Tisbury town government lacks direction.

That’s not a political criticism, just a statement of fact. If you tried to set your bearings by the magnificent copper, brass, bronze and gold leaf weather vane on top of town hall, you would end up lost.

The vane itself shows which way the wind is blowing all right, but the attached compass, the bit which should point north, south, east and west, doesn’t point in those directions and has not for an indeterminate period of time.

As best can be established, the thing has been broken for somewhere between nine months and 12 years — nine months being the approximate time since someone first noticed, and 12 years being the time since it was put up.

But like the weather vane itself, it seems, efforts to rectify the problem also have suffered from a lack of direction, although now, at last, moves are afoot to fix it. Maybe.

Now back to the beginning.

The weather vane was put up in 1996, according to Aase Jones, assistant to the town administrator and town expert on the matter.

“We had to take the old weather vane down,” she said. “It is several hundred years old and a wonderful piece. I swear it looks almost identical to an old one they have in my old home town of Bergen, Norway. It has a star in the front and a tail in back. The first thing that comes to mind when I see this one is a mermaid.

“But it was precariously hanging up there after a big storm.

“And we had a new one made by [the late] Travis Tuck, the famous metal sculptor. We put it on the cover of the town report because it was the big event of that year. Actually we won first prize in the state because it was such a beautiful cover.”

The new weather vane was a copy of the old one, made largely of copper but with elements of bronze and brass and glittering with 23.5-carat gold leaf.

“Putting it up was a major undertaking,” recalled Ms. Jones. “I think the day it was put up or the next day after, we had a major northeaster. I don’t know if it went awry right away, or if something happened in between to loosen some of the bolts or something.”

With the new weather vane in place, the old one was stored behind the stage in town hall’s Katharine Cornell Theatre — from where it was promptly swiped. A town investigation involved rounding up all the people who had used the theatre, one of whom freely admitted to having taken it. He thought it was going to be thrown out.

He returned it immediately, which is just as well, because antique weather vanes are valuable things. This one is perhaps worth upwards of $100,000 to a collector, according to Tony Holand, who was Travis Tuck’s apprentice, who took over the late Mr. Tuck’s business and who will do the repairs to the new vane if and when it can be organized.

Mr. Holand said he first was made aware that the new weathervane was pointing the wrong way when the captain of one of the Steamship Authority ferries came to see him, maybe nine months or a year back.

The problem was first brought to wider attention, though, by Tisbury harbor master Jay Wilbur.

“Ferry captains use it when docking, to see which way the wind is blowing,” he said this week, explaining that he also had known of the problem for well over six months.

“The pointer itself still works, it’s just the compass beneath which shows the north, south, east and west, which has somehow got skewed.”

Mr. Wilbur dutifully told other town officials, and has been lobbying for action for well over six months. But nothing happened. So he raised it at the most recent selectmen’s meeting, saying the compass was pointing about 180 degrees the wrong way.

For his trouble, Mr. Wilbur was given the job of organizing repairs. He was made weather vane ambassador.

And in truth, the title fits. A certain amount of shuttle diplomacy will be required, as Mr. Wilbur made clear after the meeting.

“It’s a difficult problem to solve and I think no one really wanted to own it,” he said. “It gets confused in the town’s division of responsibility, between the selectmen and the DPW. The selectmen own it, the DPW takes care of it,” he said, adding a trifle ruefully:

“It’s still not clear whose responsibility it is. So they made it mine.”

Then there is the matter of getting Mr. Holand up there to fix it. Which will mean getting the fire department to cooperate. And that will block traffic, which presumably means the police will have to be in on it too.

It will, said both Ms. Jones and Mr. Wilbur, take a fair bit of organizing. But with the imprimatur of the selectmen and both of them on the case, things seem to be pointing the right way at last.