Sea of Dreams

Down in the Abacos, there are fond hopes of restoring the WILLIAM ALBURY and building an ApprenticeShop-type program around her. After being sunk by Hurricane Dorian, the schooner is afloat in her home port of Man o’ War Cay, once a center of Bahamian boatbuilding

One beautiful morning this past winter, Marlinspike publisher Mike Rutstein sat down on Scott Weatherford’s porch overlooking Eastern Harbor on Man o’ War Cay with Scott, Jay Manni, Gabrielle Manni and Matt Sutphin. The topic was the mastless, gutted schooner William H. Albury, built just up the harbor. A light northerly breeze nudged the schooner around on her mooring, 50 yards away.

Marlinspike: I was on the boat yesterday, and she’s in rough shape. It’s gonna take a lot of work to get her back to where you want her to be. Why is this boat worth saving? What’s important about her?

Scott Weatherford: I guess it’s an emotional thing with me. The original builder, William Albury, was my adopted daddy, and I worked on her to some degree, in the early stages.

MS: When was that?

Scott: 1961, ‘62. I loved that schooner, loved it! Sailed it, and enjoyed always being involved with it.

MS: She has beautiful lines even now.

Scott: She’s a pretty boat. I hated to see it go down, you know. When the former owner, Joe Maggio, decided to get out of the charter business, we tried to buy it then, but it was way too much money. But I had a goal, a vision. I saw the wood boatbuilding [industry on Man o’ War Cay] disappearing fast, and I wanted to keep that heritage alive.

I’ve been involved with sailing for a lot of years, I was very passionate about it in the past, but since [Hurricane] Dorian [in 2019], I’ve kind of lost my passion, I guess. I would’ve got rid of it. I was advised by a lot of people just to get rid of it. But Jay and a couple other people encouraged me. “Let’s see what we can do.”

Well, we made a good start, we were starting to get it ready, and then COVID came along, and that’s where we stopped.

MS: Jay, why did you talk him out of getting rid of the boat? What’s important about the boat to you?

Jay Manni: Just the heritage of Man o’ War boatbuilding. Personally, I got on the William H. in 1976 and sailed from the US back to Man o’ War.

MS: What’s the vision for this boat? If you were able to restore it, what would you use it for?

Scott: My goal is to have it not just as a showboat, but to represent our heritage and use it for day sailing and to try to get our younger people involved with sailing again. Sailing has totally disappeared from the islands. Totally! We’ve done a little bit of small-boat jazz, trying to get kids involved with sailing. Gabrielle was involved with that.

I’m nearing the end of my time, but I’ve still got some energy and little bit of life left. I hope that I could pass some of this on and teach our kids, and Giovanni’s interested in this. Couple of the other younger people have shown some interest in. I want to keep it up.

I’d like to see a bunch of young people get involved and I want somebody to take it over. I just want to get it going and encourage others to do it.

Jay: The Boy Scouts have been doing a program — Sea Base — here for 25 years now. The Albury was the original flagship for the Boy Scouts for a good many years. The Boy Scouts always had spring and summer programs here. I don’t know how much longer that’s going to last.

Scott: Joe Maggio started the program here, and then they just kept on getting more boats. Originally it was all traditional, wood boats, sailboats.

MS: Tell me about the history of the William H. Albury.

Scott: The boat was built in the William Albury shipyard for Fred Whittier…

Jay: You just featured one of Fred’s boats on your Facebook page! In the “Name that Boat” feature. Fred Whittier’s Lazy Jack is still taking guests out in Maine. Fred built that boat in 1947 in his own yard, which was in Ipswich, Massachusetts. The Whittier and Low Boatyard.

Scott: Fred was well known here in the islands. He contracted with William Albury to build a schooner here. And he worked right along with them, in the lofting process.

MS: What was the boat to be used for?

Scott: Well, with Lazy Jack, he used to do some chartering out of Nassau. Then he married a lady from Marsh Harbor, but they liked Abaco, so they stayed up here. After he built the Albury, I don’t know that he did any chartering… the first name of the boat was not William H. Albury, by the way, it was Esperanto

Anyway, I don’t know when, but Fred sold it to a group of people who renamed it the Grand Turk. They took it down to the Turks and Caicos and did charters. Then they wound up bringing it back to Florida. It sat for a year or two, if I remember right. And then Joe bought the boat…

Jay: Bill Payne might have been the guy that bought the boat from Fred Whittier.

Scott: And Joe Maggio renamed the boat and brought it over here and had it refitted. He did a lot of work on it in

Florida as well.

MS: So this would be the early ‘70s by now?

Scott: Yeah. Getting ready to go to the Tall Ships. So Joe decided he wanted to do that. He represented the Bahamas.

MS: In 1976, for America’s bicentennial. The big event in New York!

