Rockaway’s Dragonboat Meets Her End

By Katie McFadden

“It’s the end of an era on Jamaica Bay. The Dragonfly’s Banquet has paraded her waters for thirty years. Confusing the Coast Guard, amusing the fishermen and carousing the bayside bars. Two or three generations of weekend pirates have lost their Mondays to her magical mystery tours. When a stranger pointed with awe at the horizon, the locals, without looking up from their cocktails, said ‘Oh, that’s The Dragonboat,’” artist and Captain Geoff Rawling told The Rockaway Times, announcing the end of the colorful vessel that caught second glances as it glided across Jamaica Bay. Earlier this month, the beloved boat finally gave way to Mother Nature, becoming merely a vessel for floating and fleeting memories of good times’ past.

In the winter of ’95 and ’96, Tim Johnson and Gretchen Neutrino built out the boat in Provincetown, MA, using recycled materials from another vessel, the Son of Town Hall, as well as debris from beaches and construction sites. The oversized raft had a big mast and sail and would often go where the tide took her, but she also had a little 25-horsepower motor and a rutter system, directed by a steering wheel on board. Gretchen is the daughter of the late Poppa Neutrino, a musician who had a fleet of rafts built from trash and was most known for sailing one from Maine to Ireland, a 60-day voyage on which he even survived a heart attack.

Part of the fleet, Poppa Neutrino sailed Dragonfly’s Banquet from Provincetown to Martha’s Vineyard and then to New York in the late 1990s, where she found an adoptive home. “I think he was sailing up the intercoastal and ended up here. He showed up at Mike Tubridy’s bungalow in Rockaway because the Coast Guard had spotted this weird boat and sent him in because he had some butane or propane tanks on it. So, he parked it at Mike’s. He was an interesting guy and musician who said he was gonna build boats to sail across the Atlantic and he had all these stories,” Rawling recalled. “He disappeared for a while and Mike inherited the boat, but he didn’t really have the time or patience for it.”

So, Dragonfly’s Banquet kept hopping around, hoping to land at a dock that would take her. Rockaway Artists Alliance member Jan Nabozenko took her until the boat drew the interest of Geoff Rawling, who had also spent time bouncing from spot to spot since arriving in New York from London in the early 1980s. “When I came to Rockaway in 1988, it was to paint a bar. I thought Rockaway Beach was a Ramone’s song. I had no idea there was a beach in NYC,” Rawling said. “But when I came, I got sucked in. The bay to me is the most magical thing. I had a bungalow on Beach 85th but they burned us out and people like Mike Tubridy and other friends from Broad Channel threw me in the water and had me pulling ropes and learning how boats work. When I saw Dragonfly’s Banquet, to me it was this floating sculpture that people can be on. It was a fascinating sculpture that happened to be a boat.”

So, Rawling became her captain, taking her on unique adventures around Jamaica Bay. Over the years, he maintained her, repainting parts of it, and even replacing the head after one or two fell into the bay, but he always kept the official name. Although she became known locally as the Dragonboat, Dragonfly’s Banquet was always appropriate. “When she was docked in the springtime, I’d find dragonflies on her, or I’d be steering her and would have six of them sitting on me. It was magical like that,” he said. But while dragonflies always seemed to find the Dragonboat, Rawling sometimes had a tough time finding places to dock her. “When I took it over, I had it at Marina 59 for a while until they got greedy, so she moved around a lot and had various adventures. Robert Kaskel at Thai Rock was always generous and let me keep her there a lot,” he said.

Often on weekends or even Mondays, Rawling would take friends out to galivant upon the bay. “During the early 2000s, there were a lot of guys in their 20s and 30s that were into the boat and would come and crew and everyone would pitch in. We often had a lot of lifeguards on there. We had music on top all the time. My one rule was that you had to be prepared to swim. If you couldn’t swim or were scared of the water, you were warned to not come aboard,” Rawling said.

