Hurricanes Isabel and Juan piqued the interest of York’s harbormaster, Gordon Parry, but neither storm inspired any action to protect the more than 300 pleasure and fishing boats in his care. “We have a loose emergency plan,” he says. “Nothing formal.”
The fact is that York Harbor is very protected, totally landlocked except for the entrance, the mouth of the York River. “The only wind we ever get is northeast,” says Parry. “And that gets broken up by blowing over land. The channel takes a sharp right just after the entrance so any seas go straight into the mud flat. The two mooring basins never even get a surge, just a high tide and the last really big tide was in 1992 – the October no-name storm.” York Harbor is pretty safe and sound in almost any weather.
“So, when dangerous weather is predicted, a lot of people want to take shelter here. We don’t let them in. That’s only real problem we have. If we did we’d be up to our ears in boats and that’s just what we don’t want,” says Parry. The basins are already full of York boats.
In Parry’s view, the best position to be in a blow is on a mooring. Just double your lines and add chafing gear, he advises local boat owners. “At a float you could get pounded or the float could break away.” If things look really bad, Parry and his assistant, Mike Hanlon, take the two harbormaster boats away from the town dock to a sheltered spot way up river. They haven’t done that since they can’t remember when, and they didn’t do it for Isabel or Juan.
Winter storms aren’t much of a bother either. Most of the recreational boats are out of the water by the Oct. 12 Columbus Day weekend, which simplifies things. The 35 to 40 lobster boats and three draggers are at the docks. “The current is so stiff the harbor barely gets a skim of ice in the coldest weather,” says Parry. “Floes come down from up river and occasionally take out a mooring or damage a float. If the summer [Harbormaster’s] office, located on a dock, floats away in a big tide, it floats away. We’ll have to go chase it. That’s about it.”
The occasional winter rescue punctuates the dreaded winter duty of catching up on paperwork. In recent times it’s been “silly stuff – rescuing dogs trapped on ice floes – you can’t just leave the dog out there. And last year a deer was reported swimming off Long Sands Beach. The people who called in were worried he’d swim out to sea. We herded him to shore with the boat. Then there’s the occasional looney-toon winter kayaker we go after when the weather and the seas are too much for him.”
Parry has been York’s harbormaster since 1992, but he brought his 35-foot Finn Sailer to York in 1970 and lived on it weekends and vacations while commuting to work in Boston. When he retired from a career in forensic investigation with the Boston Police Department, he moved to York permanently and just happened to mention to the then-harbormaster that he was available if he was looking for help. “He jumped on me,” says Parry. The changes in the town [and harbor use] since then have been nothing short of “tremendous.”
“We’re a suburb of Boston now and as the population gets more and more affluent, more people get into boating,” he says. When Parry first came on, the harbormaster kept the mooring waiting list in his hat. Today that list, now over 300, is managed by a computer. And yes, some of the wealthy can be difficult, Parry admits. “They feel entitled for some unknown reason, but it all goes in one of my ears and out the other. I’d be foolish to listen.”
York’s fishermen are a pretty good group of guys, he says. “They just want to make a living and be left alone. We try to accommodate them all we can but they’re pretty undemanding. Maybe somebody needs a mooring moved once in a while to make maneuvering a little easier. Stuff like that. They help us, we help them,” says Parry.