twenty years. I remember him at nine years old in a pair of rubber boots three sizes too big, fishing for mackerel off the end of this wharf with a hand line. He was a nice boy. He cried when he caught his first fish because it looked at him.

He came home in a black pickup truck with a laptop bag and a plan. The plan was called the Hartwell Harbor Club. There were drawings. They showed the old bait shed turned into a café with string lights, the fuel dock turned into a “concierge float,” and the working slips at the end of the wharf, mine and three others, turned into deep-water berths for yachts that summer people would rent by the season.

“Nobody’s getting pushed out,” he told us at the first meeting, standing in the bait shed in a fleece vest that looked like it had never been near a bait shed. “We’re just evolving.”

Nineteen-year-old Billy Coombs leaned over to me and whispered, “Evolving’s what they call it right before they push you out.” He was not wrong.

“Dogs Aren’t Crew”

The first thing that happened was the slip fees doubled. Then they went up again in August. I paid. I have a little put by and Rosalee would have wanted me to keep going.

The second thing happened on a Tuesday morning in September. I was walking out to the boat at five-thirty with Bosun padding along beside me, the way we have done every morning for eleven years, and Garrick was standing at the end of the wharf with a clipboard and a young woman in a windbreaker I did not know.

“Morning, Mr. Pickering,” he said. “Can I have a word?”

He showed me a sheet of paper. It was a new set of wharf rules. Number eleven said, “No animals permitted on vessels or docks except in carriers, for liability and insurance purposes.”

“He doesn’t fit in a carrier,” I said. “He doesn’t fit in my truck, half the time.”

“I understand that,” Garrick said, in the voice people use when they do not understand that. “But our new insurer won’t cover it. If that dog knocks somebody off the float, we’re looking at a lawsuit that could close us down. I can’t run a club with a bear on the dock.”

“He’s crew,” I said.

Garrick smiled, a little tired smile, like I was an old man being sweet. “Mr. Pickering, dogs aren’t crew.”

The young woman in the windbreaker wrote something down. I never did learn what.

Thirty Days

I kept bringing Bosun. I figured they would have to come out and drag him off, and I wanted to see them try. A Newfoundland lying down is about as movable as a granite step.

Three weeks later there was an envelope taped to the Rosalee II’s wheelhouse window. It was a formal notice. Due to repeated violations of wharf rule eleven, my slip agreement would not be renewed. I had thirty days to remove my vessel and gear. It was signed Garrick E. Hartwell, Managing Partner.

Under that, in pen, he had written, “I’m sorry it came to this. Slip 14 has been reserved for a client.”

I found out who the client was from the girl at the café. His name was Delancey. He had a fifty-two-foot motor yacht down in Camden and he wanted a summer berth “somewhere authentic.” He was paying for my slip what I made in a good month of fishing.

I sat in the wheelhouse a long time that afternoon. Bosun put his big head on my knee and drooled on my oil pants. I said, “Well, old man, I guess we’re authentic.” He did not think it was funny either.

The Harbor Takes Sides

Stonington is a small town and it took about four hours for everybody to know. The other lobstermen were angry but quiet about it, the way people here are. Billy Coombs offered to have Bosun stay on his boat. Bea at the post office said she would write a letter to the paper. A summer woman I had never met left a casserole on my porch with a note that said, “From one dog person to another.”

Elden called me on the third night. His voice was thin on the phone. “Lin, I didn’t know he was going to do it like that,” he said. “I told him the end slip was yours. I told him about your father. He says it’s business.”

“It is business,” I said. “It’s his business now.”

“It was your father’s handshake and mine,” Elden said. “Nobody wrote it down. We didn’t write things down then.” He stopped. “I’m sorry, Lin. I’m an old man up a hill with binoculars.”

I told him not to worry about it, which is a thing men say to each other when there is nothing else to say.

I started bringing my gear up. Sixty traps don’t take long. I called a man in Deer Isle about a mooring. I did not tell Bosun. He would have seen through me.

Day 27

The morning of the twenty-seventh day was flat calm and blue as a jay. The kind of October day the summer people never see because they have all gone home. Garrick’s new boat was tied up at the fuel dock, a thirty-eight-foot center console he had bought in August, white and shining with two big outboards and a dashboard full of screens like an airplane. Mr. Delancey had come up from Camden to look at the harbor, and Garrick was going to run him out past Isle au Haut and back to show him the “authentic experience.”

I was on the wharf loading my last traps into the truck. Garrick waved at me as they went out. I waved back. I am not proud of it, but I watched them go and I thought, there goes my slip.

