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Shelter Island Profile: John Tehan, home on an Island, and a boat named Tubby

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO John Tehan aboard Tubby, his 34-foot trawler with a top speed of seven knots.
CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO
John Tehan aboard Tubby, his 34-foot trawler with a top speed of seven knots.

When John Tehan moved to Shelter Island as a child, he was already anchored by four generations of his mother’s family, ties so strong they drew him back no matter how many times he got away.

A charter boat captain, fishing guide and bayman, John is as familiar with the waters of the Florida Keys as Gardiners Bay. He has lived in California, Arizona and Florida, but always seems to wash up on the Island he refers to as “Paradise.”

“A lot of people find comfort in mainstreaming their lives, but that only appeals to a segment of society,” he said. “Some of us do fine in a hurricane.”

When it comes to riding out a storm, John has a certain style. In early April, while traveling north in Tubby, his 34-foot Marine Trader, en route to Shelter Island from a winter sojourn at Marathon in the Florida Keys, he heard reports of a nor’easter between him and his destination. With Tubby safely tucked away in the cheapest slip in Atlantic City, he hopped on the casino bus and spent two days visiting seafood buffets.

“Everything worked out,” John said. “Lunch at a seafood buffet was $12, complete with raw bar and cracked lobster. I’d take a nap, get up, and do it again for two days. It was delightful.”

John was born in Washington, D.C., but his mother, Evyne House Tehan, had family living in Shelter Island Heights going back to the 1930s. In the early 1960s, John’s family started renting on Shelter Island in the summers.

“The second season we rented next door to the Hannabury’s, so my first friends on Shelter Island were Bill and his sister Cheryl,” John said.

In 1965, the Tehans moved to Shelter Island full-time and John and his brother, Chris, became the fifth generation to live here.

When John and Chris were in their teens, their parents split up, and their father moved to Arizona, where the boys went one Christmas to visit him.

“Back home it was cold and gray,” John recalled. “In Arizona, it was 80 degrees and sunny,”

John moved to Arizona not long after, eventually spending 15 years in the Southwest, gaining two ex-wives (who were roommates when he met them) and “two fabulous children, one with each wife” before he finally found his way back to the Island in 1991.

“When I was young, there was a tremendous drive for Shelter Island youth to get the hell out of here,” he said. “But when you see the rest of the world, you realize you’ve left paradise.”

Paradise was part of his decision to move back, but so was family. He said his relationship with his mother, and with brother Chris, was important to him, and so was his son, Michael. At the time, John’s first wife was increasingly worried about raising their son in Phoenix with its crime and drug problems.

“She said it might not be such a bad idea if Michael grows up on Shelter Island,” John said.

Michael embraced the Shelter Island lifestyle. Now 33, he works as a carpenter and lives in Cutchogue.

John has not remarried. “I stopped buying pretty women houses,” he said.

After 10 years working as a bartender for James and Linda Eklund, primarily at the Chequit, in 2001, John bought Tubby, a slow and reliable “meatloaf” of a boat, so recognizable that children on Shell Beach wave as John steers her past on his way out of West Neck Harbor. In 2006, he began taking groups out for half-day fishing trips and sunset cruises.

“She does not go fast,” he said, pointing out that her name fits her.

Today, John has a full-time charter-boat business, even captaining other people’s boats while they fish. Chris works for the town, a fact that stimulated a bit of sibling rivalry. “My brother is a building inspector,” said John. “So I have the better job.”

Judging by the way porgies were flying over the rails, during a recent half-day outing, John knows how to find fish. “I grew up fishing here,” he said. “Of course, everyone gives you the wrong advice, but I’m out here every day, I see where all the other charter boats are.”

On a trip a week or so ago, John described a young client who asked for help reeling in a large fish. Wanting her to have the satisfaction of landing it, he encouraged her to bring it in solo. He was aghast as she pulled a four-foot shark onto the boat with considerable effort.

“We took a picture of it and I apologized to her for not helping,” he said.

Tubby is perfect for bottom-fishing, and for most of John’s guests, it means returning dockside with a cooler full of black bass, porgies, shark and the rare blowfish, all of which John reduces to a mound of fillets in minutes.

“I had to explain to a 7-year old girl that there is a blowfish tax on Tubby,” John said, describing the subterfuge that was necessary to deliver fresh blowfish to his late mother, who doted on it. “The family of the 7-year-old got a whole cooler full of fish but I took the blowfish.”

Every October 1, John takes Tubby down to work the winter season in Florida, meeting other people on boats as he goes. “People who do this have eccentric lifestyles and tend to live interesting lives,” he said, describing the trip down as a vacation. “Thirty days on the water. Nothing but beautiful communities the whole way.”

On the first Monday in November, John can be found back on the Island, loading up his Midland 19 in the predawn cold and heading out to participate in an annual ritual he’s observed since his youth — opening day of scallop season. It’s a training exercise as well as a fishing one.

“For three weeks, I eat a pure protein diet — scallops and cigarettes. My cigarette to scallop ratio is about 10 to 1. And coffee, coffee, coffee. My purest joy is being out on the water to throw the dredges just at sunrise.”

When the East End weather starts to turn, John heads south. “Every time a snowflake hits my bald spot, I get an electric shock that goes all the way to my toes,” he said. “I sold my chainsaw and my log splitter.”

John summed up the changes on the Island in the years he’s lived here: “In the pastures where Anita Bartilucci kept cattle, there are houses now.”

He’s resigned to the inevitable development. “I’m very impressed with the quality of our Town Board and our local politicians,” he said. “They are real people, I can poke them in the ribs at the post office, I see them at the IGA.”

As he considered Shelter Island’s exceptionalism, Tubby passed through an area of reddish water. “I’m most worried about the density of the population negatively affecting the water in the Bay,” John said, noting the bloom of red tide.

“If I didn’t have people on my boat, I’d be digging ditches for a living, and I’d be a much less happy person,” John said. “We have to share paradise, we can’t keep it to ourselves.”