The Wizards of Stony Creek

Synchronicity,” muses 70-year-old Jonathan “Johnny” Waters, sharing coffee from a thermos with his 34-year-old daughter, Emilie Waters Harris. It is late summer 2022, and we’re sitting in weathered wooden lawn chairs on the wharf at Bradley & Waters Marine Railway. It has been the Waters’s wharf since 1985, and their railway. It’s the last bit of working waterfront in the village of Stony Creek, nestled in Connecticut’s Thimble Islands.

Waters is grasping for a word to explain the uncanny events and kismet that have connected him across time and space to earlier generations of boatbuilders, shellfishers, and their boats. He gives his friends and neighbors an easy smile when they choose to see something like magic in the uncommon life he has fashioned. They sometimes call him “spellbound.”

Who can blame them? After all, the man named the pride of his little fleet of workboats MERLIN, for King Arthur’s wizardly mentor. Many of his boats are named after birds. Merlin is a little hawk as well as a sorcerer. Waters loves the double entendre.

Emilie is a microbiologist and high-school teacher as well as a shellfisher, boat carpenter, and maritime preservationist like her “Pop.” She’s a pragmatist, for sure. But there are moments when she, too, wonders whether being born with a surname like “Waters” and growing up amid the Thimble Islands comes with a certain aquatic destiny. On this sultry August morning, father and daughter are preparing for another day of tending to their wharf, their workboats, and their Thimble Island Shellfish Co.