Isaac Beal was honored at this year’s Model Boat Show, which took place at Jonesport High School on 2 May, when he was placed in the Maine Boatbuilder’s Hall of Fame. Behind Isaac left to right are his five children, Wyatt, Kelley, Chris, Heidi and Tim.
This wooden boat was built at Bass Harbor Boat by Robert Rich and is now being rebuilt by Bailey Stillman in Bass Harbor.
At Hylan & Brown in Brooklin they are making they are making this Navy whaleboat into an electric powered cruiser.
A.R. Kennedy Boats – Steuben, ME
Roger Kennedy and the crew have had a busy schedule this winter and spring and it does not look like it is going to slow down anytime soon.
In the first bay they have a Mussel Ridge 42, which they are finishing out as a split wheelhouse lobster boat. Down forward is simple with a couple of V-berths, some shelves and a hydraulic locker with a head. The owner wanted the wheelhouse to be just five feet in width. Roger said, “We did a port side captain’s chair with a center companionway. With the captain’s chair, it was not going to leave a lot of room for the crew. So, I cantilevered the whole thing out over 14 inches. If you look, the bulkhead is pushed forward, just to make more room for his chair and we can have more room in there for the crew.”
This boat is powered with a C16 medium continuous duty 815-hp FPT and he should see about 25 knots. Under the platform they have a 13-crate sprinkler set-up and a transverse 400-gallon fuel tank as they wanted to keep the weight as far aft as possible. Roger added, “They say these Mussel Ridges like that weight back, back, back. He’s having a four-foot duck tail stern extension built. I figured let’s get that fuel as far back and I cheated the engine back a little further than I think most of them are. We are only on a 13-foot shaft.”
This boat was started the third week of January. The good news is that the windows are scheduled to arrive the first week of May and they are thinking that they will be done and in the water the middle of June.
In the next bay they have a Northern Bay 36, which apparently had been ashore with water running in and out of her. They have really rebuilt the entire boat starting with the house, which they just cut a little and pushed it over the side. “He wanted a West Coast house,” explained Roger, “I had never built a West Coast house. We’ve custom-built seven or eight houses in the last couple of years, but they were all traditional Downeast-style. We ended up building a whole new bulkhead, but I built it off his existing bulkhead. I really wish that we’d moved the bulkhead backwards because of course with the West Coast windshield as you go up in the round of the trunk house now you have got to tip that in so much to make it look right. It is almost tipped a little more than I wanted.”
With everything on the exterior done, they faired and painted the hull with Dresden blue and a red bottom. They are almost done with this project and are just waiting on windows and she will be going overboard.
In the third bay they have a Young Brothers 35, which was just bought by Jamie Robertson from a fisherman from Boothbay Harbor. Jamie does boat tours out of Milbridge and wanted a few upgrades before his season begins. He was looking for a lot of changes, but time is not there and there are going to fix the more drastic issues and do cosmetics to make her look more presentable.
Previous to these boats, they have just refinished a South Shore 34. Just before that they redid a Holland 32 lobster boat during January and February. The shelter was removed, and they laid up a new top and gave it an overhang.
Next up they have a South Shore 42, which will be a complicated custom build and will take them from July to next spring to finish. This boat came out of the 38 mould and is now over across the street at H & H Marine having the extension added. Joe Sargent will also assist on this project building a custom house top. Roger added, “It is going to be an interesting build. Then we are talking to a couple of people about hopefully a 36 build. There is interest out there, but it is not like it was five or ten years ago.
Bailey Stillman – Bass Harbor, ME
In the main bay they have a 1952 36-foot wooden Bobby Rich lobster yacht, which was originally built for the Peter Grace family and then it was owned by Rick Savage over in Northeast Harbor. She has been owned by the current owners since 1979. Bailey said, “The owner’s goal is to give it a thorough restoration. She wants it inheritable and maintainable again. A lot of things had gotten away like some of the deck leaks and all of the varnish was dead. We are salvaging as much as possible. When we got her in the shop, the first thing Ed Davis and Richard Stanley did was sight the keel and walk around the boat. They said her hull’s in really good shape and said they’ve restored boats from the 80s that were in half as good a shape. We have done 77 new deck beams from the breast hook to the transom header, every single deck beam is new. It is going to be Coosa decked, glassed over which is going to help her stay strong and not leak for a long time, mixing traditional with modern.”
They have also replaced all the aft steam frames and floor timbers right up to the bulkhead. The motor, 315-hp Yanmar Diesel, has been removed and is now at Spofford’s, being gone over. The engine beds have been beefed up because in 1952 she did not have an engine that had this much power and weight. R. E. Thomas in Hancock is engineering a new stuffing box, potentially bronze tube through the shaft log and cutlass.
Bailey said that they were definitely going to launch this boat the spring of 2026, but they are hoping to have her done before that.
