I have just been invited to go for a sail in my boat. I say my boat because Bluebeard was my boat for so long —thanks to the ministrations of dozens of friends.

For nearly 30 years, these friends grimly knew me as the captain of this 12-foot fiberglass Edgartown beachboat. Bluebeard bobbed variously (thanks to these friends) in the waters of the Lagoon in Vineyard Haven, in Edgartown harbor, in the Edgartown Eel Pond and in Tisbury Great Pond. In the last years of my ownership, Bluebeard sadly sat enveloped in a tangle of bittersweet on a rusting trailer in my Tiasquam Road backyard in West Tisbury.

Finally I decided to put Bluebeard on the market.

Natutically-minded friends like Mary Jane Pease of Chilmark and Mark Alan Lovewell of Vineyard Haven helped me describe her in For Sale ads. Clearly they did splendidly, even if they had certain doubts about Bluebeard’s seaworthiness after two years on land. Within days I had a buyer. Paul Cotton of Vineyard Haven — handyman, boat restorer, yachtsman and real estate mogul — arrived at my back door one late summer day last year, with his checkbook in hand.

He circled Bluebeard as he would have had he been buying a cow or a horse, or at least that was the way it looked to me. He couldn’t examine her teeth, but he did show slight dismay at the vomit-colored patches of fiberglass on her deck. In minutes, however, he was writing a check for $100 for Bluebeard and her trailer and supervising the attaching of the creaking, rusted trailer and its burden to the back of his son Benjamin’s snazzy Ford F350.

He liked her basic looks, Paul Cotton said matter-of-factly, and he would see to her restoration and make her a star in Vineyard Haven harbor’s yachting fleet. Clearly, she had good blood (or he may have said lines). These accolades were enough for me. Bluebeard and I were old pals after more than two decades together, and I was not giving her giving her away to the boat yard equivalent of a horse dealer who would have turned her into glue. There were those patches of fiberglass. Her rigging was somewhat frayed. The cotter pin at the foot of the mast, even though it was replaced each year, could never somehow be unscrewed. Then when I went looking for Bluebeard’s sails in my shed, it turned out that mice had snugly nestled in her jib and eaten some of it.

Regardless of all this, Mr. Cotton seemed pleased with his purchase and I was glad Bluebeard was going to a good home, now at a Vineyard Haven mooring just below Owen Park.

Had I waited another year, I learned recently, I would have had another prospective buyer. Former beachboat owner Ann Dickinson of Edgartown had found the sails from her beloved 1960s beachboat Payola, but there was no more Payola. When she heard about Bluebeard, she thought she might provide a home for the beachboat sails — until I informed her that Bluebeard was no longer mine to sell.

On the day earlier this summer when Bluebeard was launched near the Black Dog pier, I assembled as many of her caretakers over the years as I could. I also invited Ann Dickinson.

And I invited Tom Dunlop, since he was among those, like Ann, who learned to sail on a beachboat at the Edgartown Yacht Club in the 1960s. He learned well enough so he actually sailed once the 30 miles to Nantucket (though he admits he was foolhardy to do it).

Tom knows a great deal about the Manuel Swartz Roberts-designed beachboat and believes Bluebeard, since she is fiberglass, was probably built at the Norton and Easterbrooks boatyard in Edgartown. He also says that virtually all of the Edgartown beachboat fleet ended their days in Nantucket because the boat has shallow draft and is better suited to Nantucket than Vineyard waters. He thinks Bluebeard may be the last of her line still in Island waters.

Because the launching party was early in the season, a half-dozen of us were there on the beach to admire the rejuvenated Bluebeard. She looked spiffy with her old blue paint touched up with mineral oil, the odious fiberglass patches covered by fresh white paint.

She has a repaired centerboard, but is being promised a totally new one in time. (The old one suffered from Bluebeard’s having run aground frequently on shoals in Tisbury Great Pond.) She has a new rudder for the same reason. Her splendid new bilge pump (somewhat the star of Paul Cotton’s rejuvenation) is activated by the sun’s rays (or something like that). At least Bluebeard now has a pump that does not require manpower to operate. Her old one had long since been put to use in the waters of Estonia by Ivo Meisner of Oak Bluffs and Estonia. He took it away some years ago as partial payment for the years he had dived for Bluebeard’s mushroom anchor in the murky Great Pond and then slogged about in the muck and attached a gallon milk bottle to her bow as a marker.

In rejuvenating her, Paul Cotton discovered what a fine, seaworthy craft she is. Those who have helped to resuscitate her for sailing purposes through the years have often doubted it. But it turns out she has a strong spine of bronze and her ballast is cement.

We drank Prosecco and ate peanuts and shrimp on the beach as we admired the Cotton handiwork. Anne Ganz of Chilmark, who had frequently jumped overboard to dislodge Bluebeard from the shoal where cormorants bask in the sun, was on hand. She had prepared a blue beard of ribbon, and presented it, with her compliments for a job well done, to Paul Cotton. Mary Jane Pease, who with her late husband, Mike, trailered Bluebeard from Edgartown to Tisbury Great Pond years ago, was there. So was Ivo Meisner, who said he wouldn’t miss the finale of Bluebeard’s years with me at the tiller for anything. Charles Young of Aquinnah, who has rigged and pulled and heave-hoed Bluebeard, was also there. But many were missing. There was no Peter Meras of East Chop, who not infrequently had rolled Bluebeard on logs into the Great Pond. Joe Keenan of West Tisbury, one of the divers for Bluebeard’s mooring, was not on hand. Nor were Isaac and Trudy Russell of West Tisbury — stalwarts who for decades had welcomed Bluebeard to the waters of Deep Bottom Cove below their camp in summer and let her winter over in the camp’s backyard.

Missing too was Dr. Bob Franklin of Vineyard Haven, who had provided Bluebeard with a mooring below his Lagoon house, and Phil Flesichman and Ralph Braun of Vineyard Haven — both sometime launching aides. Nor was Martha Moore of West Tisbury, Charlotte Hall of Edgartown, Laura Silber of West Tisbury, Don Shanor of Edgartown, Gerry Catton of Chilmark or Tim Foote of Chilmark — the most accomplished yachtsman of all who replaced me at the tiller of Bluebeard on afternoon outings. Nick Rossi and Sal Laterra of Providence would like to have attended but could not.

I probably should have remembered to invite Republican presidential candidate Lincoln Chafee. In the days when he was a U.S. senator, I had called his office once when Bluebeard needed a new jib. I had a seafaring friend who worked there and I thought might know of a jib in Rhode Island that would fit. My friend was away and so was Senator Chafee, but an aide tried to be helpful. He said he knew more about Rhode Island-made Herreshoffs than Edgartown beachboats.

Now that I think of it, I also should have invited certain members of the Island constabulary. When one of my rusty trailers proudly bearing Bluebeard broke down one afternoon on Music street en route to Deep Bottom Cove, West Tisbury Sgt. Skipper Manter and Chilmark police officers Brian Cioffi (now Chief Cioffi) and Paul Lawton had helped get the trailer and its precious cargo out of the middle of the road.

Paul Cotton tells me he has a skull and crossbones for the mast of Bluebeard and that I will see it when he takes me for my sail.

In fact Black Beard was the notorious pirate. But Bluebeard was just as bad. He was a fairy tale fellow who kept a series of wives shut up in a tower before he killed them. I never changed the name because it’s bad luck to change a boat’s name.

With so many devoted old friends of Bluebeard I wonder if I could ask Capt. Paul Cotton if, one by one, he would take all of them out for a sail sometime. There must be some sort of reciprocity among captains that would make him willing to do so