Cooperative Living April 2023 - 13

COOPERATIVEFOCUS
" I am a repurposer of boats.
I can look at an old boat
and in about fifteen minutes,
I will have a vision of what
it will look like. "
- Dan Corder
" I went to look at it because it was
$58,000 and I could afford that. All the
windows were knocked out and raccoons
were living in it, but I bought it. Every
time I was offfromwork, I came here
and worked on it, " he says. " I love Callao.
It reminds me ofwhere I grew up, in
Ashburn in Northern Virginia, back
when it was still a rural farming
community. "
" I saw Ashburn go from 140 people
and farms to over 400,000 people and
data centers in nine years. I was a fire
station captain in Ashburn for 14 years,
and I saw the tremendous growth-
and some ofthe negative behavior that
comes from that. "
SETTING SAIL FOR NEW LANDS
He laughs that his journey to Callao
involved " a lot ofdumb luck. " Working
on the old house he'd bought for years
on weekends, he befriended neighbor
Bart Bartholomew, a retiredWorldWar
II naval commander with stories about
naval life. His stories included memories
oftime spent around the now-infamous
Bikini Atoll, where American nuclear
tests in the 1940s-'50s pushed some
native islanders offtheir land and
wreaked radiation havoc in the area
for decades.
Bartholomew spent weekends in a
nearby 1950s brick house that needed
work on a beautiful waterfront point
ofland. Corder helped him with many
projects, refusing payment for his work.
He admired the property, joking to
Bartholomew that ifhe ever won the
lottery, he'd buy it.
co-opliving.com
" We became close friends. He had
told me that one by one, his shipmates
came down with cancer. One day I got
a phone call and he said, 'My turn,' telling
me he'd been diagnosed and wanted me
to have the house, " Corder recalls. " I told
him I was getting ready to retire and
didn't want to enter retirement with a
mortgage. He offered the house to me
for about halfits appraisal [value]. "
Corder felt uneasy about the offer,
but Bartholomew kept calling. Finally
Corder talked with Bartholomew's
grown son who told him, " Dad is in
full-time hospice care and it would help
us to get this squared away. " A contract
was drawn up and shortly after closing,
Bartholomew died.
Corder had created his first pirate
boat in 1999 after another neighbor,
the late Skinny Beasley, gave him an
old barge that kept sinking
and had to be pumped
out.
" Skinny was a legend.
He probably built half
the docks you see in the
Northern Neck, " Corder
explains. " The night he
gave me the barge I
thought, what am I going
to do with this thing?
I decided to make it
into a pirate ship. "
He laughs, " It was
the most gaudy-looking
thing you've ever seen.
I rigged it up with a
motor and when you
saw it you'd think, 'how
Dan Corder doing what
he does best, bringing
something back to life.
April 2023 ●
Cooperative Living ●
11
is that thing floating?' "
One day a stranger who saw the
boat visited and asked, " Howmuch do
you want for it? "
Corder remembers, " I told him
it wasn't for sale. The man said 'ifyou
were going to sell it, howmuch would
you take?' I said $10,000 and then the
man replied, 'who do I make the check
out to?' "
That pirate ship wound up at Smith
Mountain Lake inMoneta, Va. After
that, Corder started buying old boats
and transforming them into pirate ships.
" Most were destined for the dump, "
he says. " Marinas still contact me
regularly; we have five marinas close by
and people will rent slips and abandon
their boats. The marina usually then sells
the boat for past due slip fees. "
(continued onpage 12)
PHOTOS BY JIM ROBERTSON
PHOTO BY JIM ROBERTSON
http://www.co-opliving.com
Cooperative Living April 2023

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