Restoring Old Boats Means ‘A Love Of Labor’ Bayview Antiques, Owners Both Have Character
Despite the clouds, teak and mahogany shone Sunday in Bayview, as antique wooden boat owners showed off their work.
Spectators gawked around a gleaming 1952 Century Resorter, painstakingly revived from neardecay several years ago. A flower and a bottle of Black Velvet liquor sat in the front seat. The boat’s flathead V-6 engine was pristine.
“I like the feel of taking something that’s going to crash, and bringing it back to life,” said Ed Todd, a Seattle electronics technician who is coowner of the boat. The Resorter won first prize at the Bayview Daze antique boat contest.
There wasn’t a lot of competition. The Resorter was one of only two wooden “runabouts” that docked. Third prize was awarded to a boat in absentia.
“They’ll get the ribbon when they get out of the bar,” laughed contest judge Barry Siebert. “It’s ‘Bayview Daze’ for a reason.”
One of the spectators was Bayview’s Sam Silva, who’s restoring a 1947 Chris-Craft. The wooden boat is five years older than he is.
“They’re pretty,” he said, looking at the old boats. “I like the color and the warmth of the wood. Fiberglas just doesn’t do that.”
Silva and his wife recently spent 18 months sanding down the hull of a 14-foot fishing boat. They put on seven coats of varnish, sanding between each coat.
“Restoring a wooden boat is definitely a love of labor, not the other way around,” said Siebert. “You need to work constantly.”
While the restored boat owners compared notes and cracked celebratory beers, retired Spokane firefighter George Robinson stood at a nearby dock slip, carefully coiling a rope on the battered deck of the “No Problem.”
Robinson didn’t enter his ancient fishing boat in the contest this year, although he’s taken some prizes in previous years.
The “No Problem” has no glossy varnish, no restored upholstery, no stereo system. The paint is flaking away, and moss grows between some of the planks.
“There’s a lot of different paint here,” said Robinson, flaking some off with a fingernail. “I’m trying to keep her afloat as long as I can. When I found her, she was on her way to the bottom.”
Concrete blocks sit below decks, to steady the boat in high seas. The rumbling Chevrolet engine is about 20 years old.
“Full-out speed is 7 1/2 knots, but it’ll pull the dock,” he said.
Robinson’s boat has been afloat since 1910, when its owners were gillnetting salmon in Alaska’s Bristol Bay. The hull is old cedar and ironwood, the frame oak. A well-oiled chain connects the wheel and the rudder.
“It was a working boat,” said Robinson. The runabouts, he feels, just don’t have the history that the No Problem has.
Down below the tiny wheelhouse, he’s decorated the cabin with a picture of Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn loading a torpedo on the “African Queen.” Water sloshes in the bottom of the boat, around rusty cooling pipes.
Robinson said he once owned a 26-foot Fiberglas Bayliner.
“It was kind of like a little Yuppie boat,” he said, chuckling. He got rid of it nine years ago, when he saw the old 32-foot fishing boat at a Bayview dock, leaning over because it was leaking so badly.
“It was just waiting,” he said, drawing on a cigarette. “I figured I could save it.”
He had the hull patched and painted. He refinished the deck, and soaked the ancient spruce mast in linseed oil, to keep it from cracking.
“If I keep doing a little each year, it’ll probably see my grandchildren,” he said.
He oils the wood around the windows, but doesn’t want to coat it with glossy varnish.
“Just about what you see is how it’s always been,” he said. “There’s a lot of things you could do, but then it would lose its character.”
, DataTimes