Yesterday a friend with good taste in boats asked me if my Tashmoo 18 skiff was for sale. I can understand why he might think so, as it’s been sitting in the middle of the yard for two weeks awaiting a warm day for me to crawl beneath the trailer and slap on some bottom paint before launching for the spring season. Over my dead body I thought. Tashmoos have been out of production since the late 1990s, a Martha’s Vineyard boat built in Vineyard Haven from a mold taken off of a Jonesport lobster boat from Maine. Now they are back.
I bought mine in 1992 after falling in love with the look of the boat in a full page ad that ran in the back of the Eldridge table tables. I needed a little boat to get young children to the beach, something for clamming and fishing, a boat that could handle Vineyard Sound on a bad day. So I placed a call, paid a visit to the Vineyard, took a test ride, and put down my deposit — all in the boat cost me something in the neighborhood of $5000 including a terrible 30-hp Johnson outboard which tormented me until the day it thankfully died.
As my cousin once told me years later: “That boat doesn’t owe you anything.” I should say not. Thirty-four years and three engines later, and I consider my Tashmoo to be the single best purchase I’ve ever made.
Over the years I’ve basked in many compliments about the boat. There’s something about the look of the boat — the sweep of the sheer line, the tumble-home stern, the rugged, non-nonsense interior — that inspires admirers to leave notes on the boat as she rides on her mooring asking me if I ever decide to sell her to please give them a call.
After the company went out of business the only way to get a Tashmoo was to keep an eye on the classifieds and grab a used one locally. There were quite a few on the Vineyard, where they were once given away as grand prizes in the annual Martha’s Vineyard Bluefish & Striped Bass Derby. Islanders nicknamed the boats “Splashmoos” because of their notoriously wet ride, and Nelson Sigelman, the fishing writer for the Martha’s Vineyard Times, wrote a story about adding splash rails to the hull to try to keep himself dry. Even with the rails, mine still soaks me down.
Soundings editor Bill Sisson was a Tashmoo owner, and wrote about the skiff in that newspaper’s pages. In “When the Boats We Own Become a Part of Us“, Sisson wrote:
More than a decade ago, I sold my 18-foot Tashmoo lobster skiff to the town of Vineyard Haven on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. It was another one of those bittersweet partings, but I was happy she was going back to her home waters.
That simple, surefooted “seagoing miniature” was a direct descendant of an old wooden skiff that Dan West had found in a salt marsh on the island. He pulled a plug off the tired workboat and started producing them in glass.
Vineyard Haven harbormaster Jay Wilbur saw my ad, knew the boat’s pedigree and put her to work in the harbor earning her keep. Every few years I either hear from Jay or I check in with him just to keep track of the old boat. “I just got out of it,” Jay told me when I called in mid-July. “We have a new high-deck patrol boat that’s also wonderful, but in the summer, I spend my time in the Tashmoo. It just fits me better. They’re just great boats.”
Now, after 30 years, the Tashmoo is back. I just got off the phone with David Reiter. He revived the design after tracking down the original molds in Portland, Maine and hauled them down to Florida. He’s started Tashmoo Boatworks and is preparing to go into production with a very new take on the old classic.
Talk about boat bling. The new Tashmoo is a serious gem. I love mine because it thrives on squid ink, bluefish blood, and black clam mud. The Florida version is all teak and shiny goodness. Here’s a story in Soundings, “Tashmoo Skiffs Return” heralding the rebirth of the boat.
