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A town where they build to last

In Cortez, it's all about the boats: hand-crafted sloops that speak of the pride of their builders and of a culture their owners won't let die.

By JEFF KLINKENBERG
Published March 26, 2006

CORTEZ

When Bob Pitt was a boy, he liked to borrow a boat from Humbug Cobb and go looking for scallops on the other side of Sarasota Bay. Old Man Cobb built fine boats, everyone knew that, but the outboards he put on the loaners often were less reliable. When they sputtered to a stop, better know how to swim.

As he splashed across a channel toward Humbug's dock, Pitt tried to be optimistic. "But as soon as you started swimming, the commotion attracted them,'' he says. The sharks, he means. They were often big enough to make him fear for life and limb.

At 53, Pitt retains every body part. He more or less gave up on motors, but never on boats. In Cortez, the historic commercial fishing village in Manatee County, he creates the kind of boats his great-granddaddy built more than a century ago. Constructed of native woods, they depend on the wind rather than internal combustion engines. Pitt intends to never feel like an hors d'oeuvre again.

He builds boats in a pavilion next to the Florida Gulf Coast Maritime Museum. Three mornings a week he teaches other men how to build them. In Cortez, founded by commercial fishermen in the 19th century, a good boat is something sacred.

At a national small-boat building competition held last year in Maryland, Cortez builders won five out of six categories, including grand prize. On April 1 and 2, the competition comes to Cortez for the first Gulf Coast Small Craft Festival. Entries are expected from Texas to New York.

Their owners will show off their boats, sail their boats and argue about whose boat is best. In a boat yard, arguing is as common as barnacles on a keel. Pitt's armada of pupils includes retired doctors, blacksmiths, lawyers, carpenters, airline pilots and engineers. Despite their differences, they have two things in common. They love old boats and they are sure, once they have taken a lesson or two, that they know more about how to build them than anyone else, even the maestro.

*   *   *

Sometimes, when Pitt is out for a sail, he sees bull sharks. They're common in the Gulf of Mexico, especially in the summer, when they cruise the bays and the beaches. Bull sharks occasionally demonstrate an appetite for human flesh. When Pitt sees one, he is grateful he no longer has to borrow Humbug Cobb's cantankerous skiff.

He feels much safer in the Bahamian sloop he built by hand. A Bahamian sloop is sturdy. A Bahamian sloop is seaworthy no matter what. One of his favorite paintings, called The Gulf Stream, was completed by Winslow Homer in 1899. Pitt used to study the painting in one of his grandpa's picture books when he was a boy.

Most people are mesmerized by the ferocious bull sharks in the painting. Pitt admires the sloop. Yes, the mast has snapped in the heavy weather, and yes, the nervous mariner has roped himself to the deck. But the sloop isn't sinking. The sloop isn't even taking on water. Those bull sharks will go hungry.

A century ago, such sloops were used throughout the tropics, and even in Cortez, for commercial fishing. Two guys sailed offshore and fished for snapper and grouper with hand lines. They used smaller boats to net mullet in the bays. Pitt and the boys of Cortez build mullet boats, too.

Today, the sloops are used for pleasure rather than work. Florida's taxpayers voted to eliminate certain kinds of commercial net fishing about a decade ago. A century's worth of waterfront development and overfishing had damaged fish populations, and neither the Florida Legislature nor saltwater regulatory agencies had the stomach to attack the problem. Nobody - not the commercial netters, recreational anglers, environmentalists - seemed in the mood to negotiate a compromise. So the taxpayers, in Draconian fashion, simply eliminated the nets. For the old net fishermen of Cortez, it was the darkest day in history.

Fish populations have mostly bounced back since the net ban. But not the netters. Many still are trying to figure out how to keep their culture alive.

In a small way, the boat-building project is helping to preserve that history. Old boats and Cortez go together like fried mullet and grits. "We live in a throwaway culture,'' says Roger Allen, the director of the maritime museum. "But in a traditional boat yard, you build to last. If you don't do everything right, the boat won't float. Building a wood boat preserves traditional values and the tradition that meaningful work is the root of happiness.''

The former curator of the Philadelphia Maritime Museum, Allen is in the process of raising money to buy land for a permanent museum. The existing one is a modest building with a screen door and few exhibits. The whole village of Cortez, with its ramshackle docks and old seafood processing plants, should be preserved in a bottle. The Burton Store, which opened in 1890, is still standing. The old-timer Blue Fulford, who could have traded stories with Ahab, still hobbles along the streets. Folks remember the day two decades ago when Blue was dragged by a rope into a net pulley while fishing in the bay. His son saved his life by amputating his leg with a pocket knife.

Five minutes from Cortez, creeping closer by the year, is the 21st century. A new Starbucks is drawing customers from the gated communities that line the waterfront on the wealthy side of Cortez Road. Sometimes, when the wind carries the stink of the crab traps, the new residents wrinkle their noses and complain.

*   *   *

Bob Pitt's relations moved from Portugal to the Bahamas in the 18th century. His great-grandfather, a full-fledged captain as a teenager, arrived in Key West in 1868. He was a boatbuilder until he died at 102. A grandfather settled in Miami, built boats in Coconut Grove and owned 43 acres of prime waterfront real estate. He lost his fortune after the 1926 hurricane.

Bob Pitt was born in Sarasota in 1953. His first boat was a 55-gallon oil drum sawed in half. He sailed his first pram when he was 7. His dad, a boat builder, did many repairs for grateful commercial fishermen. Pitt remembers going to take a shower and finding a gift 50-pound grouper iced down in the tub.

"Everything revolved around boats and fishing,'' he says. "I caught sheepshead, mangrove snapper, blue crabs, collected oysters, gigged mullet. I wasn't much for school. My parents sent me to a little private school where I could get extra attention. I was the only one in my class who didn't go to college.''

He built surfboards, worked as a car mechanic and pounded out dents in a body shop. Eventually he answered the call of the boat yard and has remained for three decades. He can fix a motor, straighten a propeller shaft, lay fiberglass. But he likes building and repairing wood boats. At his house in Cortez, seven of them decorate his yard like lawn ornaments.

"This one's a 21-foot Spritsail Skiff,'' he says. "This would be the boat the fishermen brought to Cortez from North Carolina when they settled here in the 1800s. We built her out of cypress and pine and cedar, copper and bronze fittings. Took us 11 months. She's a beauty.''

Bob Pitt looks like a waterman. Take a picture if you see him in long pants or a shirt with buttons. If he has to wear shoes, he favors a weathered pair of Duluth Trading Co. boots. When the soles start to flap, he resoles the shoes. The top leather is losing the battle to paint, glue, brine.

He has a gray beard and roundish spectacles. When someone notices the resemblance to Hemingway, he nods. Papa would feel at home in his boat yard. Papa would enjoy talking about seaworthy sloops and bull sharks. When Papa wrote The Old Man and the Sea he put his protagonist, Santiago, in a Bahamian Sloop, the kind Bob Pitt still builds.

The sharks ate the marlin, but they didn't get the old man.

Jeff Klinkenberg can be reached at 727 893-8727 or klink@sptimes.com.

[Last modified March 24, 2006, 12:14:11]