Bailey started his shop a year and a half ago. A year ago, he was working with Jim Elk just getting the shop up and running. During that time, he worked on several projects, one was restoring a Bob Lincoln rowboat for the owner of the Bob Rich boat. She was so happy with the end result she asked him to do the current project. Surprisingly, he said no at first worried that he could not do the project. He added, “It is a big project and even though I have some experience, I just can’t say that I am a wooden boat builder. I still don’t quite feel like that. To me, you just take a piece off, you look at it, what is behind it, remake it on the bench and put it back in and try to make it a little better than the previous piece. She is a sweet boat and if we did not have owners like this, then eventually this boat’s life ends with a chainsaw. By the time she is done restoring it, you know market value is kind of tough to gauge, it is not the boat that she has been cruising on since 1979. She is passionate about her wooden boats and keeping them going and that is what we need to kind of keep this trade going. Not a lot of people are commissioning new boats like this. It is all man hours, and it is a lot of money. We tore the whole deck off in four hours, but sometimes it takes all day to pull 10 fasteners. That is the reality of it. It is hard to zoom out a little bit and figure out where we are in the project. All I know is we are moving forward.”
Bailey said that he does not have anything lined up after this project. “I definitely want to continue to stay in this line of work of keeping wooden boats going with repairs and restorations,” he continued. “I don’t have preference from working on a little boat to a big boat.”
During the summers Bailey worked for a summer family as mate on their boat for seven years and before that worked at the Northeast Harbor Fleet. Now, he has been running a boat for a lady that charters it from Ellis Boat Co., a 36-foot Ellis. He added, “I like to switch it up a little bit. I just like boats, and I don’t really care if I’m on the water or under a boat on the hard. That’s how some these boats got built. There were guys that were captaining during the summer or lobster fishing and then in the winter they were like what are we going to do? So, they were building these in a winter.”
Farrin’s Boat Shop – Walpole, ME
Just launched was a 36 Wayne Beal that they put an extension on, making her 39 feet 7 inches. This was a big job taking a little over two and a half months to complete. They tore out the cockpit, replaced about a third of the framing, put back a Coosa deck and fiberglassed it in. After the extension was complete, they painted the hull.
They also removed the engine, a Volvo Diesel, and sent it to Billings Diesel & Marine in Stonington. When it was torn down, they found nothing really wrong, just some normal wear and tear and she was rebuilt for the second time.
The owner has already taken her out and has gained a knot while cruising and is very happy with the changes. Bruce Farrin added, “The boat handles very well. By not moving the propeller back she still handles well, turns on a dime you might say. One thing that we noticed by having the propeller still forward, it flattened out the stern wake.”
Now in the back bay they have a 36 Stanley from Boothbay. In the past her owner would have done the work, but he has developed an issue working with fiberglass. This was the owner’s father’s boat, and it needed a lot done. They have put a house on her, installed all the hauling gear, which included the wiring and hydraulics. They are finishing the wiring, hydraulics, plumbing, gel coating and windows. They think she will be finished in another month or so.
Several years ago, they finished a Calvin Beal 42 for a fisherman from Cape Porpoise. She is returning for a once over and to add a Northern Lights 6kW genset.
In the forward bay they have a Young Brothers hull they are finishing out for a customer from the Caribbean. They are working on the accommodations down forward. She will have a small ice box, an LP cook top and a head. They have the bulkheads in as well as the major parts of the cabinetry. This will then be sanded before the top and pilothouse goes on. Out in the cockpit they have a fish box with four-inch insulation all around it. This will be to carry ice and provisions when they run from island to island. They are figuring this project will be done this fall.
If you are looking to have a hull finished or need your existing boat upgraded, they have a slot. They just had a cancellation, but I am sure that they will not have the slot open long so be quick!
Hylan & Brown – Brooklin, ME
In the main shop they have the boat GATSBY II, which they finished last year in for some minor upgrades. This was a big job, which took over a year to complete and both they and the owner are thrilled how she came out. Some of the minor issues were the sliding doors on the pilothouse, which were not sliding quite right, they re-engineered the drawer slides and added some minor items like cup holders. This boat is fitted with 250-hp twin Yamaha outboards with electric steering, throttle all controlled by a joystick, which worked extremely well. The owner was a little worried that it would take him some time to learn how to work it all, but Ellery Brown, owner of the yard said it took him about 10 minutes to figure it all out. For speed she topped out at 38 mph. She also sported a gyro stabilizer and Zipwake trim tabs. Ellery added, “We had never done the Zipwake before. Those were beautiful. When you turn them off is when you realize how much they are doing when you are underway.”
They are hoping to take the boat to the Maine Boats and Harbors Boat Show in early August to show her off. They were also thinking of other boat shows, but they are a huge cost and time commitment.
