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"For four years Joanna and I with family, friends and relatives circumnavigated a wonderful but old and experienced Alden Schooner. # 456, Mariah, ex Golden Eagle ex High Tide. We sold it. I was quickly ashamed of the wake she was leaving behind and I had a premonition that the story was not going to end well. The new owner lost it in an October storm off of New York. By the grace of the blessed US Coast Guard on board the Cutter Alert (who have a fixation on saving us from our Darwinian stupidities) no one on board died. I was grateful because I was convinced that Mariah was going to drop a block on the skipper's head and now at the end she had the pity not to take him and his unfortunate crew down with her.
The loss of this beautiful vessel was a humbling and sobering reality. While it was out of my control, I had to choke down my personal attachment and be thankful for the joy she gave us. Humbling, because it was only by the grace of God that the outrageous situations I got myself and Mariah into never exceeded my I.Q, what was left of the hull strength and the bilge pump capacity. 1977 Cruising World articlehere.
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We came ashore to raise a family and it worked out that we settled on the happy coincidence that meant working on boats and starting a boat yard in Portland, Maine.
It seems as if I have been looking at one schooner a year for the last 20 years with out much success. Either I saw too much and over estimated the cost of repair and underestimated the value or in any case time after time I slipped up and some one else snatched the prize ring. God there were some beautiful boats, but they all were showing their age. Vessels to bring tear to your eyes but should be coddled and kept safe from the strain of expeditions on the edge. The list of boats that just didn't make it to the final cut tears my heart because any one of them would take your breath away on a reach, fill and anchorage or frame off a sunset with her mast at the end of another beautiful day.
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Two things happened that finally ended our search for an older Alden. The first is that we found "Tar Baby" for sale. We loved the boat. She was beautifully maintained. Seriously for sale but honestly only to someone who would love her and could do well by her. The price was reasonable because there could be no other and we were set to make an offer. We met the owner and with kids in tow carefully went through the boat. Boats seem to go through a cycle. Older boats tend to work them selves into the hands of do-it-yourselfers who rip things out, do less than effective repairs and generally make such a mess trying to invent ways to avoid fixing things correctly that there is eventually nothing solid to restore. We realized that "Tar Baby" was an exception. She was original, she was not abused and she had many years more of coastal sailing ahead of her. If we bought her we would have to limit our horizons to New England and Nova Scotia. OR we would have to take her apart and rebuild her. When I mean take her apart I mean disassemble with a new boat survey after reassembly.
| We did this before on "Prowess" but "Prowess" was ready for it or to die. To do that to "Tar Baby" would have been inappropriate. WE would not have been saving the boat we would have been taking the life out of her and creating something else with out the dignity of her age and experience.
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With her hand on the galley water pump, Joanna turned to me and said "but I like warm water!" It was right then we decided that we would look into building our boat. Hell, we owned a boat yard! We contacted Alden and soon had drawings of famous boats to paw over. Ever the optimist, Don Perrot, suggested that we might take a short cut and look at "Etesian" which was on the West Coast and for sale. She was design #1044. Built in 1982 for an owner who lost his Alden on a reef in the Caribbean. I think the boats name was "Tara". This new schooner was designed to the historic lines, but with strip planking and cold molding. Being a traditional dinosaur kind of sailor, I didn't really understand the epoxy cold molding approach.
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We never had one to sail or repair. The ones that came through the yard were either new, aging gracefully or didn't suffer a mishap. We liked what we saw in the Etesian plans, but we couldn't tie down the boat or the owner long enough to get to the mandatory bonding stage. The plans were great! But in the photographs to our eyes the boat looked slightly "Off". Little details, easily altered just missed the mark. Unsettling. Someone didn't have the feeling. Not enough to hesitate but just be committed to an adjustment down the road. My brother Abbott got wind of the revised project and thinking it more reasonable signed on. The project looked like reality and less like financial suicide. I remember the day the boatyard calendar was clear for a trip, the "Etesian" was in Washington State laid up for a month or so at a marina. We couldn't see the boat because the owner had the boat locked up and didn't trust any local with a key. Essentially I could fly out to Washington from Maine and look at the outside of the boat or I could wait until the middle of hauling season to get a call on short notice. Oh well, it probably wasn't for sale that hard. |
We had heard that there was an offer so the logistics of bringing the boat through the Canal to the East Coast by Christmas appeared overwhelming. In a brooding, moment I decided to look for Alden's Web Page. Up popped an unfinished hull whose cryptic description rang in my mind and clearly identified it as 1044-b. It had been built in 1986 and not finished. The builder was Bob Thompson same as "Etesian". It was in San Diego and in "Great Shape" Seriously for sale. I completed a purchase sale agreement subject to survey and began to worry about the consequences of success. Abbott had a meeting there the following weeks so I found myself with him in San Diego with a pleasant Yacht Broker who brought us to view the hull.
