What started out as a simple mooring-holder project turned into a full restoration. The author’s 1968 O’Day Mariner above. Photo by Mark Barrett
Winter 2024
By Mark Barrett
My wife and I divorced in 1998, and we ended up selling our sailboat – a Morgan Out Island 30 – and splitting the proceeds. I got the town mooring in Lewis Bay as part of the settlement, but I needed to find a boat to put on it right away or the Town of Yarmouth was going to give it to the next person on the waiting list.
Back in those days, you still looked at classified ads in newspapers. As luck would have it, there was an ad in the “Cape Cod Times” for a 19-foot sailboat with a price of $1,500. This seemed to fit the bill as a perfect “mooring holder” until I could afford another cruising sailboat. I called the number and made an appointment to see the boat.
The address was right off Rt. 6A in Dennis. A kindly older gentleman greeted me at the front door of his neat house and led me around to a wooded backyard. There she was, a 1968, 19-foot O’Day Mariner, sitting on blocks and stands, covered in leaves, her aluminum mast on horses next to her.
I was struck right away by her lines. There was something jaunty and seaworthy about her raised bow and little cuddy cabin with the single portlight on the side, like a merry eye. This was the Mariner model with a fixed keel instead of a retractable centerboard. The iron keel was knife thin, with a bulb at the bottom, and covered with rust. Her hull was a pale, sky-blue, well-faded and chalky to the touch. The name Halcyon was painted in red letters on the transom.
I climbed up the ladder the owner had set up at the stern and stepped into the cockpit. There was a drain plug in the hull, but even though it was removed, several inches of standing brown water, the color of strong tea, remained. The wooden floors to which the keel was bolted were rotted and spongy to the touch. There was a green coating of mildew all over the inside of the cabin. The sails were soft to the touch, as thin as tissue, when I reached inside the bags. The ancient Johnson two-stroke outboard that went with the boat was stored in the garage.
The old man filled me in on some of the boat’s history. She hadn’t been in the water for five or six years. But, before that, she lived on a mooring in the Bass River for more than 20 years. He had sailed with his two sons on her, but now they were grown up and had families of their own. He’d been hanging onto the boat, hoping one of them would take her, but neither of them was “stepping up to the plate,” as he put it. So he finally gave up and put the ad in the paper. “I have to tell you something,” he said with a wink and a nudge. “Hardly any beer at all was consumed aboard this vessel.”
When I offered him $1,200 he seemed insulted, but countered with $1,400. We had a deal. It was already late in the fall and boating season was over, so I had her trucked to Kingman Yacht Center, in Cataumet, where I was working at the time. My boss let me slip her into an empty back corner of one of the sheds so I could work on her over the winter.
I wanted to get the boat into a seaworthy state while spending as little time and money as possible. Her only job was to hold the mooring for a season until I got my next 30- to 35-foot cruising sailboat. The top priority was to replace the three rotted floors to which the iron keel was bolted. I cut the fiberglass tabbing that was holding the original wood in place, carefully lifted the rotten beams off the keel bolts, and used them as a pattern to trace new ones on some pressure-treated lumber I “borrowed” from a boatyard pile.
The beams were flat on top and curved on the bottom, each one slightly different to match their respective curvature of the hull. I set the new beams on top of the keel bolts sticking up through the hull, marked where the holes needed to be, and drilled them out. When I installed the beams, the curves on the new ones did not match the hull shapes as well as the originals, but I compensated with copious amounts of 3M 5200 caulking under the beams, then bolted them down tight.
That was really all she needed to be a mooring holder. The cockpit and cabin were a mess, but that didn’t matter; the boat should float just fine. Then one day my friend and co-worker Jim Teixeira, who ran the Kingman paint shop, remarked, “Hey, the hull of your boat is all faded and chalky; it looks awful. Why don’t we paint it?”
“I’m a lousy painter,” I said. “When I’m done it might look worse.”
“Here’s the deal,” he countered. “You do all the prep work and I’ll spray it with Awlgrip. It’ll be beautiful.”
Little did I know how much work was involved. Jim insisted we paint not only the hull but also the deck, cabin-top and cockpit interior. It took many hours to machine-sand, fill cracks and dings, machine-sand more, fill and fair more, and then hand-sand where the machine couldn’t reach. Whenever I thought it was ready, Jim thought it needed a little more fairing, a little more sanding. It took me two days just to tape off and mask the boat the way Jim wanted it.
Jim painted the hull white, the deck and cabin-top a light gray. The final product was gorgeous. She looked like a brand-new boat – well, from the outside, anyway. Now the interior of the little cabin looked worse than ever, and I felt obligated to do something about it.
Some of the plywood that formed the V-berth and cabinets was rotten and needed to be cut out and replaced. There were also two seized bronze seacocks from an old marine head that had to come out, which meant there were two holes in the hull that had to be glassed over. This would entail quite a bit of fiberglass work, which was not my forte. But I was ready to give the fiberglass work a try, with advice from the boatyard guys, who knew what they were doing.
The first order of business was to cut out bulkheads and cabinets, remove the seacocks, and then do a lot of grinding. When the time came for grinding, I assembled the heavy Makita machine, the extension cords, and the grinding discs of the various grits I was told to use. I borrowed clamp-on lights from the fiberglass shop and set them up in the tiny cuddy. I donned the white Tyvek suit with a hood, plastic gloves and shoe covers, and taped my wrists and ankles with duct tape to make an airtight seal. Next came the respirator and goggles. Up to that point it was sort of fun, but not for long.
