Jessica's New Room

After 15 years growing up with 1/3-height kids wall paper with a sea creature theme, our teenager declared it was time for a change. All agreed. She picked the colors and carpet; White ceiling, sea-blue walls, sand-colored shallow shag carpet. We all painted. Jessica decorated.

Old Charts? Frame them with scrap lumber and mount them--a good father-daughter project. Also about the only way to get a light weight and aged frame the right size. This one is from Chincoteague, VA, a favorite stop. I had this chart when I first sail the bay in a beach cat, 25 years ago. Old enough to meet her definition of antique.





Boat Hooks and Crab Pot Floats. About a half dozen floats, painted up, collected from beaches. The old iron and wood boat hook actually floated into my docklines during a winter flood.


Fish and Coral. Circling the closet, collected from shops and beaches from North Carolina to Florida.

Ship's Bell. From the ex-USS Carron, a destroyer my company helped decommission.

Two Marine Aquariums. A 12 gallon Atlantic Ocean tank with horseshoe crabs, BIG hermit crabs (broad claw species from Cape Charles, not the common but smaller long claw species), and a spider crab. A 29 gallon Chesapeake tank with crabs and fish collected on a rotating basis. She's thinking marine biology for a career, so she is into this. We keep a small aquarium on the boat, for collecting during long trips.

There's more: a pair of deer antlers mounted on the closet doors, for hanging ropes and scarves. An old classic solid glass fishing pole, a bent-wood lacrosse stick.

It's enough to make the visitor think the house is slowly swaying.