One man’s trash, another man’s treasure
September 2024
By Capt. Michael L. Martel
I found the “one man’s junk” that would become my treasure when I was in my 30s. She was resting on blocks and stands at the edge of a forlorn and overgrown field, adjacent to a traffic circle in Lee, N.H. She was a venerable 33-foot twin-screw, wooden cabin cruiser, or sedan cruiser as they were known then. She had twin flat-head, 6-cylinder Chrysler Crown gasoline engines, and large sliding plate-glass windows. This was my long-coveted dream boat.
A couple of decades earlier, I was one of four youngsters in a 16-foot lapstrake Penn Yan motorboat, bobbing in the choppy summer waters of the harbor, right off Fort Adams, in Newport, R.I. The annual Folk Music Festival was underway, and we could easily hear the bands playing.
The harbor around the seaside fort was crowded with boats of every kind. Most of them were anchored and their crews and passengers were just listening to the music echoing across the water. Our boat was, of course, one of the smallest. I had purchased it for short money, and although it had originally been a 16-footer, the transom was so rotten I’d cut it off with a chainsaw and crafted a plywood replacement.
I was conscious of the diminutive size of our boat, especially when compared to the big wooden cabin cruiser, perhaps 40 feet in length, a few decades old, and somewhat weathered, riding at anchor some 50 yards away. When I first saw the old wooden cruiser at anchor, a wave of envy washed over me.
It was, I thought, 1950s vintage, with a big cabin, a generous aft cockpit and deck, and overhanging cabin-top that sheltered the half-dozen or so young people from the sun as they sat in wicker chairs in the aft cockpit. Serendipitously, the outflowing current from Newport Harbor kept the stern of the vessel facing the festival on shore. It was the perfect venue. A ringside seat, if you will. Those aboard were having a fine time, drinking wine while sitting in comfortable chairs, laughing and enjoying the breezy afternoon. The cabin had a real door, with a knob, leading from the aft cockpit into the saloon. Probably a real toilet was down below, and bunks on which to have a little rest. Perhaps that venerable crate had a galley or stove, an icebox for sandwiches and refreshments, and other comforts that were not possible in my tiny boat.
This boat reminded me of the wooden cruisers my late grandfather, a boatbuilder himself, had once owned and worked on, so I felt a cross-current of nostalgia as well as longing. As happens often in life, an image becomes a dream, and a dream in turn becomes an obsession. “I must have one of those,” I recall thinking; “I will have one of those.”
Later, in my 30s, I was in the labor pool, commuting from Massachusetts to a New Hampshire electronics company, and I drove by the 33-foot sedan cruiser every day on my way to work until, one day, she caught my eye. She had been built by the Richardson Boat Company in North Tonawanda, N.Y. Sadly, she was the kind of boat nobody wanted anymore. She had no flying-bridge; such amenities were not popular when she was built. She was a pudgy, carvel-planked boat, with a pronounced flare at the bow, and although she looked weathered and neglected, she was like the boats my grandfather had owned, and her lines resonated with me.
She had a round bilge, with a displacement rather than a planing hull, so she was prone to rolling in a sea, and not built for speed. “As you increase her rpm, and once her nose starts to rise a little,” a Richardson owner once told me, “You’re not going to go any faster; you’ll just chop up more water.” And, of course, burn more gas, as I eventually discovered.
This boat’s previous owner must have been a Marine; he had named her Semper Fi. A seam had opened up, and a plank had sprung, while she had been docked in Great Bay, up New Hampshire’s Piscataqua River. She had sunk in the shallows and had been abandoned. I deduced that she was owned by a dealer in lost-cause boats, considering the appearance of the other craft lying in his field.
I, of course, was smitten. I paid Mr. Paul, the broker, his requested $3,100. My landlord, a boating man himself, told me I’d been swindled. “I wouldn’t have given him $500 for it,” he said. Mr. Paul was a talented salesman, and a good pitchman will always accentuate the positive. On one occasion, he climbed aboard, looked into the engine compartment, saw the open seams of her dried-out planks, noted the sunlight shining through from the field below, and noted, “Oh, great, she has bilge lights.”
