One morning, a thousand years ago, I sat at my desk in an ad agency, and as I wrapped up my second crossword of the day, I thought: I don’t need an
office to do this.
    
Besides, I was not then, and am not now, corporate. I’m really only good for about four creative hours a day, with two of them spent either wondering where the other two will come from or where they’ve gone, so that’s really two hours a day.
    
I adhere to W.H. Auden’s thought that every hour of genius requires seven hours of what he described as “dream time.” Again, no office needed. So I tried to manage things from home.
    
It had been done. Samuel Clemens did most of his work not just at home, but in bed, so I was encouraged. I knew that the Fuller Brush and Tupperware empires were built from private homes. However, my home office was a distracting place. Friends would drop by, happy that I was there, ergo not at work, and thus must be receiving. Then there was the vacuum cleaner. My wife is relentlessly tidy and, at times, I almost felt as if I were underfoot.
    
So I wanted a place to go, for both peace and to fulfill my need to burrow – and, perhaps, to do quite literally a little work. Men traditionally seek some sort of clubhouse, tree hut, or other male warren where we can seclude ourselves and be with our stuff. In the days of the aristocracy, we gathered to smoke cigars in billiard rooms. Now we just want a place to complain and say dumb things with impunity, preferably surrounded by a full array of electronics.
    
That was my goal: a hideout in the first-class section of life, a bungalow that doubled as shrine to cool junk and gadgetry. My retreat would have a phone,
refrigerator, online access, heat, and air – things that plausible offices all have. All the while, a fragment of ad copy I had read years before etched itself into my mind.

It asked: “You live on an island and you don’t have a boat?” It was suddenly clear that Oak Bluffs harbor and a boat within it would best serve my office needs. I called my old friend Bob Beaumont at Able Yacht Brokerage in Marblehead.

Each spring, for decades, Bob had cordially and helpfully entertained my whims and fantasies as I bothered him about boats we both knew I would never buy. So to address his loyalty and expertise, I set out with him in late 2003 to “satisfy my yachting requirements.” Our annual conversations had generally centered on the virtues of several spectacular Nauticat motorsailers built in Finland, the 33 being a particularly desirable double-ender.
    
But our initial step was to lower all sails, and move the conversation over to powerboats. I wanted a floating office – not winches underfoot and a jungle of tangled lines overhead. Nor would there be any wood trim. (I knew that I would mean to keep on top of the teak and the varnish, but ultimately never would.) The ketch and the brightwork might live on in my dreams, but the powerboat would be where I would actually do my work.
    
Bob agreed to all this but said he needed to know a few other basics, such as size of boat, choice of engine, and budget. I had noted that when men of my age and experience buy a first boat, it’s usually the biggest one they can afford, or a teeny, open skiff, just to test the waters. In either case, their next boat is a thirty-something-foot, fiberglass, diesel-powered runabout.
    
I decided to go immediately to the madding crowd’s second choice. I sought the counsel of Phil Hale. Phil owns and runs Martha’s Vineyard Shipyard in Vineyard Haven, where he got his first summer jobs in the 1960s, during his father Tom’s ownership of the yard. Phil said I wanted a small, fiberglass hull with a single diesel and a bow thruster (a propeller mounted laterally in the front of the boat to push the bow from side to side in tight places). Twin engines would be redundant in my case, doubling all the mechanical problems, but only really necessary for docking – and I would have the bow thruster for that.
    
He said newer was better than older, and recommended a Yanmar diesel if there were any choice in the matter. Phil also likes the Downeast design, a style his father reintroduced in a novel way in the 1970s with his Wasque thirty-two-foot day cruisers. They brought a certain new elegance to the lobsterman’s hull and set the pace for picnic boats.
    
So I took aboard Phil’s wisdom and stirred in Ted Gozzard’s idea that life’s too short for an ugly boat. Bob and I surveyed the market, always keeping in mind the fact of my often-strained finances. In a rare tryst with reality, I decided to spend on a boat roughly what I would pay for one of those civilian armored tanks people in middle age find so useful today. We set a ceiling of 100K.
    
