AHOY, MATEYS
Ahoy, Mateys
By Maria Johnson
Photographs by Bert VanderVeen
On many a fair-weather evening, as the sun paints the sky around Lake Jeanette with neon pinks and purples, you can make a sport of watching cars on Bass Chapel Road as they slow down on the low-slung bridge near the marina.
Heads swivel as drivers stare at a curious vessel that bobs on the lake’s rippled surface. Red brake lights flash as motorists try to stay in their lanes while making sense of their water-borne fever dreams.
Before they reach the other shore, most passers-by give in to the delirium. They honk. They wave. They smile at the floating fantasy that Jess Washburn and his crew have cobbled together over the past few years.
Built on the frame of a disabled pontoon boat that’s tied to a motorized sister craft, their creation is basically a freshwater tiki bar with sandy-toed touches: torches ablaze; a carnival’s worth of multicolored LED lights; a tin roof; faux potted palms; plastic skeletons in swabby garb; grass-skirt fringes fluttering in the breeze; a glowing, 40-inch flatscreen TV; a mind-the-wake-and-take-your-best-shot dart board; and a seriously tall but not-seriously-plumb bamboo flagpole draped with a couple of Jolly Rogers that threaten absolutely no one.
The overall effect is Gilligan’s Island meets Pirates of the Caribbean meets Cheers.
“After a long day at work, when I’m kinda stressed out, I get out there, and I can immediately relax,” says Captain Washburn. “I know I’m gonna see my friends, and I know I’m gonna get a good laugh.”
When he’s not combing the internet for pirate-adjacent accessories, Washburn works as a salesman for Greensboro-based Morrisette Packaging. He also buys and develops older industrial buildings, and perhaps most important to his nautical dreams, he owns Lake Jeanette itself.
Eight years ago, his company, Lenoir Warehouse Group, bought the 270-acre lake in North Greensboro, along with nearby Buffalo Lake, which covers a meager 105 acres by comparison.
Cone Mills Corp. created both reservoirs — Buffalo in 1922, Jeanette in 1943, according to a state inventory of dams — to provide water for its White Oak plant, which wove denim for the U.S. military among other customers.
Eventually, Cone sold its holdings to International Textile Group, which decided to shed the private lakes, by then surrounded by pricey homes.
Washburn had lived on Buffalo Lake for eight years. He was afraid an outside investment group might buy and develop what had been his duck-filled backyard.
So the perpetually tanned outdoorsman, who literally looks at life through the aquamarine lenses of his Maui Jim sunglasses, jumped on the urban watering holes.
He already had a pontoon boat docked at Lake Jeanette, where he enjoyed fishing and taking friends on cocktail-hour cruises.
His imagination churned with what could be moored even closer to home.
“I wanted a tiki boat on Buffalo Lake for the longest time,” says Washburn, who was inspired by the tiki-themed water taxis that slosh tourists on booze cruises up and down Taylor’s Creek near Beaufort, N.C.
Alas, Washburn’s modest lakefront dock wouldn’t support such a dream on Buffalo Lake.
Lake Jeanette, with its well-concealed marina, was a better fit. But tearing down a perfectly good pontoon boat to make a floating tiki bar did not make sense, even to a repressed pirate.
Five years passed.
Arggg.
Then a friend made Washburn an irresistible offer: Washburn could have the friend’s dilapidated pontoon boat in Virginia if he would make the trip to retrieve it.
Washburn huddled with four friends, who all loved hunting, fishing and spending time on the water.
Rodney Hazel, a real estate agent who had been Washburn’s pal since they were students at Chapel Hill, was gung-ho.
So was Todd McCurry, a textile company executive.
Ditto medical device salesman Ben McAlhany.
The crew towed the junker boat to the Greensboro home of master carpenter Kevin Crowder and turned his backyard into a boatyard.
They commissioned Crowder to create a pirate’s den in the spirit of Peter Pan’s nemesis, Captain Hook, which is to say, a youthful idea of a slightly dangerous good time.
But first, Crowder ripped off the rotting deck and replaced it with inch-thick, marine-grade plywood. He added floats under the frame for stability.
Above deck, he built in a cabin big enough to house a bar with bench seating, plus a small galley where an outboard motor would have been.
As the watercraft took shape, the crew and their mates dragged in building supplies, some donated, some discounted.
Washburn got his hands on some sheet metal for the roof and walls. He wangled some AstroTurf, left over from a Wake Forest University lacrosse field, for the deck.
McCurry rustled up some outdoor fabric for seat cushions.
Hazel donated a large bell that he found in a store in Ocracoke.
Washburn salvaged pine pallets that would become the boat’s shiplap siding and freestanding bar. He also bought a solar-powered generator to provide electricity for the mini-refrigerator-and-freezer that had once occupied his son’s dorm room. He found pre-lit, solar-powered palm trees online.
