Working Thin Waters : Conversations with Captain Lawrence H. Malloy, Jr.

Oysterman, freight hauler, salvager—for some seven decades, Captain Larry Malloy, Jr. made his living from the "thin" waters of the Connecticut coast and Long Island Sound, taking on "all manner of work legally available to someone with a boat," as Stephen Jones remarks. Malloy weathered the Depression and the hurricane of '38, the submarines of the Cold War and the yachts of the '80s and '90s, and, a gifted if laconic raconteur, he is able to recall and describe it all with clarity, vividness, and wry humor.

Jones, himself a mariner, offers an affectionate portrait of Captain Malloy, recounting cultural and economic changes that shaped his life on the Connecticut coast. Inevitably, Malloy's story is also the story of the boats he has owned, modified, refurbished, sold, traded, and owned again over the years. Whether shelling oyster beds, hauling potatoes or coal or manure, carrying scientists on research expeditions, or salvaging buildings and scrap off the islands of the Sound, Malloy has displayed the ingenuity and technical expertise required to keep an oysterboat running and an oyster bed producing, and the adaptability required to survive in the face of changing times.

Today Malloy himself remains a down-to-earth man who embodies the values and perspective of an earlier era. When asked what you call a mariner who works the way he does, he replied, "I guess I'd call him a damn fool."

Stephen Jones is owner of West Mystic Wooden Boat Company, which repairs and builds wooden boats of all sorts, and author of eight other books, including Turpin, Drifting, Backwaters, and Harbor of Refuge, recently reissued in paperback. In a long career spent with and on boats, he served in the Coast Guard, worked on lobster boats, and sailed a schooner in the West Indies. For the last 30 years he has been on the University of Connecticut's maritime branch faculty, where he has taught courses on literature, the environment, and aspects of the sea.