The wharf rat writes

These are the selected writings of Craig Moodie, a.k.a. the wharf rat. He writes about sailing, the kind I like to read about. I'm not interested in the scene in Newport. I'm more interested in gunk-holing and the desire to see what's just over the horizon, and then just keep going.

He has a new book out--Seaborn.

He has a bunch of other books, all about the sea. You can learn about them here.


And here's the old wharf rat, himself. Craig and I worked together a long time ago. Many lives ago. Something that always struck me about him was how growing up on Cape Cod and working for a while on the few rusty fishing boats that still go out of the Cape affected him. It's a place he's never really left, but in a way that it seems as if he's still looking for something there. Like a ghost continues to haunt. Unsettled. Troubled. Disturbed, as in, his sleep was disturbed.

I remember one night we drove down to the Cape from our homes in MetroWest to fish the canal, which is a really dreadful thing to do, but we had dreadful jobs at the time and so standing in all that bilge water didn't seem to matter much. We ended up not catching a thing, probably not even getting a nibble, the only shivers on our poles came from dragging our lures across the bottom. It must have been Scusset Beach where we ended up driving to finish the beer we had. And the reason I remember that night was because Craig skipped a rock across the lapping oily water at the earth's edge and the sea's beginning, and it hit green, and green, and green again. I'd never seen the fluorescence before. I'm sure I stood there slack-jawed for a while. You can't forget seeing something like that for the first time.