McAlhany contributed a gas grill in the interest of keeping the crew stoked with hamburgers and fajitas.
“We’d get out there every night and say, ‘This would be cool. Let’s try this.’ People would come by and say, ‘Oh, I’ve got just the thing for you,’ and they’d send a little something,” Washburn says.
The crew briefly considered adding a hot tub to the party barge, but nixed the plan because of the required maintenance.
They hauled the mostly-finished boat to Lake Jeanette in the spring of 2023. The most treacherous part of the voyage was the traffic circle on Bass Chapel Road.
“We had a real old, kind of a sketchy trailer, and it was rocking back and forth. We went about 5 miles an hour. People behind us were not too happy,” Washburn says through a Cheshire Cat grin.
The crew breathed a sigh of relief when the boat reached the marina, eased into the water and stayed on the surface.
“We weren’t real sure it was going to float because we had a lot of weight on it,” Washburn remembers.
The boat gained weight, in the form of decor, as more friends came aboard.
Mic Cardone handed over a deluxe dartboard with its own cabinet.
Mark Ruffin donated an autographed snapshot of Jerry Garcia, the late leader of psychedelic rock band The Grateful Dead. Ruffin’s brother had been an attorney for Garcia.
Kelly Harrill chipped in a wall-mounted TV that streams internet-based shows via cell phone hotspots.
“It was a community effort,” says Washburn.
At night, as bats pin-wheeled over the water, he hung out on the boat and surfed the web, ordering skeletons, string lights, pirate flags and grass skirts.
“Everything is from Amazon,” he says.
These days, crew members — minus McAlhany, who recently moved to South Carolina — take the tiki boat out as often as five nights a week.
They sip adult beverages, puff cigars and watch deer, ducks and a pair of bald eagles that nest along one of the lake’s coves.
They fish for bass, crappie and perch. Washburn is proud that the lake supports a diversity of marine life.
A few years ago, he asked the Coastal Dynamics Design Lab, based at N.C. State, to study the health of Lake Jeanette, which spills over a dam and eventually into Lake Townsend, a source of drinking water for Greensboro.
“They were amazed at how pristine Lake Jeanette was,” he says.
The crew also likes to stargaze, keeping watch for constellations and shooting stars, as well as Starlink, the satellite communication system, which appears as several fast-moving lights in a row.
“It’s really nice at night. It’s beautiful,” McCurry says quietly.
Sometimes, the vibe on the boat is philosophical. More often, it’s social.
Crew members gather on board to watch golf, NASCAR and football. In the fall, when it’s nippy, they pull the curtains around the cabin, fire up propane heaters, and toast the night away.“
Rain, snow, sleet, hail — we’re gonna say, ‘Yes!,’” says Hazel.
“The rain sounds good on the roof,” Washburn pipes up.
Side-by-side, the tiki boat and its sister vessel can float a party of 16 passengers. Guests leave their graffiti-like marks, with Sharpies, on the tiki boat’s wooden surfaces:
“Let’s have a painkiller party on the U.S.S. Washburn.”
“Go for the flip. Just do it!!”
“Let’s Have One More!”
A barrel stuffed with pirate costumes stands ready for anyone who wants to harrr it up. When the crew gets rowdy, they open a valve to shoot a water cannon. Another water stream appears to emanate from the pelvis of a skeleton that sits on the cabin roof, his legs dangling over the edge.
“Our kids come home and say, ‘Where was this when I lived at home?’” says Hazel.
Short answer: When the younger kids move out, the older kids take over.
Washburn doesn’t deny there’s a strong current of adolescence running through his 61-year-old veins.
“I grew up building forts and treehouses,” he says, reflecting on his childhood in High Point. “Maybe I have a little immature kid in me.”
His playfulness is a hit with other boaters and with revelers at the lakeside gazebo. They wave the tiki boat over for pics.
“It’s an Instagram moment,” says Hazel, who favors a photo-ready skipper’s hat when he’s aboard.
Soon, people might have more selfie opps.
Washburn is considering building a second tiki boat for Buffalo Lake if he can get a larger dock.
Also, his crew is agitating for inclusion in the annual Greensboro Christmas parade.
That would require a trailer big enough to get the boat downtown and then pull the craft through the streets.
Then there’s the issue of Santa.
Would he ride with naughty pirates?
And what would he wear?
Black beard?
Blue beard?
White beard?
Washburn ponders.
His imagination scans the horizon for what could be.
“Yeah, a white beard,” he muses. “Maybe we dress him as Hawaiian Santa. We don’t want all the kids crying. No sword. But maybe . . . ”
Chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil? Santa could toss them from a treasure chest.
“Yeah,” Washburn enthuses. “YEAH!”
Ho-ho-harrrrr.