Scott: So the boat went, and did promotional stuff along the way for The Bahamas.

MS: Tell me about Joe.

Scott: Joe was originally from somewhere in Southern New Jersey…

Jay: Northfield.

MS: A guy from New Jersey represented the Bahamas?

Scott: He had moved to Florida by this time, doing charters out of Miami. He came over here and, you know, he spent the rest of his life here, in this area of the Bahamas. He was very involved with the Boy Scout program, as Jay men- tioned. He originally brought the Boy Scouts into this area for the program. He had worked in a similar program — somewhere in the Florida Keys, wasn’t it?

Jay: The Boy Scouts do a summer sailing program out of the Keys also. And I believe even in the Virgin Islands.

MS: How long were those Boy Scout programs aboard the Albury?

Scott: They were on the boat for a week. Twelve to fourteen kids. It was an adventure program. They slept on deck, did their own cooking.

MS: OK. We’re into the 1980s now. The boat’s based here, on Man o’ War Cay, running private charters and Boy Scout programs. And then what happens?

Scott: Joe got out of the program. Then he passed away and that was the end of his program. But before that, he had sold the boat to some people from Jamaica. They wanted her for evening sails at a resort, a booze cruise. From what I’ve heard, they didn’t take very good care of it. It went through a hurricane. Didn’t they lose one of the masts?

Jay: The mainmast was rotten and they cut it off with a chainsaw.

Scott: Anyway, a local guy, David Wright, wanted the boat. He wound up going to Jamaica, thought he was gonna buy the boat, but between the price and the condition of the boat, they couldn’t reach an agreement. The story that David tells me is that after he went down again and negotiated for a second year, the guy finally said, “If you’ll pay my bar bill, you can have the boat.”

[Laughs]

David then went to Jamaica for a few months, got the boat ready with just the one spar, the engine was running, and they sailed it back from Montego Bay to Man o’ War. His goal was to restore the ship. He tried for about two years, I guess, but he couldn’t get it going. Then along came Dorian.

MS: When David Wright brought the schooner back from in Jamaica, was that when the boat got glassed over?

Scott: You know… [sighs] it was just a money thing. He really wasn’t doing it right. He was just trying to smooth it over and make it look pretty, but not really fixing anything. David’s parents were from Massachusetts. They had a home here for a lot of years, and David was one of the kids. He wanted to fix up the boat, but he didn’t have the resources.

MS: So what happened when Dorian hit?

Scott: She broke away from the mooring — or took the mooring with her, I’m not sure — but she went against the rocks a little bit, not a whole lot. And then she just sank, which saved her probably.

MS: How long was she on the bottom?

Scott: A couple months. David raised it up, got her floating. She had a lot of patches on the bottom, but they were able to use bladder tanks to get her up.

Still, David got discouraged. He came to me and he said, “Scott, I can’t do it. Why don’t you take the boat?” I said, “No, David, I can’t.” I’d lost every boat I had and I didn’t have a house. I said, “I can’t get involved with a boat. That’s the last thing I need.” Well…

MS: What changed your mind?

Scott: I kept thinking about it. [Laughs] I guess I talked to Jay about it — whether it was worthwhile to try to save it. And what would we do if we could. And so David sold the boat to me for a dollar. [Laughs] We started the process of restoration. We totally gutted the boat, as you can see. We were working on her right here. And then COVID come along and that’s where we stopped. I had bought all the mahogany and the fasteners to redo the bulwarks, the decks…

MS: What happened to the mahogany and the fasteners?

Scott: I still have all of that stuff. It sank again a couple months ago and I told Jay, I’m debating whether we should just get rid of it.

MS: Jay, did you talk him out of it again? Oh, you’re really on the hook now. You got do something.

Scott: Well, wasn’t no fault of the boat’s. We had had a lot of rain for a couple weeks and we didn’t get it pumped out. [Laughs]

Jay: Our fault. She went down by the stern…

Scott: So we brought the barge alongside her and put two straps underneath her and lifted it gently till we got the deck outta the water and threw three, four pumps on the deck… She was probably better off for the salt water!

MS: What do you need to get working again? From what I understand, she’s just sitting on her mooring, getting pumped out on a regular basis, but no work is going on.

Scott: We need people to work on her. Somebody that knows how to fix wooden boats.

MS: There’s some very knowledgeable people on this island, I can see that already.

Scott: Most of the older carpenters, of course, are no longer around. There’s a couple younger guys who know their stuff, but they’re busy working in the yards here and we don’t have the money to pay those wages. Honestly, I’m not sure whether we can find the people on Man o’ War to do it, even if we had the money, I told David Wright before Dorian, when he was working on it, “David, find somebody who can help you and take the boat to Maine, get the boat redone, because the help isn’t here.” But he said no, he wanted to do it here. I understand that.

