This week it happened again. The northeaster that blew in Tuesday, with wind gusts reaching 60 miles per hour, thrashed the ship Granuaile, Ian McColgin's home until recent years - against the Hyannisport breakwater. By Wednesday morning, it had sunk. ''I think that's our only casualty, so to speak, of the storm,'' said Barn-stable Assistant Harbor Master Joe Gibbs. That casualty was a 1964 mahogany-and-oak ship called Granuaile, and yesterday it turned Eugenia Fortes Beach into a kind of maritime wake. Some hiked a half-mile out on the jetty to view the wreck upclose. Others, like Lucille Johnson and Marcia Cowan of Centerville, came to this beach near the Kennedy compound to gaze at it from afar. The two 82-year-olds, one wearing a pink jacket and the other wrapped in a plastic rain scarf, stopped to chat with the man in yellow boots, tattered blue fleece and canvas fisherman's cap. I'm the owner, he said. ''Ohhhhh,'' they both said. ''That's sad,'' Johnson said. ''Everything was shackled properly,'' McColgin said later. ''I don't know what happened.'' McColgin, 56, has a mooring in the harbor, but he hadn't set it up for the season yet. Two anchors, one 65 pounds and the other 45, had held the ship in place about 100 yards north of the mooring. He used the same setup to secure her during Hurricane Eduardo in 1996. It didn't budge. He checked on the boat Tuesday night around 7 p.m. Everything was fine. But when McColgin came back Wednesday morning, the boat was leaning against the jetty, submerged but pretty much intact. McColgin rowed out and salvaged some things that had washed up on the breakwater. His favorite life vest. A kayak. A pump. Whether he can salvage the boat is unclear. The interior will be ruined, for sure. But the water was still too rough yesterday for a diver to get a look at the structural damage. That will probably happen today. Afterwards, a maritime salvage company will do one of two things. They'll patch up the boat, pump it out and tow it. Or they'll lift it out with a crane. McColgin will have to decide: Will enough of the structure be intact to repair it? The boat came into his life 12 years ago. He found it in a way that he never expected: an ad in Soundings magazine. It said ''H-55'' and listed a phone number. McColgin reached the owner in New York and asked if H-55 meant a Herreshoff 55-foot schooner. That's L. Francis Herreshoff, the legendary boat designer. ''Yeah,'' the owner said. ''Wouldn't be a Marco Polo, would it?'' ''Yeah.'' ''And you have it for sale?'' ''Yeah.'' ''It was almost like he didn't want to sell it,'' McColgin said, retelling the story yesterday. But the man did sell it, for a price McColgin didn't want to reveal. And like Goblin, the two-masted schooner he lost in 1991's Hurricane Bob, the shower- and stove-equipped boat became his home. It isn't really anymore, he said. He's been living at his girlfriend's place the past couple of years. But in the past, before he retired, he spent years commuting from Hyannis to Boston. He'd get up at 5 a.m. and row ashore on a dingy. Then he'd catch the bus to his job with the State Department of Telecommunications and Energy. Boats touring the harbor would point out McColgin's ship. That, they'd tell people, isn't Ted Kennedy's boat. The senator's boat is the two-masted schooner moored nearby, called Mya. Granuaile has an old Deutz two-cylinder diesel engine, and yesterday Gibbs inspected the area from another boat. There was no sheen, no sign of any environmental damage. But McColgin said many possessions would be destroyed. Pots and pans. Clothes. A new digital radio. And the sailing book he was writing - the hard copy of that sank, too. Still, McColgin said he'll retrieve his most cherished items: the compass and steering wheel, the one he salvaged from Goblin after Hurricane Bob. (Published: May 27, 2005)