The Phyllis A is looking a little dispirited these days, ensconced in the shadows thrown by the cluster of boats in the storage lot of Gloucester Marine Railways on Rocky Neck.
The 91-year-old gillnetter, the oldest former commercial fishing boat in a place where that should mean something, sits under a tarp on the railway’s ubiquitous boat stands, its hull a warren of good wood and bad. On the pavement next to it, the old boat’s pilot house, removed to allow access to on-deck work areas, rests like a tiny sidekick.
This is not technically a state of dry dock. More like drying-out dock. And that’s not good news for the oak-on-oak boat launched in 1925 at the Warner Shipyard in Kennebunkport, Maine, to fish the Great Lakes.
“She’s drying out,” said Douglass Parsons, the longtime foreman at the railways. “We should have had her back in the water last month. The longer she stays here, the more work that will have to be done.”
Parsons also is the president of the nonprofit Phyllis A Marine Association (PAMA) formed in 2006 to restore the vessel. He knows better than anyone that more additions to the to-do list for the workhorse vessel are the last thing his group needs. They already have more projects than they currently can afford.