I wedged myself into the cabin with the heavy machine in my hands and began to grind away. Fine fiberglass dust filled the air, obscuring my vision. I began to sweat profusely inside the sealed-up suit. My goggles fogged up so, despite the bright lights, I could barely see what I was doing. It was extremely uncomfortable, to say the least, but I pressed on. My many layers of clothes quickly became soaked with sweat inside the Tyvek suit, which was said to be breathable.
It was so hot and claustrophobic in that small space, and painfully loud from the grinder, that I had to give myself a continuous pep talk just to keep going. As each second passed, I gained new respect for the fiberglass technicians and what they did on a regular basis. And I knew – with absolute certainty – that I was never going to go into that line of work.
When I finally climbed out of there, pulled off the goggles and respirator, and got out of the shed, fresh air never smelled and tasted so good. Even though I thought I’d sealed myself up well, I would be itching for days where the microscopic slivers of fiberglass found their way inside the suit and embedded themselves in the skin of my neck and forearms. The final coup de grâce came when I brought the lights back to the fiberglass shop and Joe, the head fiberglass technician at the boatyard said, “Hey, what are you doing with my heat lamps?”
“Heat lamps?” I exclaimed. “What do you mean heat lamps?”
“Yeah, those are my heat lamps,” he said. “I use those to cook the resin, you know, to make it fire off sooner when it’s not hot enough in the shed. Those suckers get hot.”
Tell me about it, I thought.
Once the interior of the cabin was restored and painted, it was impossible to stop there. I made patterns for the V-berth and cockpit benches, and ordered custom-made cushions. Next, I installed a cabin light and running lights, a VHF radio and an electric bilge pump, which necessitated installing a switch panel, a deep-cycle battery and a battery switch. The head was simple, a five-gallon bucket with a special toilet seat that snapped onto it.
Now, how could I have a beautiful little boat like that and use those old, worn-out sails? I commissioned the local loft, Squeteague Sailmakers, to make a new mainsail and jib, and then a new mainsail cover and boom tent. The standing and running rigging were all original, which meant they were over 30 years old, so I replaced all of that, too. Last, but not least in terms of expense, I donated the antique Johnson two-stroke to the mechanic’s shop at Kingman and purchased a brand new Tohatsu six-horsepower, four-stroke outboard.
So much for acquiring the most inexpensive boat possible just to hold a mooring.
Eventually I secured a mooring in Red Brook Harbor, on the side of the Cape where I lived and worked, so I gave up the one in Lewis Bay. One day I tied my tiny fiberglass dinghy to the stern of the Mariner, which we had renamed Blue Skies, and set off on a 35-mile sail along the south coast of Cape Cod, through Woods Hole and up into Buzzards Bay. It took exactly eight hours, which worked out to an average speed of just over 4.3 knots – not too bad for a 19-foot sailboat towing a dinghy. That trip proved she was a seaworthy little vessel. She handled the chop in Nantucket Sound and Buzzards Bay like a champ.
With her spacious cockpit and simple rig, Blue Skies turned out to be the perfect boat on which to introduce my daughter Alison to sailing. Not that Alison hadn’t already been introduced. She had been aboard sailboats since she was in the womb, then later strapped in a car seat in various cockpits, then crawling on side decks before she could walk. However, those were much bigger sailboats. Blue Skies was small enough for her to steer and trim the sails herself, and she also fit perfectly in the little cabin, where she could stand up.
And it wasn’t just about sailing on Blue Skies. With the six-horse Tohatsu outboard and the fixed iron keel, she made a stable fishing skiff. We had a few memorable father-daughter fishing trips, bottom-fishing for scup with frozen squid, and Alison learned to cast from Blue Skies with a spinning rod and lure when the blues were running.
On some outings, she brought a friend or two to whom she could show off her sailing skills, after which we would anchor off Bassetts Island, hook the ladder over the side, and swim to the island. Alison did her first head-first dive off Blue Skies, a proud milestone for her.
During those happy times on Blue Skies with my daughter I couldn’t help but think about the old gentleman who sold me the boat, and how his two sons had learned to sail when they were Alison’s age. They, too, must have had memorable times together in that same cockpit. Are family times like that on the water not the highest and best use of a sailboat? Of any boat? I’m sure Blue Skies, if she could speak, would agree that she was serving a much better fate now than slowly deteriorating in a backyard in Dennis before getting chopped up and taken to a landfill.
Alison is grown up now, like those two sons, but I like to think she has fond memories of those father-daughter times on Blue Skies. I certainly do.
Part 2 takes Blue Skies on what was billed as a spearfishing cruise, then tells of her yeoman service at a sailing school. Frequent contributor Mark Barrett started at the bottom of the boating industry – literally – scraping, washing and painting the bottoms on all sorts of vessels. He is a yacht broker at Cape Yachts in Dartmouth, Mass., and he lives in Sandwich, on Cape Cod. Mark and his cruising partner Diana sail their 1988 Freedom 30 Scout out of Red Brook Harbor, in Buzzards Bay.
We have complete issues archived to 2009. You can read them for free by following this link.
