Tim, Linda and Taz

Taz really was a sweet little dog.  Few people ever knew that.  Though I’m unsure how he got his name, he certainly could be a little devil!  He didn’t like people, but throughout our morning neighborhood visits, I wormed a way into his heart.  Cheddar cheese!  I became his only human friend outside his family.

Whenever he could break out, he’d hot-foot it to our house.  This is how Linda and I became friends also.  She’d come to collect him and we’d fall into wonderful conversations that were funny, deep and real.  She was the only friend who thought to bring me flowers when my mother died.

I’d met Tim in the early 80s when my boat was at the festival.  Kiwi suggested I join he and his friends for dinner.  “We’ll motor by and you can just jump aboard.  We’re going to the Ajax.”  Standing on the deck of my boat and seeing Heather putting by, all 6 people onboard yelled “JUMP!”  Where, I thought?  This is crazy.  So I jumped.

Slow as she goes, it was “a three hour cruise.  A three hour cruise.”

I’ve come to think of Tim as one of my “girlfriends,” a special title relegated to a precious few.

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Diana Talley has been around wooden boats since the 1970s in Sausalito. She is a shipwright by trade. She has built sailboats, fished along the Pacific Coast, and moved to Port Townsend in 1990, creating Taku Marine, a boat repair service she ran with her late partner Rick Petrykowski until the mid 2010s. Now retired, she still lives in Port Townsend.

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