Jim Moores

Jim Moores

Monday, February 15, 2010

Dear Friends January 2010

January 2010

Dear Friends,

December has come and gone so fast I found it hard to catch my breath. Ocean Reef’s Vintage Weekend this year was a great reminder of years past. Freedom, the 103 Trumpy built for Albert G. Fay in 1927, Contract 181 took center stage. Alan Jackson brought two yachts, a Burger and a Rybovich. Then, there was Jonathan III, a wooden Burger.
The true gem of the show was Legion, the oldest Rybovich around that has been totally restored by Mike Rybovich himself.
There was of course my personal favorite, 75’ Trumpy M/Y America, Contract 420, built in 1965 for James L. Knight, owned by Ted Conklin, the owner of the American Hotel in Sag Harbor. I have spoken of this Trumpy many times and we have taken care of her for many years. She is a one-of-kind, classic houseboat with the longest foredeck, with exquisite clean lines. As for Freedom, I finally got to see her finished in persona and she is a masterpiece. Earl has a lot to be proud of on Freedom.
It was a great show.
Nate Smith, my partner, flew down from MMYC in North Carolina to help bring Washingtonian from St. Augustine to Beaufort. Nate usually doesn’t go out on the yachts more than for a sea trial now and then. But there was safety concerns on Washingtonian making the journey so Nate stepped in for the trip. The journey north went smoothly and she is now sitting in at our Beaufort yard.
The Washingtonian project is to get a COI or get a U.S. Coast Guard ticket back so she can charter. She has new owner, Paul and Tracy Berger of Chicago. He is a renown architect there.
Her to-do list includes shaft logs, new transom and a lot of small projects. We plan to install a bright work transom built out of mahogany. The JDW building has come in handy and this project will slide right in.
The Honey Fitz project is in full swing. Chet Gallanari is the lead carpenter on the project and he has really stepped up. This is a significant project.
Capt. Bryan Akers of the 1930 Consolidated Justice dropped by and took a look at Honey Fitz. “My God, the Honey Fitz looks like she’s in traction,” he said.
I never thought about it, but she sure does. Twelve steel pipes have been welded to her engine beds, where six motors hang on pipes and jacks. There are eight that go through hull to lift the weight of the deckhouse up. We have cut many holes to feed laminate ribs and taken four points per side and laminating three per area. Then, we plan to strip off all the hull in between this. This will be the fastest and most efficient to reshape the hull. With battens screwed in place, there we will be able to do multiple rib laminations at the same time and be able to put her back to her original shape.
We are having virgin cut vertical grain Douglas fir cut, milled, dried and shipped from the West Coast of the U.S. The Honey Fitz was built out of some of the finest, tightest grain vertical cedar of her time. That no longer exists. Also, there’s a lot more weight that has been added to her in the engine room than when she was originally built.
The Douglas fir is a little heavier but will add considerable strength where its needed. With planking out of the way, the metal preservation can be done from the outside of the hull and can be reached from the inside.
This is a very ambitious undertaking, a challenge and I love challenges.
We have soaked the forward bilge wood as we slowly rotated the forward third of the hull until we have zeroed out the levels. From the aft engine room bulkhead to the stem, we have removed the twist and the center hog. However, the aft hog is locked in because that area was already rebuilt with the hog in place by another company.
I have gone on a quest to learn as much about the Honey Fitz as I can that has lead me from the JFK Library to Mystic Seaport. After three days of telephone calls, I wasn’t able to find plans and had hit a dead end.
I called Earl McMillin and he rattled off information like a machine. It was hard for me to keep up. He told me about the university at Bowling Green that has records of the “The Great Lakes Collection.” It still took a while to find the right person at the university when I finally must have said the right thing. A woman told me I needed to talk to Bob Graham in archival research.
I envisioned a man standing in a long warehouse stacked, from floor to ceiling with boxes and crates of documents. After talking to Bob, my suspicions were correct. He said the university recently acquired Defoe’s total collection and have three shipping containers full of drawings that have yet to be catalogued.
I told him about the Honey Fitz and the information I had, including her service as a presidential yacht and how JFK came to name her. It wasn’t until I told him we had started the restoration that his voice lit up with interest. He promised to get back to me in the next two weeks. Three days later, I got a call. “I found all of them, including launching photos, scantlings to materials listed with engineer notes,” he said.
Then it snowballed. The JFK library’s Laurie Austin called and told me they had old movies and photos. Then Mystic Seaport’s Louisa Watrous called me and said they had found photos of when Lenore/Honey Fitz served as a U.S. Navy patrol boat with machine gun turrets and missile launchers. If I had wanted something special for Christmas, this was it.
A while later, I received a call from Bill Iler on Windrush about Grand Lady. He had spoken to Dan, the late owner’s son. Bill told me that someone had bought her and the boathouse. The new owner intends to fiberglass her. It wasn’t really the answer I was looking for but then Sunrise, Freedom would probably not be here today if she hadn’t been glassed to hold her together so she could be restored later.
I would like to end on an upbeat note. Andrew, our webmaster, has redesigned and upgraded our web site and it’s back up. We had run out of room in our old photo gallery and we had to move everything. We are reloading the photos as we find time, when Stephanie has extra time. We are making short movies of Honey Fitz restoration and we will be loading those as well. The goal is once a week. It will be on our youtube channel, which is linked to our website at www.mooresmarine.com. Do a search for “Moores Marine” in youtube and you should be able to see all of our little movies, 17 so far.
I am challenging Nate and Judy to do the same with the Washingtonian project. I don’t know if this has been done before, two pre-war yachts getting refits at the same time, in two different states by the same company.
My first movie was pretty rough but I am getting better at holding the camera steady and getting better content, instead of shots of my shoes. Or, Stephanie’s getting better at film editing. At least I’m good at calling “Action,” or “Get to Work.”

Until next time,


Jim