You think about what it must have been like being alone out on the open water for about three months, drifting through the western Gulf of Maine during the cooling autumn and onto winter’s doorstep, battered day and night by the waves, aimless and powerless to nature’s whims.
You think about that and you think that the wee 7½- foot dinghy called Goblin’s Imp more than lives up to its name.
This little fiberglass dinghy is the imp that puts the “imp” in impossible.
The dinghy, which in its more serene existence merrily floats behind Stephen Bobalek’s 24-foot sailboat, the Goblin, sits on the upper sands of Coffin’s Beach in West Gloucester, Massachusetts, waiting for a ride back to its owner in Topsham. Certainly, it has earned at least that.
“I really didn’t think I’d ever see it again,” Bobalek said Wednesday in a phone interview. “I thought it was gone.”
You would think. But somehow the tiny dinghy that could is the tiny dinghy that did.
And the more you learn of the tale, the more you realize that it’s not only the telling of an inexplicable journey, but a sea shanty of cosmic coincidence and just one more example of how small the world can be.
Let’s start in the middle.
Last Sunday, Mike and Carol McMahon, who live on Digby Lane, just behind Coffin’s Beach, were enjoying a sun-splashed walk along the beach in the unseasonably balmy temperatures that have graced Cape Ann this fall.
They were accompanied by their son Michael III and his wife, Jesse, who just happen to live in — you guessed it — Topsham.
In case you feel like tabulating the odds of one neighbor from Topsham finding a dinghy belonging to another Topsham resident about 85 nautical miles from home, consider that the 2010 federal census listed Topsham’s population as 5,931.
Clearly, them be mighty steep odds.
About a quarter-mile after venturing onto the beach, they saw something resting on the sand ahead, just above the tide line. From where they stood, it didn’t appear overly big, but it certainly looked larger than the average lobster pot or driftwood that generally washes up along that stretch of the beach.
“We weren’t sure what it was at first,” said Carol McMahon, who works with the Gloucester Office of Emergency Management and, as president of the Massachusetts Association of Emergency Management Professionals, is a major participant on the Cape Ann Emergency Response Team. “Then we saw it was a lovely little dinghy.”
They hauled the small boat up the beach toward the sea grass to make sure the tides didn’t reclaim it. Curiously, the dinghy was right-side up, filled with a modicum of water but not overflowing. Its oars were still in it. An additional flotation collar Bobalek had installed around its gunwale clearly had helped keep it upright.
As the McMahons began to bail the water out of the tiny craft, they noticed a name — Bobalek — and a phone number attached to the inside of the stern.
The younger Michael McMahon, a marine engineer by trade, called the number and spoke with Bobalek, quickly establishing that he was the owner of the dinghy and — in another curious turn of events — a neighbor from right down the street back up in Topsham.
“I mean really, what are the odds on that?” Carol McMahon said, laughing.
Young Michael McMahon and Bobalek figured out a plan: when the former returns to Gloucester next week for Christmas, he’ll drive his pickup truck down the coast, load up the boat and, upon returning to Maine, complete the little dinghy’s round-trip journey — but this time by land.
But how did the Goblin’s Imp get to Cape Ann in the first place?
On Sept. 20, Bobalek, 70, was enjoying a day of sailing on the 39-year-old Goblin near Harpswell in Casco Bay on an extraordinarily blustery day.
“At one point as I was coming in, I turned to start the engine,” he said. “Both of the tow ropes for the dinghy were still there, but the boat wasn’t.”
The dinghy, which he believes he purchased at a yard sale or through an Uncle Henry’s advertisement more than a decade ago, somehow had been cut loose in the heavy winds. He wasn’t sure when he lost it or where. But it was gone.
It’s unclear exactly when the Goblin’s Imp made land on Coffin’s Beach.
At one point a few weeks ago, Bobalek’s wife, Sharon, took a message from an unidentified caller saying the boat had been found on Coffin’s Beach but provided scant additional details. So, that came to naught because, as Bobalek said, “We don’t have a Coffin’s Beach up here.”
A second call produced the same result, but the third time was a charm.
Now Bobalek will get his dinghy back, not to mention meet one of his neighbors for the first time, and the McMahons will be able to bask in the warm glow of a good deed well done.
“It’s like a Christmas present,” Bobalek said.
More like an impish miracle.
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