The last of the junk cars which have been languishing at Gerry Jeffers for decades are headed off-Island to be recycled. Personnel of JWL Transportation are extracting the rusty hulks from the weeds with a huge fork lift, loading them onto flatbed trucks and bringing them down to the ferry point. Then a big excavator with a menacing looking claw at the end of its boom grabs them and stacks them on John Packer’s barge Innovative. With a load of 20 or so vehicles aboard, the Innovative heads down harbor to the Mattakesset landing, where the claw once again muckles onto them, transferring the antiques over to tractor trailers for the trip back to America.

Handling disintegrating vehicles is challenging. But the claw operator did an admirable job of clamping onto objects that could only very loosely be described as motor vehicles. The bed of a pickup truck is held on by only half a dozen bolts. And that’s when it’s brand new. Anyone who has owned one, knows what happens to a pickup truck bed in a salt water environment. Eventually gravity is the only reason that the bed stays with the rest of the truck.

The operators of the Innovative handle that vessel as if it were on wheels. It is propelled by the biggest outboard motors ever seen in these waters. At the corners of the stern of the barge are hydraulically driven propellers at the end of long shafts. Big diesel engines supply the oomph to turn those propellers and move the barge along fast enough to leave an appreciable wake. When the barge is in a position where it needs to remain, tall spuds on the port side of the barge are dropped to the harbor bottom to hold the barge solidly in place. I watched over the years as the superstructure has evolved to two stories high. You couldn’t ask for a pilot house with a better view all around. Innovative is the right name for it.

Travelers on the ferry were distracted by the fascinating activity of lifting the hulks from truck to barge. Several folks pointed out cars and pickups in the heap that they used to ride in as kids. Lots of history and memories in that pile of steel. Thanks to Gerry Jeffers we get another chance to reminisce about days long gone by.