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Lowell agreed reluctantly.
The idea of concocting a 40-foot commercial dragger to fit a stem that
had been concocted for yet another 40-foot dragger held little appeal.
Nevertheless, in 1983 he began design work on the Connie O’Connor.
(Norton had decided to name his new boat after his grandmother.) He continued
construction until 1987, using the project to slake the pauses between
others and to move his youngsters, Jamie and Joe, toward a dream of his
own: Carroll B. Lowell & Sons. During those years, the boys and their
father laid the backbone of the Connie, ribbed it with white oak,
put in the floor timbers (white oak again), and planked the resulting
skeleton with white cedar. They hauled the emerging vessel from her birthplace
at Yankee Marina over to Even Keel, where they installed her alongside
a nearly finished 38-foot beauty: Sea Scribe, built by Lowell for
Donald McGraw of the McGraw-Hill publishing family. Working amid a milieu
of shavings, sawdust, French curves, and line drawings, the threesome
forged a unique and mysterious bond—the one that exists between
fathers and sons.
Then Norton did something
that was wholly in character but still a little surprising: He disappeared
finally and forever, leaving Even Keel with a semifinished, unpaid-for
dragger on its hands. “Because she was so big and taking so long
to finish, my Dad called her the Ark,” says Jamie. “She was
his least favorite boat, I guess, but it still hurt him to see her left
that way.” Lowell didn’t have enough ready cash to finish
the Connie himself, and she wasn’t complete enough to sell,
so he and the boys moved her to a likely spot in the yard. Funereally,
they covered her with a big, blue tarp, and she stayed that way for the
next five years.
Times turned hard for
Carroll Lowell. Certainly the death of older brother Royal, arguably the
most famous downeast boat designer who ever lived, cleared the way for
the development of the younger man’s own design skills. When she
was launched, the Sea Scribe caused nothing less than an overnight sensation
in the yachting press, making Carroll Lowell famous both as a builder
and a designer. Moreover, his boys were coming along—no longer did
he have to change their diapers on the table saw or instruct them in the
vagaries of wielding chisels, mallets, try squares, and drawknives. Although
Jamie was just 15 years old when the Connie was tarped and Joe
was just 11, both boys were already evincing the same graceful grasp of
boatbuilding that had hallmarked the family for six generations.
But trouble insinuated
itself into the simple life Lowell loved. The fame he enjoyed brought
strife and turmoil as well as opportunity and prominence. Altercations
with business partner and friend Capt. Archie Ross turned into a feud,
and the feud generated a lawsuit over the ownership of Even Keel, one
that would drag on for years. Boatbuilding stopped at the little shop,
and Lowell went to work for another friend, Alan Dugas, proprietor of
nearby Royal River Boat Yard. Lowell’s sons hired on elsewhere as
well. Then, in 1993, with dark clouds scudding across his personal horizon,
the Connie O’Connor came back into Lowell’s life.
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