But those who did were always in for an adventure. “The Tubridys had a flotilla back in the day off of Bungalow Bar and they invited us along with the Dragonboat and everybody brought something they floated on and tied it to the boat. I think it was on a Tuesday and we didn’t think anyone would show up, but people started arriving with huge floating coolers, wearing Mexican hats and brought anything that floated, including sex dolls and we floated into Jamaica Bay. It was a wild event,” he said.

Sometimes he tested her limits. “We could fit about 30 or 40 people on that boat but she was really made of wood and Styrofoam and one time a few girls freaked out because there was about an inch of water on the deck because there was so much weight on it. A lot of the Tubridys and Broad Channel guys were on the roof, so I had all the guys jump off and Bryan’s Auto had his big boat and came to the rescue,” Rawling shared.

But on paper, Rawling did everything by the books. “It was registered. It had 18 lifejackets, enough for the legal limit for a party of 15 plus me, and two crew members,” Rawling said.

However, that didn’t stop some from asking for proof, as after all, a floating, colorful, dragon-shaped piece of art filled with young folks having a good time, often drew some attention. “We had crazy adventures with authorities who always wound up being empathetic at the end. We were raided by seven authorities in one day. Some lady saw us chugging along against the current one summer, sailing parallel to Beach Channel and called the authorities. A huge helicopter flew over and they knew us, we were waving to them, and it looked like they were coming down, so we slowed down, hid anything illegal and they got back in the helicopter like nothing happened.

“But after 9/11, a homeland security boat with a fan behind it came hurtling from behind and stopped at our portside. They didn’t say anything to us except asked us if we were alright. I said ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ They had gotten a report that we were in trouble. Some Karen in Belle Harbor had called and said the boat was struggling and made a whole hoopla. It was a Wednesday in August. Police showed up, fire trucks all over Beach Channel Drive, a monster fireboat from NY Harbor asked if we were alright. It was like nobody had anything else going on that day.  We had a journalist on board from Germany and he was shaking and said, ‘in Germany, we’d all be in jail.’ But we were in Rockaway, we weren’t a threat, we were just having fun on the bay. We had Coast Guard stop us one day and we showed them the life jackets and everything and they were impressed. They realized it was pretty cool. It was the last remnant of free America, a place where we could be on the water, and nobody was getting hurt,” Rawling said. “But she was always the center of attention.”

It’s why many used the Dragonboat for special occasions. From everything from birthdays to bachelor and bachelorette parties, to being used for a funeral after Rawling’s good friend and fellow pirate, Chris Preston, aka Blu died, and they held a funeral on board, throwing his ashes overboard, to being included in wedding plans, like when Bobby Butler and Casey Brouder used the boat to make their grand entrance to their Bungalow Bar wedding in 2017.

But as the young crew members and pirates grew up, time took hold of Rockaway’s Dragonboat. “About five years ago, I was getting frustrated because everything was so expensive to dock her in the winter and David Selig, out of the blue said, ‘would you bring the Dragonboat to my place?’ Dave is a sweetheart and has always been supportive of the boat and Whaleamina and public art, so we docked her at front poles outside his property around Beach 49th. It would eventually be her final resting place. “She had a great innings, but her crews grew up and had children, her Captains got old, and her structure was broken and decaying,” Rawling said. “It was a lot of maintenance every spring to upgrade her, and she slowly started falling apart. A few weeks ago, we were going to bring her on to a dock and fix her up, but we noticed things falling off and the bottom was really rotten. Then a windstorm came, and she was on her side.”

And that marked the end of the era of Dragonfly’s Banquet. “Two weeks ago, we had five nice days to be on the bay so we dismantled her and put her in a dumpster, and I saved what I could,” Rawling said.

Her pieces will go to people who loved her and may be on display for an art show. As for future iterations, “Might you see a modified Dragonboat or perhaps a fleet of mini versions in the future?” Rawling said… “Only the horseshoe crabs know for sure.”

Photos by Sherif Elgawly, Bryan Fraser and Geoff Rawling.