| She sat in a small chain link fenced lot next to a highway. High, white dingy, and out of place. The plywood sub decks were sunburned right through the first laminate, the cap rail and bulwarks long since stripped of any epoxy or varnish. The deck openings were uncovered and the inner hull was exposed to the elements. |
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As advertised, inside the boat the engine was in place covered by a blue tarp, the cabin sole beams and a few bulkheads were temporarily attached. Covering the sole beams was a tangled pile of wood that was the remnants of a wooden cover. Green powdered shreds of material settled over the entire interior in silent testament to the power of the sun and deterioration of the plastic that once covered the boat. A hose lead under this dunnage to an electric sump pump deep in the bilge. The floors, hull and keel showed wet with a rim of grime mute testament to the recent pumping and fact that the builder had not seen fit to install a bilge plug prior to putting her into storage. IDIOTS! It didn't take long to determine that The mahogany plywood gussets on the floors were rotten, but it was very difficult to determine the extent of the rot. Because the epoxy coating on the cedar strip planking and mahogany gussets was sound and when the rot on the gussets was removed it appeared as if the rot stopped at the last epoxy layer before the floor itself. |
| There was a rotten strip plank on the port side, which was totally incongruous to the condition of the rest of the planking. Again the troubled wood seemed to stop at the epoxy layer. With the exception of the possible effect of the hot organic soup in the bilge we could accept the boat. It surveyed with some minor indications of delamination in the cold molding and the expected recordings of wet in the bilge area. We noticed that the builder had used aluminum fastenings between the strip planks, which we felt was unusual. The bulwarks and caprail were an unusual interpretation, and the decks were Medium Density Overlay Mahogany Plywood and pretty toasted. We decided that if we could determine that the epoxy on the interior strip planking had protected the cold molding in the bilge we would exercise our purchase and sales agreement and close on the hull. |
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Travel-lift to
Second Trailer |
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I knew nothing about Alaska Yellow Cedar but I was beginning to become impressed with it's rot resistance. We wanted to investigate and the owner agreed that we could take a couple of cores. Little did we know that another broker had scooped him up and he had "sold the boat again". We eventually figured out that they were in a dilemma of holding the "other buyer and us" at bay trying to finesse the first broker out of his commission by stalling our investigation past our agreement dates. We had the truck on the way to pick up the boat and the other party was scarce. Our San Diego friends were watching closely and the word to watch out reached Maine. We put all of the facts together and convinced our California Attorney that the owner was not honoring the contract in good faith and it was with some difficulty we finally and successfully dotted the I's and closed on the hull. The truck, which cost almost as much to hire as the acquisition, was closing in when the papers were finally signed. Scattering in the attempt to avoid being at ground zero in what was really going to be an interesting situation the original broker was “hung out to dry” by the owner of the brokerage. I feel badly for him. The acquisition was an exquisitely painful experience, but we do wish them all peace and happiness. ( In 2011 we are still attempting to straighten out issues on the documentation. caused by a false certification of completion.) |
| With winter upon us and some help from a local boatbuilder who acted as our agent the newly renamed Lions Whelp was lifted onto a Joule Yacht Transport trailer and at 65 feet long 15'8" wide and 15' high with a hull weight of 48,080# made it's escorted dash across the United States. She arrived at Gowen Marine in Portland. There Joe Schmader lifted it off of the Trans continental trailer with his travel lift and transferred it to Dayton Marine's Brownell Hydraulic Trailer. She made the last mile to PYS and Building #1. For those who knew there was a lot of excitement. But she was there to sleep. We had a lot of interior design work to do before we could start work. I felt whole again. Ignoring the work of several years that lay ahead. I had my hands on a boat, a boat." -- 1/7/00 |
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Next Step: Rebuilding the
Hull
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