NY40 MARILEE: Restoration of a Herreshoff Classic

[Music] I loved the all-out racing machines that Matt Herreshoff I design if you look at you know modern race boats I think they're incredible because there's no compromise and sin that Herreshoff designed these beautiful one design race boats that again at their time were the no compromise race boats the flush deck clean aesthetic [Music] and so powerful those Herreshoff designs are timeless and merrily is one of them their sale area to displacement ratio is through the roof [Music] they were absolute monsters to handle on race course [Music] [Music] [Music] coming up with a plan for Marilee was working within a an owner's schedule that did not want to lose a sale exceeded this project which initially came to our shop we were supposed to do the planning for a successive year where we would do the major restoration and do a lot of engineering and design work of what was needed on the boat in that first winter of 2014-15 up in Belfast a French and web we went in with rather modest goals but quickly we decided that you know there were areas of structure that needed some attention especially with the goals for racing that we had in mind and this was sort of the major factor the boat wasn't gonna just be gently cruised around New England in the summertime for years to come only being in the water a few months a year the ambitions of the program were to take it internationally racing the Mediterranean racing the Caribbean and with that in mind we decided that the structure of this boat needed to be completely suited and there couldn't be anything that we didn't have faith in we're been raised about heart [Music] one of the first things to do on the boat was actually find out what we had so MIT Kurt Hasselbeck the curator MIT fantastic resource for industry has been a steadfast champion of you know the builders restoring these classics over the years and has opened up the heart nautical museum collection which is all the plans that came from the Herreshoff company the heart a nautical collection of the MIT Museum is one of the oldest marine collections in the United States was formed by mi t--'s department of naval architecture and marine engineering in 1922 the heart collections are largely archival and they contain approximately 400,000 items mostly photographic there's a large collection of models marine art and a very very large collection of plans the Herreshoff manufacturing company design records is one of the larger plan collections in that group about fourteen thousand plans about 19,000 object records altogether the Herreshoff design record is very heavily used by the classic boat community it's used by model builders that's used by people studying design because of that heavy use we have started a project to digitize the entire collection and put this collection online we are digitizing the planned collections in our studio Evelyn Ansel is our primary digitization specialist doing that part of this huge project there's something about the manufacturing company's history and its pedigree and its legacy and the quality of build and the attention to detail all the way down to the molding and the way the planks are fastened there's so many components to these boats that are worth as a result we have all this information about how they were built we have all the drawings we have the interiors we have the offsets we have all these historic photographs we have examples of the boats themselves in unrestored condition which means that we can look at the methods the manufacturing company actually used to put them together Todd friction and his team at French and web they are extremely appreciative to have that level of certainty in the construction plans and they have to then make decisions on their course of work based on you know what the owners needs are and based on what the original design is and I think that this refit program formerly adhered very very closely to the integrity of the design while still understanding the owners needs which is to race this boat really hard the New York 40s were called the fighting 40s because they raced very very hard and and that is Tim rudders intention with Marilee to bring out the best in that boat it was recommended to us by Paul but Rose who had been involved in the restorations of doraid sunny stormy weather he recommended that we get a three-dimensional hull scan of the boat to see where we were it was fascinating to watch this machine went around and took a gazillion points in our shop and then the engineer was able to massage this these digital files and come up with the shape of Marilee of what it was in 2015 I was able to entice Atma clave to come into the project and IDI is just this iconic Herreshoff engineer designer he has dedicated his life to the Herreshoff legacy but what it means from a structural engineering performance standpoint edie McClay have prepared CAD drawings of the original 1926 drawings provided by Kurt Hasselbeck at MIT Hart nautical collection we scanned the boat three dimensionally and then converted that into CAD and laid the two drawings on top of each other to find out where we were she was Hogg two inches in the transom she was two inches high of the chain plates and actually a symmetric fore and aft once we knew that we we knew we needed a strong but that was sound structurally but we also knew that there was a lot of work ahead to get the boat to be the perfect New York 40 event the owner obviously wanted so that first season was was difficult because by the time we found out how much work had to be done it was middle of January closing in on February and racing in that 2015 season was never in doubt we were going to go racing we refasten to the entire hall we removed a few fasteners and found that thing we're not exactly sound so we decided to create custom-designed fasteners 3000 of them and we refashion the entire hull this is where no expense was spared on the materials custom screws were made for the boat to the right pitch to the right thread lengths so that everything was working in concert as it should have been we replaced a portion of the keel back out we replaced probably 80% of the floor frames we also replaced about 45% of the starboard side planking both single and double planks and about 60% of the portside planking those were some of the major pieces that we tackled in that first season not to mention a few others such as moving the placement of the engine from really far half where it was unsupported into the center of the boat was better for racing and also for the structure of the vote these boats were incredibly lightly built they weren't meant to last 95 years and they didn't have as much structure in the ends as a modern boat does so having all that weight back up actually was probably the reason why we had that hog that we found you know 2 inches in the transom getting weight out of the ends of the boat is like