A Bang-Up Experience

“What in the damnfoolery are those?” my mother asked at a volume that rattled the windows.

The year was 1958, I was 13 years old, and I had an 8-foot sailing dinghy that had been purchased after we returned to California after a long, parched spell in Arizona. My father—who had run away to sea as a young man, and in whose veins flowed salt water—stood off to one side, with the expression of a man trying not to laugh aloud in front of his wife. And losing.

My mother was pointing at my newest acquisitions: two fenders from the local marine hardware store. I’d gotten them to protect the turquoise-green gelcoat on the hull, not to mention the glossy varnish on the caprails that I had laid on so lovingly.

But it was not the fenders that were the problem. It was their shape: They were mermaids. Quite obviously naked mermaids, with detailed flippers and scales. And they had, ever so faintly, nipples.

I thought they were the coolest things I’d ever seen. I couldn’t wait to hang them over the side when I cozied up to the waterfront restaurant on Alamitos Bay for my usual burger. I was trying to picture how I could angle my dinghy, regrettably named Chris’ Craft, so that everyone in the restaurant could see that I had naked mermaid fenders.

Instead, my parents and I came to an understanding that I would only use these fenders on the dock side, where they couldn’t be seen. I gave my word, and I kept it.

Recently, though, I was glancing through a marine hardware catalog. Lo and behold, there were the mermaid fenders, still available. They weren’t the $4.99 I remembered from 1958, though. Now they were $63.

The price made me think about how far fenders have come in the past six decades or so.

Nowhere.

Fenders remain one of the most uselessly designed pieces of equipment on a modern yacht. Most are round, some with ridges for some reason, others smooth. All absorb the color of the dock or piling against which they rub, and they cling tenaciously to that color. The fenders on my current boat (some of which came from previous boats) bear the color of fresh green creosote from new pilings. Others have a reddish tinge from the “Do Not Dock Here” signs against which I always moor.

I’ve tried everything: acetone, paint thinner, Windex, metal polish. Nothing gets the stains out of the once-bright-white fenders I once carried from the marine store so proudly. I’ve started thinking about fenders as the badly crumpled World War II “50-mission caps” that combat pilots wore as their badge of honor. My fenders have been to war, too.

But modern fenders beg for a redesign. The round ones roll nicely out of the way, leaving your glossy topsides unprotected against the barnacles and loose nails in the dock. In my boating travels, I see more flat fenders nowadays. They were obviously designed not to roll out of the way; instead, they slide out of the way. Barnacles, meet paint.

We’ve made huge progress in everything from the shape of anchors to life jackets (oops, PFDs). Anchors now hold in every bottom from grass to muck, and PFDs are finally comfortable to wear. But fenders just keep failing to protect our hulls, despite our cat’s cradle of lines attempting to hold them in place. Perhaps one of the boating associations could offer a tidy grant to design a fender that actually fends.

I have a friend who, after owning a long series of ocean racing sailboats, made the transition to a trawler and swore he was never going to put the boatyard painter’s kids through Harvard again. He uses 50-cent paint rollers from a big-box store, and, as far as I know, house paint to cover his topsides. Yes, it looks like hell. On the other hand, he doesn’t even own a fender. If that paint gets a barnacle or nail scratch, out comes the cheapo roller and voila, the hull looks as bad as ever.

He does say that ditching all the useless fenders has freed up an immense amount of locker space around his boat. Point taken.

My mermaid fenders did protect my dink, so perhaps one of these days, I’ll see an absolutely stunning trawler with dark blue or black topsides and rows of mermaids for protection.

In the meantime, I continue to be sad that just a day after I got those mermaid fenders as a kid, I discovered that the nipples had disappeared. They’d been sanded away smooth and then waxed so those chest bulges disappeared.

I suspect my father, but he never came clean.