July 2005

July 2005

Dear friends,

We have got a lot going on down here in Florida. Emma is out for a bottom job and a little topside touch-up. We painted her with Sterling Paint. We love this paint for wooden boats. The main reason is you can fix it. A small tree or maybe a big branch drifted up against Emma’s bow and rubbed a section down to bare wood. We repaired the paint and because Sterling blends so well, you can’t tell where the scratch was on the boat.
Like a couple of sisters Emma is sitting next to Wind Rush, a 55’ 1965 cruiser.
The great thing is these beauties are both similar and at the same time different, just like sisters. Wind Rush is really coming along. The last plank was installed yesterday. We ordered and used quarter-sawn African Mahogany for her garboards. It's tough as nails and so pretty, it could have been a varnished transom. However, the African made the best garboards. Too bad that they will be covered with bottom pain.
We are also taking out some extra ribs and floor timbers. They were made out of Honduras Mahogany, which is a beautiful wood but not for this use. The backbone of these boats are white oak, which has a compression strength of 8200 to 8600 PSI, where Honduras mahogany runs from 900 to 1200 PSI, a huge difference.
We are replacing the old plumbing. The old copper lines made mist because of pinholes. But for 40 years the old copper plumbing worked pretty well, especially when you consider how boats move while under way.
We are putting copper back. Why? It's personal preference. Who wants to bathe in water that smells and taste like plastic? Besides the cost difference between copper and plastic is about $600. Copper last longer. I doubt I'll be around to replace it the next time around. I'll be 90 by then.
While I'm at it, I want to mention to you a misuse of a product that we have been running into more frequently as we go into re-fix previous repairs on some of these boats. It's 5200. We have worked on many Trumpy yachts that were built with the use of this product from 1969 to the last few boats. They were bedded between the double planking with the rubberized glue. However the older boats (pre 5200) were bedded with white lead between inner and outer planks. Dolfinite is the replacement product today.
As for the antique Mathis Trumpy yacht they were single planked, these were caulked with cotton, primed, and puttied with the underwater seam compound.
In recent years we have run across many repairs where boats have been slathered with 5200 used as gap filler. This product was not designed to be used like this. It's just an excuse for poor craftsmanship and knocks down the value of the boat and compromises safety.
It is especially bad when you have pay to have the job done twice and it's much more time consuming and costly to take apart sections gobbed together with 5200. As you can tell I’m a little passionate about the subject.
By the way, I hope you get the chance to meet the new owners of Wind Rush.
Bill & Connie Iler are a great addition to the Trumpy community. Bill and Steve Kneipp, our artist in residence, have teamed up to make the Trumpy Yacht Association's participation awards, with Steve providing the art and Bill having the prototype made with Steve's design laser cut into the wood. We will post the prototype on the web site trumpyyachts.com once done.
While I'm on the Trumpy Yacht Association, I hope you got the voting ballot and letter sent by John Patmore. If you didn't and you're a member, please let him know. His address and email are P.O. Box 4247, Annapolis, Maryland, 21403, or mpatmore@starpower.net. Thank you John for your hard work.
For those of you who haven't joined, this is a great association, which to be a part of. Moving on to the Trumpy directory. I hope that you have been checking our progress. My father used to say if you want to learn something, jump in feet first. I truly did not know how ambitious this project was going to be until it started to take a life of its own.
I am deeply grateful to our web master Andrew Peeling. He's a young man in his early 20’s, who is a full-time college student, works at The Palm Beach Post 10 to 40 hours a week on the paper's site, interns at a Christian radio station. And, he still makes time to work with me at Moores Marine on our sites.
His fingers furiously fly on the keyboard with page after page of pictures, code and text flipping one over the other. To keep up with Andrew, we are on our third upgraded computer in two years and added a DSL line.
I remember as a boy, I would stand and watch a construction site for hours. I get that same feeling watching Andrew build a site that starts out with 200 to 300 pictures. Now, he has designed the site to hold 10,000 photos and documents. It’s all designed for Trumpy yachts and once this site is built, it will be an important source of information on these yachts.
We want you to be a part of this. We will credit you by name for your contributions. Photos of you on your boat and dates will be much appreciated.

On a final note, I have enclosed a copy of a September 1946 ad for Makaira, a 62' built for Charles Johnson of Palm Beach. Take a close look at the shape of the hull. The neat thing about this boat is it has a clipper bow and a modern style hull, but it was built back in 1946 when Trumpy yachts still have plumb bows. She was definitely ahead of her time. All she is missing are the scrolls and the varnish stripe down the hull to look like a boat out of the 1960s.

All the best, and will write again soon,


Jim