Dan's Papers - February 22, 2008 - Restoring A Ship The Old Fashioned Way

With Traditional Boat Building Methods, Matt Culen Is Restoring His Century Old Schooner

"Whether you own a 42 ft Cigarette or a 31 ft Beneteau sailboat, you know you are involved with a high maintenance mistress. All boats take a lot of time and money, but keeping a hundred year old schooner operating takes things to another level. You got to have heart, and you got to find craftsmen with skills they don't teach at MIT, or the local trade school."

With those words, Matt Culen has made a commitment to do it right with a piece of Greenport's maritime history. He is going to great expense to accomplish this feat. He is convinced that in the end the schooner Mary E will emerge restored and authentic as clean and as new as the day she was launched.

The one hundred and two year old schooner Mary E is undergoing an extensive overhaul at the Britannia Yachting Center in Northport. Her new owner, Matt Culen, is determined to make this piece of maritime history sail the Long Island waters for decades to come. The 75 ft wooden schooner has been doing public sails out of Greenport over the past twenty years. Last summer, under its new owner, the boat also ventured out to Nantucket Island, Martha's Vineyard, up the Connecticut River, Sayville on the South Shore, Oyster Bay on the North Shore, and as far as Nyack on the Hudson River. Although the ship performed well throughout the season, the October haul-out and thorough inspection revealed that her oak frames and bulkheads were due for a lot of work.

Matt explained that when you hear, "They don't build them like they used to", it usually means that the quality of something today is inferior to the original. In the case of the Mary E, Matt claims the expression applies quite literally. "They have not built ships like this for over a hundred years."

Forget about any inferences on quality. In the 18th and 19th centuries, timber and skilled labor were plentiful. Ships were made from local oak trees and held together without a drop of glue, or a single wood screw. Instead, the frames were fastened with trunnels (contraction of "tree nails") driven into tight fitting holes bored with a hand-operated ship's auger. As the wood swelled up after launching, the trunnels acted like rivets and held the ship's skeleton together, basically for the life of the vessel. The frames of larger ships could not be fashioned out of a single timber, they were made up from a number of curved segments with overlapping joints. This type of construction was called "double-sawn oak frames."

One of the advantages of this method is that the frames can be repaired without dismantling the whole ship. This has made it possible to keep the Mary E strong to this day. Had she been made with bent frames in 1906, she would be long gone, and not a soul today would remember her name. Another archaic method of fastening was used on this vessel to hold the hull planking onto the frames. An undersized round hole was drilled through the hull and into the frames, which was followed by a much larger square iron spike driven in with a sledgehammer, or as Matt joked, "Who says you can't fit a square peg into a round hole? You sure can - if the hands and the hammer are big enough!"

Thanks to a traditional boat building school in Maine, this art has not been lost. There is a small cadre of young artisans who have the patience and skills to do the restoration work.

Master carpenters Joshua Herman, Ricardo Vicente, along with shipwright Bill Rueck, have put their hands to the task of bringing the Mary E back. Every morning they show up with dozens of ancient tools that the Home Depot has never heard of. They work outside all winter, steaming and fitting planks, driving oakum, melting & pouring tar just like the hardy resourceful New England craftsmen of a bygone era. These guys deserve a lot of credit. They have the skills to fabricate custom mahogany paneling for some class action lawyer's office, yet they choose the smell of barnacles and bilge water, the rough timbers of an old ship and very low-tech tools. They work together all day without speaking for hours at a time. A little nod and occasional eye contact is all they need to communicate. When you first see them with their earmuffs you think it is for the cold, or noise protection. But then you realize that they are listening to music, each to his own, and dwelling in his own thoughts. They are repairing an antique instrument.

Come springtime, the shrouds and stays will be tuned up, the sails unfurled, and the wind will play its tune through the rigging of the refurbished Mary E.