In Search of His Once-Buoyant Youth (It’s a ’77 Model)

At the far, forgotten end of a Huntington Beach boatyard, a cluster of old boats waits. Each of these old sea dogs has a story; they’re told in the scrapes and barnacles that dignify the hulls.

Perhaps new owners will come along, but more likely this is the boats’ last port.

It’s among this lot of torn sails and broken masts that George Link hopes to reunite with his own youth, with a boat he loved for 12 years but had to sell.

Call him Ahab. He does.

The former Costa Mesa man has been looking for his beloved Boston Whaler for years. He has searched in the registration records of the DMV, in the marinas and harbors of Orange County, and now in the corners of boatyards where the old ones wait.

“I guess the boat’s my Moby Dick,” he said last week. “They say you can always get another one, but I can’t. This boat is a part of me.”

This boatyard is, too. Like the memory of his old Whaler, the place makes the 50-year-old feel young. He has been coming here, to Action Boats on Beach Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway, since it opened in 1965.

Link wants to buy his boat back and has tracked it to an old registration record for a woman whose address was listed simply as “Huntington Beach.” He couldn’t find her, so he checks to see if maybe his boat has joined these castoffs waiting in the yard.

He bought the boat for $5,000 on Labor Day, 1977. It left his life Aug. 3, 1989, when he sold it for $5,000, a down payment on a house for him and his pregnant wife, Christine, when his business transferred them to Scottsdale, Ariz., where he still lives.

There have been many boats in Link’s life, but the Whaler was the best. He loved the way it glided over the water. He loved that, sometimes, when he was cutting through the bull rushes of a river at whiplash pace, he could pretend he was back in a Navy whaler, guarding the USS Tutuila II, in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. In his replays, he can edit out the death he witnessed that year.

The 1977 Boston Whaler Sport 17 is a cruising boat. It’s white, trimmed in mahogany and stainless steel, devoid of the plastic found on boats today. Link isn’t interested in a new boat because, well, “they don’t make them like they used to.”

The Whaler is what more affluent kids had during Link’s grade school days, when his was a leaky skiff. He promised himself he’d have a Whaler someday. Years later, in the Navy, he made another promise: Come gunfire or air raids, never leave your boat.

He kept the first promise; he wishes he’d kept the second.

“I was 23 when I bought it,” he said. “When you’re younger, you think you can just turn things around or get it back quickly. . . . Sometimes it’s not that easy to do.”

Sadly, Link soon realizes his Boston Whaler is not the one he has spotted among the old ones in a corner of Action Boats, which now caters more to new ones.

That one belongs to Raymond Guy, an owner of Action, and he’s not letting it go.

Guy said he was about 5 when his father opened Action, and he’s seen a lot of men like Link trolling through the yard, dreaming of younger, easier times at the sight of the old boats.

“It’s the nostalgia of old product,” said Guy, 40. “It’s in their blood to go build up a boat and set up in a marina, but it’s not realistic anymore. . . . People don’t have the spare time they did 20 or 30 years ago.”

Link leaves this boatyard with a last glance at Guy’s Boston Whaler. His elusive boat, serial number BWCB712M76L, registered to a Beth Fabian of Huntington Beach, is still hiding.

It’s times like this that Link channels his father.

“He said that if you didn’t succeed, you didn’t try hard enough,” Link recalled. “I figured there’s always one more try.”

*

By Wednesday, his last day in town, he heads to Schock Boats in Newport Beach with his son, Alex, 10, for a peek around their graveyard. His boat isn’t there, but when he tells his story, owner Marie Schock has a suggestion.

Isn’t it possible, she said, that the owner of an old Boston Whaler would come to Schock’s, the only official Boston Whaler dealer in town, for parts?

Fabian’s number pops up on Schock’s computer screen. She gives Fabian a call. Link and Fabian speak. The boat is just up the street, docked at the Dunes, and Fabian may be willing to sell. She’s available about 3 p.m. to show the boat.

Link and Alex couldn’t wait; they went early.

At the Dunes, his Whaler was resting right where Link stopped. “I looked and said, ‘No, it can’t be,’ looked at the engine, ‘Yeah, that’s it,’ checked the numbers again.”

Alex couldn’t stop smiling. Link began taking pictures because he realized he’d be leaving it right there.

His Whaler, you see, had grown up. It was converted to a fishing boat. There’s a tower that wasn’t there before, and new holes cut in the mahogany trim to fit it, too many holes for Link to fill if he tried to restore it. He’d need a new hull, but the manufacturer stopped making them six months ago.

“It was good to see it,” he said, admittedly heartbroken. “And I’m learning how to let go.”

But he’s already thinking about all the boatyards out there, with old boats left in corners. He’s going to find one, he said, polish it up, and they’ll celebrate getting older together.