paramount and so we were able to find some plans of the near 40s that had engines closer to centreline and we were able to actually move this powerplant good 12 14 feet forward from where it was in the first season of restoration we had a lot to bite off incredibly we accomplished the goal of going sailing and going racing in that first season on July 4th in 2015 barely launched after the first round of restoration work we finished on the podium at all four events that we participated in that year Marblehead Corinthian classic regatta the Nantucket Opera House Cup Regatta amnezia meiotic at the end of the season we managed to podium everywhere it was one of those moments where I think the owner realized what he had this was a fast boat and even though we were just learning how to race it we're still out there extremely competitive and successful for as much as we did in that first season of refit restoration work there was quite a bit more to do the second round we had to continue to deal with planking issues and and structural issues all that work was left for the second season so again we had to completely rip the boat apart and break it all the way back down into just framing and planking and get back to work we needed to get this boat completely restored to the French imbibe level and what the owner wanted at nine to ten months the team of French web just went all out they did it an incredible amount of work in a short amount of time first season was incredible but the second season was probably more so because on top of it we had to build an entire interior and the boat had to be perfect one of the weak points of these boats as racing boats was where the connection of the wires come down to the hull the chain plates and marelize chain plates when they came to us were just bolted pieces of bronze half-inch plate to the inside of the planking no structure not attached to structure so you're asking the hulls in to support the structure of the rig so what we did this was Edna claves you know brilliance was we spread out the load on five frame base so instead of a point load that was two inches on a haul skin we spread it out over eight feet and all only on structure framing sheer clam that and we tried to transfer all that load to the keel and not use the hull skin as transferring that load one of the great things that MIT is all the beautiful plants of the Herreshoff hardware that you can draw on so with Edmund claves you know engineering he was able to take some of the Herreshoff shapes and hardware and actually redraw a bunch of stuff for us so we made a lot of custom heart around the boat but we also used a lot that was there because we have these boats in their original condition that means that you can look at them and decide for yourself and so there's this element of interpretation that is available to builders here they're the experts the true craftsmen can come here and look and decide what was incidental on any given day and but by looking at the whole collection they can see what is fundamentally Harris off in nature which is extraordinary I can't think of another collection that has this much historical documentation and has as much of a presence the way the Harris off manufacturing company started was captain that had been working at the Corliss steam engine company in Providence at night he would moonlight as his brother as chief designer he did that up until 1878 when he agreed to join JB as a partner in the company when they first started the company it was primarily a power-law company they didn't go into business to make sailboats at all they made sailboats but mostly for themselves and their friends because when you live on Narragansett Bay and there are no bridges and the road are bad the way you get around is by jumping in a sailboat and going sailing somewhere NAT and JB were both enthusiastic racers that was their sort of pastime and they would spend a lot of time sailing together yachting as a broad-based sport was just starting to take root until that point it had been a lot of regattas that would be organized by the Queen for a massive schooners so for the first time smaller boats were starting to actually race against each other the same time people were starting to you know the robber barons moved to Newport and they all wanted boats they all wanted sailboats to race and they needed a new one every year pretty much so a couple of there the Harris off manufacturing companies early customers became cereal customers they'd order a new boat from them every year the 11th sailboat that the company built was actually the one that put it on the mat from a sailboat perspective and that was in 1891 they designed and built Gloriana 12 or 13 years into the life of the company it was only the 11th sailboat that they'd built it was raced in 1891 by a gentleman named Edie Morgan who had been a regular customer of theirs for other boats and it won every single race that sailed in the next year the New York Yacht Club Syndicate came to them to design the defender for the 1893 Cup a member of that syndicate was Edie Morgan himself so that's how that sort of came about they were also doing early assembly line manufacturing at the Harris off manufacturing company many of the one designs that they built here for clubs were built all in a series all right next to each other all at exactly the same time but worked the same way with the New York yeah club one designs the New York 30 the near 40 the 50 and the New York 70 when they first came out they're incredibly powerful in 1916 the New York 50s and the New York 30s before them in the New York seventies before that were all out racing classes crewed by many professional crew with time the New York 40 class was a different concept these were owners who wanted to be more part of the action and ultimately class rules would limit the number of professionals on board which was different from the 50s and 70s especially this promoted more family and friends to join on the boats for class racing and it turned out to be a great success since the boats quickly earned the nickname fighting 40s because of the close racing and great camaraderie amongst the crews the rigs on the new york forties are one of the last editions of a racing gaff rig especially in Marilyn's case in 1926 back in 1916 they were still racing gaff rigs all over the United States and in Europe in 1926 when Marilee was bill Rico saw her sister ship was actually launched as a Vermillion y'all Marilee was still rigged as a gap so that she could compete with the other near 40s at the time in one design racing Marilee was one of the last real racing classes her racing designs at hair shop with that Caffrey they quickly turned over into Bermuda and rigs that were that quicker upwind maybe not as fast off the breeze but definitely were more easily driven in racing applications the second year was the major restoration it really was the lion's share of