MS: There are shipwrights in Maine who would love to be here right now instead of up there!

Scott: That’s one of the ideas we’ve been talking about.

Matt Sutphin: You might know my uncle, Lance Lee, of the ApprenticeShop. Lance’s family built a house here in

1948. He was here a lot as a kid. Lance spent a lot of time in that boatyard. It really was the incubator for what he ended up doing in life, which is providing life experience through building boats.

We talked to Lance about getting some apprentices down here and getting a program going. But it wasn’t quite the right time. All the stars weren’t lined up. I suggested it again to him, just last week, that he might revive that thought.

MS: There must be young men in the Bahamas that you could bring in to be apprentices. Why import apprentices from the US?

Matt: Well, this is the thought that we’ve all kicked around. Lance hopefully will help us establish winter programs, say two or three months, get an apprentice shop guy that wants to be in the warm weather in the winter. Make it maybe a short program the first year. Bring two or three people down here, and maybe that workforce could be supplemented by those around here that are willing to be helpful.

Hopefully it will go well enough so that the next year will be two months, then possibly it’ll end up three months. I don’t know. But anyway, the idea is to get the workforce, import the workforce.

The thought is that the Albury needs the most work and time, but there are some other boats that we’re putting into the picture. The Traveler that I’m bringing over here [she arrived at Man o’ War in January], Scott remembers from being built in 1948. She’s in Florida. She has a storied history. She has the distinction of crossing the Gulf Stream 80 times in two, three and a half years. She was taking people to Bimini and back. They’d go to sleep down below, wake up on Cat Cay, and then do whatever they do for a day or two and then go back to Miami.

They had all kinds of big guys, Kennedy and Burl Ives and people like that, running ‘em back and forth. It was, it was really the first, I think, charter sailboat in Florida.

Scott: Traveler’s original rig was a Marconi rig, but beautiful. She’s now gaff rigged.

Jay: But there’s thing called the Jones Act, right? A foreign-built hull can’t charter in the United States. You have to touch a foreign port if you want to charter. How they got around Traveler having been built here is, they got her over to Florida without the keel. They laid the keel in Florida! But she was probably 80% built here.

MS: That’s one way to enhance that ApprenticeShop opportunity, if the apprentices are sailing as well as building.

Jay: That’s a given. We would make sure that they had something to enjoy. They’re not here just to work. They’ve gotta enjoy being here enough to want to come back.

MS: The boats have have to be sailed and maintained. No point in fixing up a boat if it’s going to sit at a dock! But getting back to the Albury… there’s a number of boatyards still on the island, and I assume you could access some of the heavy equipment that the apprentices would need if they’re gonna replace frames and so on.

Matt: We could work that out. The equipment is the least of our problems. There’s a railway. This property has a workshop. I’m sure that’s not a problem.

MS: But who’s going to take charge of this program and set it up?

Scott: Well, Jay and me and Gabrielle are the only ones that have been involved since day one trying to put this program together. There are other people who are interested, but I’m talking about day-to-day stuff.

MS: You’d think that people would be banging your door down to spend their winters on Man o’ War Cay fixing up the William H. Albury

Matt: I think Lance can find the people. He started more than one ApprenticeShop, you know — he’s on his third. He’s retired now, sure. But he started that and he started The Atlantic Challenge, which is a big deal now, 18 countries.

So he has resources. He can find the bodies that want to be here. We’re confident about that. It’s a matter of just getting a mission statement and figuring out who’s going to do what.

MS: Let’s say you had a shop, and you had apprentices. What would be the first steps to get the boat going?

Scott: We gotta patch the bottom. Like I said, we have the material for that already, bought and paid for. Just as important is to get the hatches and decks watertight, and the bulwarks on; right now she has to be pumped out every time it rains. And that’s not good for the hull.

Well, those are the things that require the least expenditure, in terms of rebuilding a boat. I mean, the hull is surprisingly not the most expensive part of the boat. Having all the equipment, and being able to start without a heavy requirement for money, that’s a good thing.

Jay: It’s not like you got a keel or the framework that has gotta be replaced. It’s still all good. It’s just some planking and the bulwarks, really.

MS: What woods were used in her originally?

Scott: Madeira and dogwood and horseflesh. Horseflesh is an ironwood, hard and dense. The planking is all Honduras mahogany, naval bronze fastening.

MS: How do the fasteners look?

Scott: Okay. I did not like the deck from day one, that fir deck. I didn’t think that was a good idea. It was fine when you were working every day…

MS: Do you have an original sail plan or lines? Did William Albury work from blueprints?

Scott: No, nobody here ever did that. But Fred Whittier was somewhat of a naval architect, and as I said he did a lot of the lofting. He might have drawn her lines.

For more info on the effort to rebuild the Albury, visit: www.facebook.com/SchoonerWilliamHAlbury