By two o’clock I had the truck loaded. I sat on an overturned bait barrel at the end of the wharf with a thermos and Bosun lying at my feet. And at two-fifteen I smelled it before I saw it. There is a smell that comes in ahead of the fog off the Gulf of Maine, cold and wet and mineral, like the inside of a church in March. Bosun smelled it too. He lifted his head and stared south.

By two-thirty you could not see the end of the breakwater. By three you could not see Billy’s boat forty feet away on its mooring. Somebody up in the village started the old fog signal on the point, two long groans every thirty seconds, the way it has done since before I was born.

Garrick’s boat had not come back.

The Radio

I went down into the Rosalee II’s wheelhouse and turned on the VHF, the way every fisherman on the coast was probably doing just then. For a while there was only the regular chatter. Then, at three-forty, Garrick’s voice came over channel sixteen.

“Stonington harbor, this is the vessel Hartwell One. Does anybody copy?”

He sounded young. He sounded like a boy in big boots.

Billy Coombs answered from his house up the hill. Garrick said they had lost all their electronics about forty minutes back. The screens had gone black. Some kind of power fault. He had a compass but he was not sure of his position, and the fog was so thick he could not see his own bow. He thought he was somewhere south of the harbor entrance but he had been idling in circles and he did not know how far. Mr. Delancey, he said, was “not doing great.”

Then he said, “There are ledges out here, aren’t there.”

Nobody answered for a second. Everybody listening knew exactly what he meant. South of the harbor entrance are Cutler’s Teeth, three granite ledges that sit about a foot under water at half tide. They have taken more boats than anybody likes to count. My father lost a skiff on them in 1961 and walked home on the bottom of it, so to speak. They were about half tide just then. They were covered, and they were hungry.

The Coast Guard came on. They had a boat coming from Southwest Harbor. Forty minutes, maybe more in the fog.

Bosun stood up. He walked to the very end of the wharf and planted his feet on the planks and stared out into that gray wall. Then he began to bark.

A Dog Who Could Hear

A Newfoundland’s bark is not like other dogs’. It is low and enormous, a sound that seems to come up through the wood of the wharf into your feet. Bosun barked once, then waited, head cocked, then barked again. He did not bark at nothing. He never had. He was listening to something.

I went and stood beside him and held my breath and listened. The fog signal on the point groaned. Water slapped the pilings. And under all that, so faint I could not be sure, there was the idle of an outboard somewhere out to the south and a little east.

Bosun had heard it before I did. Of course he had.

I went back into the wheelhouse and got my father’s foghorn. It is a dented brass horn about a foot and a half long, the kind you blow with your mouth. My father carried it on every boat he ever had, and I have carried it on every one of mine. Rosalee used to call it the trumpet of doom. I have not blown it in earnest in twenty years.

I picked up the radio. “Hartwell One, this is the Rosalee II. Garrick, it’s Linwood. You listening?”

A pause. Then, “Mr. Pickering. Yes. Yes, sir.”

“Shut your engines off,” I said. “Both of them. Right now. Then be quiet and listen.”

Steering Toward the Dog

He did it. I give him credit, he did not argue. The faint sound of the outboard out in the fog went still.

I put the brass horn to my mouth and blew one long blast. Bosun barked right behind it, that great booming bark. Then we waited.

The radio crackled. “We heard it,” Garrick said. His voice was shaking. “We heard a horn. And a dog. Mr. Pickering, we heard the dog.”

“Which side?” I said.

“Off the bow. A little to the right.”

“Good,” I said. “Now listen to me. There’s a bell buoy marking the west end of the ledges. If you hear a bell, you keep it on your left side, your port side, you understand? If it’s on your right, you stop and you tell me. Start one engine. Dead slow. Steer for the dog.”

That is what we did for the next twenty-two minutes. I blew the horn. Bosun barked. Garrick crept forward at idle and called back what he could hear. Once he said, “I hear a bell on the right,” and my heart turned over, and I told him to stop and back down, and we waited, and he said, “No, it’s moving left now, it’s on the left,” and Billy Coombs, up the hill, said over the radio, “Thank God,” which is the only time I have ever heard Billy say that.

My lips went numb. I ran out of breath and had to sit on the bait barrel between blasts. Bosun never stopped. He would not leave the end of the wharf. Every time the horn sounded he answered it, and every time he answered, Garrick said, “Closer. It’s closer.”

At 4:21 a shape came out of the fog. It was the white bow of that brand-new boat, creeping in like a ghost, no more than thirty feet off the end of Hartwell’s Wharf. Garrick was standing at the wheel with both hands on it. Beside him, wrapped in a gray blanket, was a tall man with white hair, gripping a handrail like it was the last thing in the world.

Bosun stopped barking. He wagged his tail once, slowly, like a man setting down a heavy load.

