Well, the log of ressurected bits was Junior's idea, but I like it.

My proudest score are actually special secret bits from CPete, followed by the mahogany from Kathy Ann and the cool stuff from Tony G., (Psst...I got da goods from Tony G. Lessgo<G>), and of course the Borregard hatch if it should become available.

Since we are way into left field here, I'll tell you about Kathy Ann.
In a lot of ways, I think Alberg's honest little boats (he was once quoted as saying he wouldn't design anything he wouldn't personally go out in adverse weather aboard!) have a lot more in common spiritually with a workboat than a yacht...so you see why I care so much about some stuff off a fishboat.

Kathy Ann was a sixty-odd-foot seiner built in the late 1920's or thereabouts. The yard owner looked with sadness at the hulk the day the environmental salvage folks pulled the barge alongside the wharf with the stinking and waterlogged hulk on deck. Apparently she'd been kept perfect, well-maintained, neat as a pin for many years. Indeed, she had been a graceful boat, all 60-odd feet of her...then the owner died, his kids took to working her, and did nothing to repair or maintain for 5 or 6 years. There were gaping rotten chunks of sheerline with splashzone kind of mashed on in...that's just one detail but should convey the situation. The guys had been out to fish one night, moving thru fairly shallow water. Tapped a rock under her bottom, and when she flexed the transom blew straight off. Boat went down so fast they couldn't even get into the gumby suits before they all had to swim for it. They were close enough to shore they all made it--barely.

The entire interior of the boat was the most lovely african mahogany...so was all the exterior trim, albeit covered under 10 miles of brown paint. I'll not begrudge the brown paint as I strip it off the crapper door, it's the onlly reason the door is savable.
The lockset and hinges are wonderful bits of bronze, equally paint encrusted. It did have some sweet louvers, but someone broke them out to get the door open once the boat was raised...not too hard to repair, though.

The whole galley was solid mahogany...cupboard doors, drawer fronts, dinette table. All of it was ruined by the flood of diesel and battery acid that came up from the engine hole and stripped off the varnish, from the salt water she sat in for a few weeks, from the fact that no one got at it with fresh to even try for a save as she sat by the seawall at a crazy angle with a zillion jacks propping her and caution tape festooned around. I'd have loved to have saved the table to re-make into ours...thinking about all of the many meals that had been shared there, with laughter, bickering, trepidation (is this gonna be our last?), all the finances the skipper must have sweated seated there alone, etc...the business of running a boat. Too Bad.

Amazingly, the brown paint saved the door. 'Twas a smallish, low-bridgfe kind of door, so all I have to do is trim it down and it's a Triton head door. Amazing.

The mirror on the bulkhead, I almost missed...but the silvering had not been corroded (protective film of diesel) and the water must have washed thru in some way that saved the varnish from the acid when all those 8-D's ralphed out. I couldn't get the two little nails that held it to let go without mangling the frame, so I skilsawed out the bulkhead around it!

The bunk boards down in the folks'l were things of pure beauty. a small bit of them along the bottom edge was gotten to, but they had been varnished so well and so many times over the years that they made it. Think about what must have gone thru the mens' heads a few nights when the weather was bad...it's probably not too different than what goes thru the head of a guy in a Triton in a bad stretch of ocean who knows that there is no one remotely close to help if it all goes south and that the fate of everyone aboard is pretty much up to the boat. They're about 1-3/4xx 8"x 8'! Outstanding.

The foreman of the Demo crew was more than happy to let me go aboard with the requisite two boatbags of destructiveness to get what I'd like...he was glad some of her could be saved, too.

My thought is that the spirit which is present in an old boat is a combination of the natural forces she lives right in--the heartbeat of the earth--and the little bits of spiritual detritis left behind by those who've worked, played and lived aboard her...so that she genuinely has a life of her own, so long as she lives. Somehow, a little bit of Kathy Ann and a teeny bit of all the men who bravely worked her will now go with us, and I like that a lot.

She went down really fast when they got to her with the excavator...the usual drill, to pump out the bilge, remove batteries, engines, and tanks...let the vultures get what they'd like and remove the big stuff like the aluminum drum and the mast that folks bid to get...then the excavator moved in, and that was it. We stopped work when I heard the excavator fire up, and we all went out to watch. Jess looked like she would cry, truthfully, and after a bit I had to turn and walk away. In an hour, she was a pile of broken wood and mangled junk, and in two days she was a memory, save for a rusty and ruined 6-71 that will never run again sitting up on timbers by the seawall.

Since I am rambling....

There's another sad one that came up yesterday, a 30-foot wood sloop in the yard. Another of those with little in the way of nice parts to yield and not much money to be made upon her...it's mainly galvanized and mainly junk. I actually met an older fellow last summer who had driven by and seen our Triton from the road who had once owned her...then traded her off to by a Triton way back when. Used to run several fishboats out of here until the fisheries all got so bleak and he moved to Maine to run a few lobsterboats he bought. Nice guy.
The fellow who worked on her so hard in the yard for so long...got too old and sick to keep going. His disability check couldn't keep up with everything and the yard fees piled up. Enthusiastic and talented young 20-something finish carpenter showed up and was given the boat in exchange for paying off the yard. Never paid it all off, and as he worked away he found more and more work to do...near every frame rotten for the upper 8" or so, and that was the beginning. We saw less and less of him after a while...this is the way with rotting old wooden boats. I'll be salvaging off of her in January by the look of it.

This little Monk-looking boat I have to do away with here. Again, she was simple and honest...someone obviously had the dough to build her/have her built, but spent his limited funds on good-grade materials and just fitted her out with galvanized hardware. (Seems like such common-sense judgement has gone the way of those people, doesn't it?)
Down below, even though she is bleak , wet and abandoned, you can tell someone cared. Someone sailed the crap out of her, treated her with love and respect. No doubt he went on from our world and someone bought or inherited with best of intentions and zero understanding...and there she went, slowly dying herself. Simple, honest, noble little boat...plywood topsides and decks with carvel-planked mahogany bottom and an incredible solid mahogany house. Not one but two huge galvanized gas tanks in a 24-foot boat---someone went places in her, I'd think.
Nice little iron cookstove below, I'm sure that she was snug, cheery and dry. All over now. She had a graceful, shallow, well-turned bilge and keel and a belly of iron pigs...she looks sweet, not like the fancy and admittedly more handsome H-28 which looks great until you get to the big squared-off concrete ballast pig that reminds of a fine-looking woman who became a big surprise when the underwires and corset went away.
I'd be sad in ways to hack on the H-28 (which I imagine I will someday), but all that chromed bronze would pay for a new mainsail for me. This little boat I speak of is one I look at with a much deeper sorrow for some reason.

We are seeing a similar thing happen with old 'glass boats now, aren't we? What really sticks in my craw is that in comparison to a hammered-out woody, there is nothing THAT hard or THAT costly about doing even a complete rebuild on a smaller 'glass boat! I think it is sad commentary on the folks who get into such a project that they get discouraged and walk away from something so much easier than what their grandfathers would have regarded--in terms of labor effort--as periodic boat maintenance.

The Ariel we all talked about that got done in...yikes. Needless.
I really worry about the Commanders out there...not a lot of people under 70 can see a Commander as what it is--it doesn't look "right" to what they've been conditioned to see. That's a real shame. For every one Ariel that goes, how many Commanders go? Spooky.Sad.

Dave