August 2009 Dear Friends Letter

August 2009


Dear friends,

As I drive alone, south to the Florida Keys, I’m passing one strip mall after another. There’s the occasional beer joint , and old trailers, a little off level, in parks that are full. Junk cars and boats, whole or in pieces, litter lots and yards. Then, I see a stack of lobster traps at the end of a road. When you go over the bridges, you see the Keys’ crystal emerald waters. It’s a long painful drive. The air is clear and fresh except when it is interrupted by the smell of salt marshes and Sargasso seaweed baking in the hot July sun.
The Keys really haven't changed much through the years.
I am headed to Key West to see Capt. Seth Salzmann. He is the captain I mentioned in my last letter, a schooner captain. I met him in Beaufort this spring aboard a Malabar sloop. John Alden had never designed her as a sloop. She was a schooner missing her main mast. Malabar VII, built in 1926 in Wascasset Maine, was preparing for her journey north to Seneca Lake in upstate New York. And, on her final inspection before heading north, one of the crew inspecting her spars found that the top was rotten. Capt. Seth and the owner made the decision to cut it off above the boom, leaving her booms in her boom chalks. The sail and rigging was stowed below. And they set sail. Time was of the essence.
Sometimes luck plays an important role. The wind blew like hell out of the southeast at 20 to 30 knots out of the southeast and Malabar was surfing on waves at nine knots. They stopped to refuel and provision. The beautiful bow, black with gold leaf carved scrolls stopped me dead in my tracks. I had to take a look. I met Capt. Seth. He had assembled quite a crew. Her new main mast was being built near Seneca Lake while she sailed to her summer charter season. Seth was only delivering her. There was another schooner waiting for him in Key West, the Wolf, a steel, gaff-rigged schooner with a square top for a sail. She is docked at the appropriately named Schooner Wharf.
I had one stop to make. It was to an old Trumpy, Tramp. Terry Loring, the owner was onboard. We sat in the main salon, drinking a few cold beers. His wife was not feeling well so she didn’t join us. Terry has had Tramp for 25 years. Good or bad, he has kept her in operation. I wanted to study her interior details, and original parts for another project I’m looking at and we spent hours walking around her and looking at her from the deck beams to the stair case to the deck house. Tramp, 52 feet, was Contract 100, built in 1919 for William Selby.
I have been trying to put pieces together in my mind to formulate a restoration plan for Grand Lady, of the same era. Capt. Jim Twaddle and I drove up to see Grand Lady and went from end to end to look her over and now I was doing the same with Tramp. Although the boats were built in the same year and the hulls are similar, their layout and their pilothouse were entirely different.
Besides researching 1919 Trumpy yachts, it had been very quiet in Florida with James in sailing camp and Stephanie in North Carolina. It allowed me to focus on forming a strategy to save Grand Lady. The reality is she will need most of the hull replaced, and parts of the interior that are original should be saved. That’s why I visited Tramp to see what I could determine was original in both boats. This style of Mathis yachts are uniquely beautiful. The have an old-fashioned elegance of that era and bringing one of these boats back to its original grace would be like saving a national treasure. I can’t stand to see any more of these yachts destroyed and lost forever.
They are small enough to be practical to operate and breathtaking enough to stop people in their tracks to watch them go by. Of course, that’s my opinion. As for collecting information, Sean Simmons who tipped me off about Grand Lady, has been coming through with these great photos. I’m still looking for old photos from that era of the cabins and interior joinery. I have contacted the Newport News Marine Museum and they are researching my request. If anyone has suggestions, please let me know.
On another older Trumpy, I found out more about August Moon, her real name is Augusta of Cotton. She was 48 feet, built in 1920, Contract 113, for Sailing W. Baruch. She was famously known as the Abadab and was written up for her adventures in Yachting magazine in the 1930s. She was originally built at 52 feet and was shortened before WWII to 47.5 feet. This was the Trumpy that was crushed in Key West.
Now I want to fast forward to 1962, 57’ Westerly, Contract 404 for John Ward West. She carried the name Windrush II through three owners. Her lastest name is Patriot. She sits in a boatyard named Lockwood Marina in South Amboy, N.J.
Five years ago, my son James and I went on a summer adventure. We were guests of Mitchell Turnbough on the Trumpy M/Y Paragon, just outside of New York City. He told me of a Trumpy being restored in New Jersey so we went to take a look. This was a restoration in progress. It was going horribly wrong. They had Boy Scouts sanding the interior with 60 grit while others were taking things apart, and another group was cutting out wiring. She has been sitting for quite a while now. Someone had built a fly bridge on the top and gravity and rot were bringing her down. I initially tried to give them some advise but it fell on deaf ears. I bit my tongue and that was that. Five years later, she is slated to be crushed. The yard owner wants to sell the parts to see that they go to good use. His name is Bill Lockwood, 732-721-1605.