Who Shook Hands First

Billy and two other fellows had come running down the wharf by then. We got lines on her and pulled her in to the float, and Mr. Delancey stepped off onto the planks with his knees buckling. He was about my age. He had on a very expensive jacket that had not done him one bit of good out there.

I put my hand out to steady him. He did not take it. He walked right past me, knelt down on the wet wharf in his expensive pants, and put both arms around the neck of my dog.

“I heard you,” he said into Bosun’s fur. “I heard you, big fella.”

Garrick came off the boat last. His face was the color of the fog. He stood there on the float looking up at me, and then at the brass horn still in my hand, and then at Bosun, who had his tongue out and his tail going and drool coming off his jowls in long ropes, and was clearly the happiest he had been in weeks.

“The screens just went,” Garrick said. “Everything. I had a compass and I didn’t know where I was. I could hear the ledges, Mr. Pickering. I could hear the water breaking on them. I didn’t know which way they were.” His voice cracked. “And then I heard the dog.”

I did not say anything for a while. Then I said, “Your father taught me that trick. Your grandfather taught him. You turn off your engine and you listen for something on shore that knows where it is.”

Mr. Delancey Takes a Walk

Mr. Delancey stayed on the wharf a long time that evening, sitting on my bait barrel with a mug of Billy’s coffee and his hand on Bosun’s back. The fog lifted around six, the way it does, all at once like someone pulling a sheet off a table. You could see the ledges then, black and wet, about a hundred yards south of where Garrick had been drifting. Mr. Delancey looked at them a long time.

He asked me where I was moving my boat. I told him Deer Isle, a mooring, probably. He asked why. I told him.

He turned and looked at Garrick, who was coiling lines on the float like he was trying to disappear into them.

“Is that right?” Mr. Delancey said. “You’re putting this man off the wharf for the dog?”

Garrick did not answer. He did not need to.

Mr. Delancey stood up. He was not a small man and he did not look like he had just nearly drowned anymore. “My father fished out of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, for thirty years,” he said. “He had a Newfoundland named Captain who rode the bow of his boat. When I was eight he told me there were two kinds of people on a wharf, the ones who belong to it and the ones who are visiting. I’ve been visiting my whole life, son. I’d like to think I can tell the difference.”

He handed the blanket back to Garrick. “I won’t be taking slip fourteen,” he said. “Find me something a little further up the wharf. Somewhere I won’t be in the way of the crew.”

The Old Man With the Binoculars

The next morning there was a knock on my door at six. It was Elden Hartwell, eighty-two years old, who had walked all the way down that hill on his bad legs with a cane in one hand and a paper bag in the other. He had seen the whole thing through his binoculars, he said, as much as anybody could see in the fog. He had been on the radio too, listening. He had not said a word on the air because he did not trust his voice.

In the bag was a new brass plate, the kind you screw onto a piling. He had had it engraved in Blue Hill. It said, “SLIP 14. PICKERING. CREW: BOSUN.”

“Garrick paid for it,” Elden said. “He asked me to bring it because he didn’t think you’d open the door for him.”

“I’d have opened the door,” I said.

“I know,” Elden said. “He doesn’t know that yet. He’ll learn.”

Evolving

Garrick tore up the notice himself. He came down the wharf that afternoon with it folded in his hand and tore it in half in front of me and Billy and Bea from the post office, who just happened to be there. Then he said, “Rule eleven’s changed. Working dogs on working boats are crew.” Then he crouched down in front of Bosun and said, very quietly, “Thank you,” and Bosun licked his entire face, ear to ear, and Garrick laughed for the first time since he came home.

The café opened in the spring with string lights after all. It is not so bad. They serve chowder and the lobstermen get coffee for a dollar before six in the morning, which was Mr. Delancey’s idea. His yacht is at slip nine now. He comes out on the Rosalee II some mornings in borrowed oil pants and bands claws badly and loves every minute. Bosun has decided he is crew too.

Garrick fixed the electronics on his boat. He also bought a brass foghorn of his own at an antique shop in Searsport and hung it in his wheelhouse. I saw it there last week. It is shinier than mine.

Bosun is twelve now. His back legs are getting stiff and it takes two of us to get him over the rail some mornings. When he can’t go out anymore, I suppose I won’t either. But on foggy afternoons he still walks to the end of the wharf by himself and stands there with his big head up, listening, as if somebody somewhere might still need to know which way is home.

My father’s horn is hanging in the Rosalee II’s wheelhouse where it has always been. The “P” he carved is still on the piling. Under it now there is a brass plate, and on it there is a dog’s name.

If there is an old working man or woman in your town who has been told they don’t fit anymore, maybe stop and ask them what they know. You might be surprised what it would take to find your way home without them. And if this story meant something to you, please share it with someone who loves the water, or loves an old dog.

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