David Wayne Greenhaugh, mariner, owned Midway Services

With joy stretched across his face and an oar in each fist, rowing the Grand Lakes strip canoe he built from a redwood pickle barrel is how best to remember David Wayne Greenhaugh, sole child of the late Earl and Miriam Greenhaugh, born Dec. 28, 1954.

Greenhaugh will not lay to rest. With his soulmate KK by his side, his spirit may have passed into the ether during the wee hours of Sunday, Jan. 26, 2025; yet those fortunate enough to know him, will see him again in the sparkle of sunlight on water, and hear his laughter in the tinkle of lanyards alongside the dock-lined Pilottown Road on the Lewes Canal.

This is where he was reared, where he pitched his first childhood job, pulling lines on his neighbors’ boats on an incoming storm tide surge. Greenhaugh saw it all from his family’s front porch, back then, and then again when he and his bride of 27 years restored a tiny cottage with views of his beloved waterway.

Greenhaugh’s lifelong affair with the water makes for many a briny tale best savored. The boat builder and sea captain who restored a 35-foot Bruno Stillman lobster trawl, and then designed and fabricated “Rain Dog’s” dinghy, “Pup,” stowed away many memories of the voyage with his wife and their labradors to Canada by water.

His last boat-building project, a journey on which he embarked in 2022 with his best mates, still awaits its first dip; because, in 2020, Greenhaugh was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. Before that, he owned and operated Midway Services for decades.

Greenhaugh’s family wishes to thank the caregiving angels at Westminster Rehabilitation in Dover and their dear friends, and to invite all to enjoy the bench to be installed in his honor at Cape Henlopen State Park near his favorite lookout.

Memorial gifts will also be welcomed, especially to the Association for Frontotemporal Dementia, 2700 Horizon Drive, Ste. 120, King of Prussia, PA 19406, to better understand the uncurable.