the work we made a new boom eight stave construction Paulo a new gaff a new Topsail yard and they're just you know pieces of sculpture not only was the deck shop and but with the new sheer that we needed to cut in the boat the four inches of sheer that was out we actually had to replace the deck structure hall connection and that is called a shear clamp which is the length of the boat this longitudinal timber we had to take out and make new the actual centerline of the deck was out too so every deck beam had to be replaced to its proper camber normally Herreshoff would have in the original build the deck would have just been a single thickness laid deck with seams meaning cotton rolled in and pit black pitch tooled into the seams in this day and age people want water integrity but they don't have the crew that can you know constantly upkeep and keep the decks wet all the time like they wouldn't the old shipping days so we actually designed a deck that was a teak covering on it and then underneath that was instead of full thickness teak which is really heavy we actually put Port Orford cedar down which would have been more in keeping with the pion deck that was original and then we laminated two layers of eighth inch cedar at 45 degrees so there's four layers of deck but it's not a plywood deck it's a solid deck it has the same weight characteristics as the pine deck so we're not like overdoing it with you know added weight on the boat but it it's structurally much stronger than original [Music] you made all your knees for the boat but we added in the high load areas like the running back stair is the chain plate areas and the midsection of the boat five of these what I call wet frames or belt frames inside and each one of those frames had a knee and it's just like to make all that all kind of flow together in an open interior which is one of the Herreshoff pieces of this interior is like you can sit on one side of the boat you can see all the way to the bow and all the way to the stern inside the boat and all the structure and these knees just they just carry the line throughout this whole thing [Music] aside from all the major structural and you know racing improvements that we had planned for that second winter of restoration work the big elephant in the room was the interior we needed to you know fully refit the boat with a brand new interior and buy brand new we were not going to go back to the original designs of 1926 this is one of the special times of this project I think is the interior and I say that having worked on many many boats and their interiors and the traditional kind of yacht interiors that we've all been exposed to the owner had a vision that was a little different we sat down at the offices of Stephenson wearing in Belfast and did a complete three-dimensional rendering of what he was hoping for for this interior the New York 40 agenda allows owners to make their own choices down below the rest of the yachts were built essentially almost as a 1 design class the same rigs and similar layouts and deck hardware and things like that that's what enabled them to race together as a class but the owners had their own choices down below and as with this restoration our client made his own choices and established a very interesting direction this interior was supposed to have some patina to it but also be a Herreshoff interior so the materials we use we're going to be period materials I was able to find through some connections in a mill in North Carolina some amazing old-growth Cypress logs that had been sunk in a river for 140 years we don't want to say that it was a modern interior because we actually used a lot of the same design facets a lot of the same materials of an original Herreshoff interior we wanted it to look like it came from 1926 but at the same time we wanted to sort of open up the boat and make the space inside of a New York 40 more appreciable than it would have been in 1926 the challenge with designing a more modern take on an interior floor the New York 40 is the hurt Hall shape and in the limited interior volume the biggest factor of which is for slack builders which tends to basically limit the floor space thus the cabin sole in the boat across the beam of the boat and we worked hard to find the best solutions to use that that space we discovered by essentially moving the furniture of the settee arrangements out board and up gave us the ability to open up the elbow room to free up traffic flow and also allowed us to set off the pieces of furniture in a more distinctive fashion we were pushing to make all the moldings the Herreshoff style frame and panel work and trim but the vision behind this was to actually texture and give it some age so not only do we have old wood but we've built beautiful new work with it and then we went through this laborious process of distressing it to make it look old it took it took a leap of faith and I have to hand it to the owner he had and he had the vision but once we signed on to what it was gonna be it took a leap of faith was the crew to actually come up with the techniques and work with it and build this beautiful bulkhead and then start painting it with chains and texturing it with taking the green out with late wire wheels and just and then oxidizing and bleaching it and staining it with this hard wax oil stain so it could come up to this insanely beautiful alive interior [Music] [Music] [Music] the idea for the second rig came about unless unexpectedly we'd never went into the project with it as one of the goals for her restoration but when we first visited the Hart nautical collection at MIT and met Kurt Hasselbeck he immediately whipped out every single plan that belonged to merrily go along to the whole process of building her in 1926 along with that we uncovered a plan drawn by her shop of merrily with a Marconi braking and I can remember the big smiles on their face when we pulled out the Marconi sail and he realized that that was a whole other option each time that the rig got changed they had to actually rebuild the bow structure and the stern to accommodate a back stay in a forced day in two different locations so one of them the other design parameters which was totally creative way of looking at this is how do you get two boats in one so the owner asked us work with the engineers and design a rig that could be interchangeable in a couple days so we designed a bow structure that was hidden in the deck and hidden in the unloved stem this amazing piece of bronze sculpture that was fabricated that went down the bow and on the deck and around the stand but actually had to go through the stem a little bit so this was a very hard thing to do how do you blade cut you know a spot in a big piece of oak timber and keep it straight and just a half inch slot and the creativity of some of our guys Steve Caron but it was the project Foreman at the time actually came up with this idea to use a