I’m starting to feel like I’m writing obituaries for Trumpy yachts every month and that is not my intention. So now I’m going to move to more positive things. I received happy news from Henry Pickersgill telling me about the Newport Bucket and how Summerwind performed. The 1929 Alden Schooner won overall and her grand dame class. It was when he told me that the owner held her wheel crossing the finish line that put a tear in my eye. This was his dream. He told me so even before we started the project, to own and race a grand old schooner. With all the headaches that come with any major restoration, I was thrilled that this had a happy ending. His dream came true not only for him but for all of us who worked on the project.
For a schooner, Design 412, barely mentioned in the Alden book, not even a photo, this sleeper has woken up and roared back to life. It doesn’t get better than that. Congratulations all around to the captain, the race crew, and especially to Mr. Don Williamson and his family.
Another happy ending was the countdown to launching Chesapeake. Even before we saw the boat, the new owner had a drop-dead deadline and completion date. We had to launch her in time for his wife’s birthday. This is not the first time we’ve had such deadlines. On Innisfail, Frank Lynch’s daughter was getting married. You don’t mess with brides and mothers of brides if you want to keep your hide.
On both projects, we had three times the amount of work than a surface inspection in a survey pointed out but got the work completed within the original time frame. I am very proud of how Nathan and his crew came through in the clutch in both projects. He had to resort to all kinds of tricks, such as getting patio heaters to make epoxy kick during unseasonably cold weather, or whatever to get these projects done. Behind Nathan’s laid back ways, he has a very mathematical mind. He went to college on a math scholarship and majored in economics and computer science. He served in the U.S. Army calculating coordinates for nuclear cannons. That background has proven to make Nathan a great project manager, very mission-oriented. He’s very hands-on and he teaches by doing and showing. With what we do, you learn as much with your hands as with your mind.
On Chesapeake, Nathan and his team of the best from his crew and my Florida crew, pulled out the running gear, installed new shaft log ribs, installed floor timbers, installed ribs and more ribs, blocked portholes, planked topsides and below, removed and reinstalled a large section of the aft staterooms and painted the area, painted the topsides and the bottom and hand-lettered and gold leafed new names on the transom and name boards in eight weeks. I challenge anyone to get that much work done in that time and done right with a six-man crew.
Now I’m going to jump around a little. I’m sure you all know Joe Bartram. He is a wealth of information when it comes to yachting. Joe and I were recently on the phone and I mentioned Grand Lady and how hard it was to find information on a yacht that old, 1919. Joe was gracious enough to invite me to research the boat at his personal office library. I jumped at the chance. Joe’s late father, J. Burr Bartram, a great yachtsman, had started a collection of Yachting magazine dating back to 1909 through 1950. They are bound by year and these are among Mr. Bartram’s most prized possessions and I understand why. Joe pulled the first book. “This is the way you need to remove them from the library,” he said. I nodded yes. I had brought along a 35mm camera and holding these bound magazines gently, I turned the pages. Joe left me there so I started at 1919 and worked my way to 1924 in a few hours. What a history lesson and what an evolution in such a short period of time. The earlier copies have many drawings and the pictures where there wasn’t enough contrast, they drew in the lines. The era of yachting really took off just after WWI. The wooden and steel mega-yacht was started in that time with yachts of 250 feet and 180 feet and so on. Most of them had one thing in common, aesthetic beauty. It was a time when naval architecture was an art and with the advent of heavy engines to achieve horsepower, many of these great yachts sliced through the water using a totally different principle to achieve performance. It was called piercing technology. The boat cuts the water in two and it comes back together at the stem, long and narrow. For this principle to work, everything had to be perfect, the weight, the balance, even the shaft angle. And it had to be done beautifully with striking lines, exceptional craftsmanship and elegance.
I didn’t need to go into Joe’s library to know that but being able to see its progression through the magazine’s pages was exciting. Joe would pop in every so often and ask how it was going?” He could see it in my smile, ear to ear, and he knew I appreciated the treasure trove that he had. Joe told me when his stewardship of this collection ends, they will be a part of the Museum of Yachting in Newport. That’s a wonderful thing to do.
Joe and Barbara are wonderful people and it was great to catch up with them. They had just returned from a trip to Alaska but that’s their story to tell.
In a few days, I will be on a trip north for a few weeks to see friends and clients, stop to see my three grandsons along the way, and to of course collect adventures to write about when I return.


Until next time,


Jim Moores