And so it was on a December day in 2003 that Bob sent me to a 30-foot Mainship Pilot at a Rhode Island shipyard. While there is also a thirty-four-foot model, the 30 would meet all – and I mean all – my expectations. I was aglow. I had not felt that icy titter of the heart since my eyes first locked onto that Austin Healey 3000 back in the Kennedy administration.
    
The Pilot has classic lines, plenty of head room below, heat, air, that Yanmar diesel – the only diesel ever expressly made for marine use – and a bow thruster, all quite intelligently built in the USA. It sleeps two and rides in comfort, yet it can touch eighteen knots if need be. It is, in effect, a studio with a dandy little galley and a bathroom – not one of those all-male marine heads that so closely resembles the facilities in a Corsican jail. In every dimension, the vessel has enough room but not too much.
    
Broker-friend Bob printed up a nice little booklet of all the Pilot 30s on the market. I was tempted by the pennant-blue hull but remembered that a white finish would look cleaner longer. We picked a handsome ivory one and made an offer. Last February I bought my thirty-foot Mainship Pilot, and before summer, she was in Oak Bluffs harbor.
    
The name? The boat was named to honor the blissfully idiotic ducks on our pond. These winged friends are oblivious to all but ground corn and imperfect
landings – something one would expect the species to have genetically mastered eons ago. In celebration of the fleeting attention span of the duck, its willful lack of enthusiasm for anything important, and the magnificent sound it makes when it talks, the boat was named Sitting Duck. The Sitting part commemorates the fact that I would hide out there and feel the sea beneath me far more often that I would actually set out on a voyage, even a wee one.

So, how did it work out? Would I do it again? To answer that, let me declare that my first season in Oak Bluffs harbor gave me an entirely new Vineyard experience.
    
Of course I love the boat. In any home I’ve ever owned, I’ve always holed up someplace cozy and never used any more space than I have on Sitting Duck. The view of the water all around me is spectacular. The comfort goes beyond my fondest hopes. But more than any of this is the joy of my subtle introduction into membership of the saltwater community on this Island.

Let me declare that my first season in Oak Bluffs harbor gave me an entirely new Vineyard experience.

    
All summer long, I kept humming “Proud Mary,” the old Creedence Clearwater Revival song. A single line kept running through my head: “People on the river are happy to give.” The line speaks to the folks in O.B. harbor. Harbor master Todd Alexander has recruited a force of knowledgeable, nice kids – under forty – whose manners indicate that someone actually raised them. And they know boats, boating, and the courtesies therein prescribed.
    
Good feelings abound in the harbor and along the perimeter of bulkhead and businesses. I spent the first three months of the summer on a mooring for reasons of both economy and isolation – a most private island on an island. One day, after a fairly serious rain, Melissa Hammond, a petite marine biologist who seasonally skippers the harbor launch, was delivering me to my boat. As we approached, I noticed that my dinghy was floating rather high in the water, given the recent rainfall. I mentioned it.
    
“Oh,” said Melissa, “I pumped it out for you.”
    
Another time, planted comfortably at home, I noticed the winds begin to rise and gust, and I knew that there would be a sea even in the harbor, whose narrow, jettied entrance faces east. I felt in a basic but vague way that the boat was safe and opted to stay in bed and hope for the best. The next day, I noticed that someone had added extra lines and deftly fastened them to the mooring. It was Melissa again – actually, Melissa
and Matt Feeney. He is another launch skipper and her significant one.
    
Harbor master Todd and marina supervisor Wendy Brough, a lithe beauty from New Zealand whom Todd met in Bangkok a few years back, are traffic
controllers who must factor in the tides. They also answer the same questions endlessly and enforce the same rules – mostly obvious ones, such as don’t crank your engines while passing the osprey nest at the edge of the harbor channel.
    
They are my Scilla and Charybdis, gatekeepers to a harbor that serves as a primary gateway to Oak Bluffs. Cruise ships, the ferries of four companies, and pleasure boats of every description arrive in season. When there is a harbor rescue of any sort, they are the first responders, and I am supplied with eyewitness reports of what happened.

Having the likes of Matt, Melissa, or Natasha Snowden – another launch driver and dockhand – greet them all reflects well on the town. Having my boat-
office in such a place reflects well on me and what I do – no matter how much or little of the day I might actually do it.
    
Location, location, location.