With friends from Newburyport, I visited the boat a couple of times so I could solicit their suggestions, of which there was no shortage. One idea I found intriguing was from friend Carl, who said I should coat her bottom with fiberglass cloth and epoxy to make her watertight and stronger. “You fill the seams with a mixture of epoxy and ground-up cotton waste, like a putty,” he offered. “Then you put the cloth over that.” The suggestion didn’t sound right, so I ditched it.
I bought a blue poly-tarp to cover her; there was no sense working on her while she was exposed to the weather. For months afterwards, I toiled inside her, in a world of eerie blue light that filtered through the translucent tarp. I became used to it, but, at day’s end, emerging into actual daylight and real-world colors after a day in that dour shade required an adjustment.
In a year or so, our family moved to Bristol, R.I., and an old friend, who was a boat-hauler, put her on a trailer, delivered her to my rental cottage, and set her up in my backyard. I crafted a tool shed next to the house so that, on my off-days, I could roll out of bed, walk outside, and get to work on the boat.
Progress began in earnest. Many times, when I wondered what to do or how to perform one task or another, I would ask myself, “What would Grandpa have done here?” And the simple answer was to think it through carefully, read up on the subject, and then proceed step by step from there. My grandfather’s big wooden boats had all been named Fish Tales, and when it became time to choose a name for this vessel, the choice was simple: She, too, would be Fish Tales.
Working from the bottom up, I refastened the planks up to the waterline, replaced decking, tore out parts of the added cabin bulkheads below, and cleaned up, freshened, and painted or varnished everything. I dug holes in the soil under the boat, then drilled through the keel and inserted new keel bolts from the bottom up.
Tearing out the old and adding the new happened simultaneously. The previous owner had done a botch job of adding things to the cabin below – in the style of Early American Basement, as Mr. Paul described it, so this area space needed renovation. I rebuilt the transom with new planks and some new oak frames, the deck and the engine hatches, and renewed much more.
At long last she was nearly done, except for her engines, which needed work. With the boat up on stands in my side yard, I built a strong frame over the after deck, and using a solid rig of my own design, I used a two-ton come-along to slowly lift each engine off of its bed and ease it out through the doorway to the cockpit, 750 lbs. apiece. Then I would lower it over the side and down to the open trailer on the ground below. Once they were loaded, I towed them behind my Isuzu Trooper to North Tonawanda, near Buffalo. Here, the late John Dubickas, had serviced and rebuilt Richardson boat engines for many years.
Some months later, I drove back out there to retrieve the engines, and towed them, at night, through a raging lake-effect blizzard across the Berkshires and then home. The next day, I began the laborious process of hoisting them up and into the boat, where everything from cables to hoses to propeller shafts had to be recoupled, aligned and re-installed.
Rebuilding an old wooden boat when you have amateur skills – as I had back then – is a learning experience. One learns by making mistakes, fixing those mistakes, and learning not only boat carpentry but also the basics of engine mechanics, electrical wiring and plumbing. Painting is the fun part, but that comes after everything else has been done satisfactorily.
The engines ran beautifully, smoothly clicking like sewing machines. The boat’s exhaust was noisy, but that was because I had not installed mufflers. A fellow for whom I had worked ran a machine shop, and he donated two lengths of stainless-steel pipe, which I installed as wet exhaust pipes. They were terribly loud, but they got the job done. She was never a fast boat, and as the price of gasoline began to rise, her Zenith updraft carburetors made her increasingly expensive to operate.
She was not equipped with any sort of trim tabs, her round bilge ensured that she remain a displacement hull, and she rolled like the devil in a cross-sea. But she was otherwise comfortable, buoyant and dry, and we took her everywhere from Block Island to the Elizabeth Islands in safety and confidence.
My family and I enjoyed Fish Tales for a number of years, keeping her on a mooring out in the harbor, before I sold her to a friend. Selling her was a mistake because, once he owned the boat, he let her deteriorate through neglect and stupidity. However, once the check had been cashed, I no longer had a say in her fate.
Capt. Mike Martel, who sails out of Bristol, R.I., holds a 100-ton master captain’s license, is a lifelong boating and marine industry enthusiast. He enjoys delivering boats to destinations along the U.S. East Coast and in the Caribbean and writing about his experiences on the water and about other marine topics.
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