The first time Angus Mowat sailed a boat, he was five years old, and he set out across the bay at Trenton, using his mother’s umbrella as a sail; but the story he has to tell is not about himself, but about the boat he resurrected, The Scott Hutcheson.

She is moored now in the tiny harbor beside the Mowat’s Northport home, a 34 foot, 14 ton Ketch. In 1968 when Mr. Mowat brought her home, she was almost completely gone, still, in his memory she was the most beautiful boat on the lake.

The Scott Hutcheson isn’t the first boat Mr. Mowat has had, “I was owned for years by a boat called the Scotch Bonnet,” he, said. When he sold her, he built a model of the sort of boat he would love to own. Strangely he built a model similar to a boat he had known years before, the Scott Hutcheson.

The memory kept drawing him back, and finally, he went to visit her owner, Muriel Mills, a woman who had fished and had become the last of a number of owners of the boat. She too loved her, and agreed to sell the boat to Mr. Mowat, “Rather than to the divers who could never appreciate her.”

“I learned slowly, and a long time ago that you don’t own things. While you are alive you have the use of them.”

So, she was brought to Northport, a tired derelict, and her life was renewed by the loving hands of a man who had watched her being built at Barcovan Beach in 1910, by Scott Hutcheson.

“Anything I had to do with the boat I’ve regarded as a commemoration to him, perhaps something of him that I’m keeping alive. He was a poet who never wrote a line of poetry, but there is poetry in the lines of the boat. It is as important as a poem.”