Many Vineyard residents, both seasonal and year-round, don’t remember a time when the Islander wasn’t steaming back and forth from the mainland, and now that she’s gone, they miss her.

“The Islander was an icon for the Island,” says Tony Ratcliff, a retired house painter who lives in Oak Bluffs with his wife Deborah. “I rode it the first summer it was in service, in 1950.”

Fortunately for Tony, he can look at the Islander – in miniature – through his living room window every day. Several years ago, at his wife’s request, he made a birdhouse modeled after the boat. Birds enter the two-unit dwelling where the freight deck doors would be. Its two pilothouses are hinged so Tony can lift them off when he needs to clean the “apartments” after the tenants have moved on.

 “When I first started it,” says Tony, “it stretched my imagination. I went over and stood in the Steamship Authority parking lot and stared at the boat, trying to get a sense of its proportions.”

To make the rounded hull, he purchased thin plywood that he could bend into shape. The rest of the boat is built from scrap material he had lying around his workshop. The railing around the top deck, for example, is wire mesh topped with a length of electrical cord, all painted black.

Tony has made two additional Islander birdhouses, each of which, he says, improves on the earlier versions. He made the second one because his friend Kristen Kingsbury Henshaw “wouldn’t stop naggin’ me about putting one into the Ag Fair.” This model has an upgrade: He added the Islander name boards, created on his computer. “I urethaned the daylights out of ’em and glued ’em on.” He believes the second birdhouse is more accurately proportioned, describing the first one, which he calls his prototype, as “a little dumpy.”

He went on to a third at the request of one of the technicians at his dentist’s office – she and her co-workers wanted to give it to the dentist for his birthday. “I figured,” says Tony, “here’s a lady who puts sharp, spinning objects in my mouth – I’d better do what she asks!” While this last one was made on commission, Tony has no plans to produce any more Islander birdhouses. Though he confesses that it did occur to him that he could have made a killing selling them at the ferry terminal on the day of the steamship’s last voyage, he figures he’ll leave commercial production to someone else. Because he has emphysema, it’s not good for him to breathe in too much sawdust. Moreover, he explains, “For me, working in the shop is like having an orgasm: Afterwards, I just want to roll over and go to sleep.”

The second birdhouse, by the way, did go to the Ag Fair, where it won second prize. “I was surprised even to have been in the running,” Tony says. Since Kristen was behind his making it, he decided to give it to her. “It’s the only time,” he says, “that I’ve ever seen her cry.”