Just behind GATSBY II is an old fiberglass Navy whaleboat being finished out as an electric cruiser for a customer from Sorrento. They basically gutted her out, leaving just the seating area aft. The engine, a Westerbeke Diesel, was also removed and this will be replaced with an electric motor and two battery banks, one on each side containing twelve 24-volt 200-amp hour lithium-ion batteries. She will be fitted with Rim drive technology from Holland. Ellery said, “A Rim drive has got no center shaft, and the motor is in the housing of the pod. It is pretty cool. I went over to Amsterdam last fall to the huge boat show over there, METS and talked to them. I even got to play around with their pod drives, so, when we needed to find a pod drive for this, we decided to ditch the shaft drive and go with a pod drive. That is on its way, about 15 kW pod drive.”
There will be a solar top, which will cover most of the boat and that should supply enough energy for long cruising. They had built this owner another electric boat, VAGA, but she was just a day boat. This one the owner wanted to have more range and that meant how many solar panels can they put on the top? They have done some calculations and at four or five knots she will go over 100 miles. Ellery explained, “If he is cruising with the sun shining you can basically pick a speed at which you are not putting a dent in your battery bank. It won’t be fast, probably three and half to four knots. For a power boater that will feel real slow, but for somebody that’s used to sailing it might seem okay. If you want to go faster or go further, you can deplete your battery bank. With lithium you can deplete it almost down to 20 percent, that is one of the beauties of lithium. I think if you are interested in electric boating you have to like that kind of thing. You are paying attention to the charging and the solar coming in and your speed and how many watts you are using. You have to sort of think that this is fun. There is a guy talking about solid state battery. That is sort of the next leap in battery efficiency. In cars the weight of the battery is somewhat less important, but in boats, it is all about kilowatts to pounds. In boats you want the lightest, highest energy density, highest energy per pound because the weight is slowing you down. More kilowattage in less space and less weight and from our perspective that is the whole ballgame with batteries. It is expensive, but the battery costs have been coming down a lot. We stick with established companies like Victron for the batteries. Victron is sort of flawless as far as their safety. They are using the safest chemistries, and their technical support is outstanding. With propulsion, it is about efficiency and that is why we are trying this rim drive motor from Holland.
Down forward is just a head and some storage spaces. The living quarters are up in the shelter for either a couple or an individual. There is a small galley and berths port and starboard. Under the berths are the battery banks. The berths are also made so they can pull out more for sleeping. There will be sliding windows in the cabin.
In the side shop they have another electric repower on a double-ended boat from the early 1900s, which has been covered in fiberglass. At some point she had an Elco electric shaft drive installed with some AGM batteries. They are going to change out the batteries to Victron lithium-ion batteries and keep the running gear, shaft drive with an Electric Yacht motor, a 5-kW inboard motor. This boat is used to go back and forth between Bass Harbor and Swan’s Island. Charging seemed to be an issue, so they are having solar panels from Ocean Planet Energy stitched into the canvas bimini. Another issue became evident when the fiberglass on the skeg split and needed to be repaired, but that was an easy repair. Ellery said that the sea trials are really important with an electric boat just to make sure everything is working the way it should.
Next to this boat is a Castine Class daysailer, which they store ten of. Most are in for just their annual maintenance and maybe a small repair job. One had broken their rudder, and the centreboard pendant had detached. Nothing that took a vast amount of time to repair.
Portland Yacht Services – Portland, ME
There is always a lot going on here. In the main shop they have the classic aluminum sailboat PALAWAN, once owned by Thomas Watson of IBM. She was taken down to aluminum and they did some welding of spots that needed attention. Her current owner has owned her for about ten years and keeps her in Bristol condition.
There are a number of sportfishing boats from the Portland area all the way down to Cape Cod. They had a Flowers cruiser that they were adding hydraulics, turning her from a yacht to a sportfisherman. They have also added live wells in her stern. A 60-foot sportfisherman had her decks painted. A Calvin Beal 36 was in to be repaired and add Zipwake trimtabs. She was also having more done to make her a sportfisherman.
In the side bay there was a Hinckley Sou’wester 42 in for just her normal spring maintenance. The owner also had the standing and running rigging completely redone and ordered a new suit of sails. This owner likes sailing into the fall when there are some better winds.
Across the way in the big shop, they have a Gunboat 55, which was getting ready to be shot with Awlgrip. She comes back every other year from the Caribbean and is gone completely over. They also painted her carbon mast.
Just before the Gunboat was in the shop, the Casco Bay ferry MACHIGONNE II was in for her annual maintenance, which was pretty standard. They did some welding work on her hull, lots of paint, both interior and exterior, and some drive line work. Brackett Machine does the shaft work, and the propellers go to Rose’s Marine in Gloucester. They actually keep spare propellers just in case they are needed in an emergency.
The cruise boat BAY LADY of Boothbay Harbor came in to have a new generator installed.