chain saw to cut this slot so large and John spent a couple days making a jig because you could screw up the past and they did amazing job to cut a beautiful perfectly aligned spot for this piece of hardware slip intimate when you remove the bowsprit you have this force de fitting that can support 40,000 pounds love in the past with boats of this vintage you know they would have started as gaps like Marilyn did and then continued through an evolution and maybe landed with a permanent rig or y'all Rick later in their life just as sailing had changed over time but to be able experience all of that in a three-year period it is incredible this Marconi rig actually is an elliptical section mast in sailboat design and sparse design you want to keep things as lightweight as possible because the more weight you have up aloft the more unstable your boat can be so we were able to construct them in such a way as they were in the nineteen late 1920s but put a little bit of a kind of modern feel on them we took beautiful vertical grain Douglas fir and matched all the woods so that all the glue joints would almost look like a piece of grain line and then sculpted it and shaped it so that this hollow spar would look like one piece we tried to keep to the aesthetic of the 1920s which was all bronze hardware and we were able to build in chases inside the masts to actually bring the powered lines down and so they exited just above the deck here so the main halyard in the jib halyard have custom ship boxes built into them all the chain plates all the connections to the boat and the hull structure are interchangeable to between the gas and the Marconi so you can just use the same turnbuckles but all these wires and stuff can be accommodated for either rig one of the exciting pieces finding that Bermudan designed was that we found it in the hair shop archives and it was pinned by Herreshoff at the manufacturing company now that was extremely rare we talked to Curt and he told us that Marilee was the only one they found in the archives from all the original documentation of a New York 40 with a permanent rig other near forties that came out with Bermuda rigs later in their life may have had them drawn by Nevins or by Stevens or other yards would have built them for those phones but to have Marilee with a hair shop and Bermuda and rake gave us that authenticity that we would need when we arrived in the Mediterranean or wanted to race in New England the boat had pedigree with this rig the painstaking effort to make merely a stronger stiffer and more resilient boat is really paying off with this new rig loads are different but merrily can accept all of that all of the new sails are fitting very well first dry and the boat is balancing perfectly but we're not worried about her structure and we know that she's going to last for a long time to come [Music] in the 2016 season racing we had more expectations for the boat the crew was more organized we knew what needed to happen but at the same time the boat was almost more difficult to tune than it was that first season we had upgraded the rigging quite a bit we had a new rigging package standing and running so we had to spend some time tuning the rig our first event was at the Kennedy classics Cup we unfortunately didn't have any briefs to race on the first day but the second day was a great day for racing and it was a great day for Marilee it was a perfect shakedown his light air and we were pretty quick in those conditions we were second across the line behind a big spirit of tradition boat [Music] so I tagged Magan reads 2016 in light of our 20% penalty after winning year before we still managed to find the podium with a third-place finish which was a terrific result [Music] there were three days of racing this year in Nantucket two days of windward Luard racing which is unique for a boat like merrily merrily was designed for short distance racing you know out and around Block Island and back type of thing when we were lured racing is more four meter style boats in smaller boats so it was a great two days of hard crew were to get this boat up and around the shore when we lured track although we didn't perform our best it was fantastic preparatory work for the big event which was the Opera House Cup on Sunday the Opera House Cup was terrific we sell very fast he said was hard and the conditions were ideal primarily it was a lot of off the wind work and she is untouchable in those conditions we finished second and on top of it won the best restoration award which was incredible that was icing on the cake at an otherwise terrific event for racing in 2016 we arrived in Bristol Rhode Island for the Herreshoff classic yacht regatta we had a really beautiful event with a nod to both merrily and Ragosa the final to New York 40s ever built and still existing in racing shape which was a fantastic time on the dock end up under the tent at the hair shop marine museum our final event was a Museum of yachting event in Newport hosted by Iris we had a fantastic few days of racing the second day was most exciting it was blowing upwards of 20 knots and merrily was flying so we had some exciting racing and finished third overall which was a nice finish to our season making the podium at every event after the event at the award ceremony merrily was again crowned with the best restoration award the Tom Benson award for best restoration there was a lot of competitions here great boats just great boats Merilee with all her work stood out stood out enough to win Opera House and to win again you know Museum the otic Museum yachting one was special because it was an industry-led judging group it wasn't owners it wasn't you know museums there were no politics to it [Music] in 2017 we started with a whole new program in the Springfield the boat was in the water far earlier than it ever had been and we had all sorts of time to prepare it's something that we were lacking in the years prior we were making it up as we went in 2015 and 2016 but this past year we had all the time that we needed to prepare the boat to prepare the crew to prepare our sails and to get everyone in sync for another year of racing the crew really came together the boat was absolutely the fastest it's ever sailed and we went undefeated in all of the Pinner events from Marblehead to Nantucket to Bristol and Newport we never lost a race and took home the overall Panerai vintage grand Classic award of the 14 New York 40s originally built in 1926 and 1916 there are only four remaining two here in the United States Ragosa merrily into and Europe rowdy in Chinook rowdy in Chinook are both very active on the Mediterranean circuit and they're also very successful rowdy has had numerous overall Panerai wins and Chinook has also won Panerai overall Awards so we are very anxious and excited to head to Europe and go take them on [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Alison Langley Films

