The Dory Shop. Traditional Lunenburg wooden dories, Lunenburg, Nova Scotia

Susan (“Dory Plug”) Corkum-Greek

One night when Susan Corkum-Greek was about 10 years old her father arrived home from work in a highly excited state. He explained he had been talking with a fishing captain who lived down the street about an old punt that was hauled up on the spare lot alongside his home. The skipper had found the lapstrake-built boat adrift on the Grand Banks more than a year before. He had brought her home thinking he would fix her up but fishing was good in the 1970s and he’d never found himself home long enough to start.

“I asked him if I could have it, and he said yes,” Mr. Corkum told his wife. Their kitchen bore the mark of her head hitting the ceiling for years thereafter. Still, Mr. Corkum was not to be dissuaded.

Borrowing his brother’s truck, he brought the old boat home where he could have a better look at her. “She really wasn’t in that bad of shape, though your Mom thought she was,” Mr. Corkum recalls.

Yes, her gunwales were rutted from the chafe of fishing lines over the side and the boat’s bottom had to be recaulked. But all she really needed was a bit of care.

As Dad worked evenings and weekends on the boat, Susan and her two younger sisters were asked to come up with a name. They agreed to call her Snoopy after the cartoon dog.

Finally the boat was ready to be launched. “I remember that day really well. It seemed like a big occasion,” says Susan. Seen through the eyes of a child, all freshly painted in dory buff with green gunwales, the boat looked nearly brand-new.

Of course having been on land for more than a year, the boat immediately took on water. “Great boat, Chris,” said the wife as she sank.

But within a couple of days the seams had swelled tight and Dad, who had also managed to find an “ancient outboard” for the transom, was ready to take his girls out for a spin. “We had some really great times in that boat,” Susan says.

That first winter, Mr. Corkum built a small cabin, just large enough to fit three little girls. He also installed a steering system with a wheel outside the cabin. Unfortunately, the steering apparatus did not prove especially reliable. “It broke a few times,” Mr. Corkum says while his eldest daughter’s eyebrows rise. One of the most notable occasions happened when Susan’s mom, never a keen boater, had the wheel. “We were heading for one of the islands in Mahone Bay when the steering went and so Mom is turning the wheel and nothing is happening and she’s yelling to Dad who I think was untangling a fishing line or something. “It wasn’t like we were in danger, not even for a minute, but that was it for her as far as running the boat!”

The family had the Snoopy for a number of years before selling it to another family, who also had it a few years and sold it again. At that point, they lost track of her.

This long, convoluted story mostly tells you that Susan likes to tell tales, which she did as a newspaper reporter and editor for roughly 15 years. But she insists it also speaks to why she’s at The Dory Shop today.

“That was a simple wooden boat, built much the same way as our transom dory skiffs and even had traditional dory colours. We had no idea how old she was when my Dad brought her home and we know she was still being used more than 10 years after we had her. People ask me how long a dory will last and I can’t give them an exact answer. But with care it can be a very long time,” she says.

“More important, though, are the memories you make in these boats, with your family, your fishing buddies, your friends. Or maybe it’s the solitude the boat offers that gets you away from all that hustle and bustle.”

Today Susan enjoys boating with her young family in a lapstrake skiff, strikingly similar to the Snoopy. Susan’s also trying to learn to row. But that’s something for another time…