Views: 485,752

Rating: 4.8820601 out of 5

Keywords: Nathanael Herreshoff, Herreshoff, classic yacht, classic boat, sailing, sailboat, spinnaker, regatta, boat, yacht, sail, French and Webb, Belfast Maine, Newport Rhode Island, Bristol Rhode Island, Herreshoff Manufacturing Company, Maine boatbuilder, Maine, wood boat, woodenboat, wooden boat, Hart Nautical Collections, MIT Museum, Opera House Cup, Eggemoggin Reach Regatta, MOY Regatta, Museum of Yachting, Herreshoff Marine Museum, classic sail

Id: oqaSWjtF8PI

Length: 37min 57sec (2277 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 19 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Double_Minimum]

I love sailing boats. I love the restoration efforts that went into making this beautiful boat.

But something about this video really had me thinking about the massive income inequality we have in the US.

I think people should be able to spend their money how they want, because often they've earned it.

But you shouldn't feel proud to give back by spending 3-10 mil on a sailboat if you haven't spent a fair amount on much more deserving endeavors.

I don't know this owner. This is a wonderful boat. Its refit likely educated hundreds of craftsmen, engineers and designers, along with many seamen and related skills.

But man.... and I'm really not that guy. I suppose this is the difference between the top 5% and the top 0.5%....