"A Quiet Beauty"

As the latest custodian of Hindu, Josh Rowan had been running the schooner out of Provincetown in the summer and Key West in the winter since doing some major work back in 2011. However, the boat needed more. Rowan’s carefully-laid plans for a full rebuild were upended when Hindu struck a semi-submerged derelict in 2020 while returning to Provincetown, suffering major damage.

Marlinspike: First, tell us why Hindu is important. Why are you rebuilding the 97-year-old Hindu, instead of building a new boat?

Josh Rowan: That is a great question. I’ll give you my answer and then Erin will give you hers. [Third voice, unintelligible] Uh, it’s not all me! That’s not true!

I mean… everybody has something in their lives that may not be logical, but is driven by desire. Hindu fulfills, like, three niches for me. One is, she’s a quiet beauty, a subtle, not like a slap-you-in-the-face kind of beauty. She’s perfect in every way. And she is so different and unique in her construction and in her build quality.

For example: she should not be as fast as she is, for how she’s built. She’s built like a tank! And yet she can keep up with boats like Brilliant. And Aldens that are built with half the weight. That goes to show that that the designer was on to something.

On the engineering side of things, there are her hockeystick futtocks, which are totally weird, but Bowdoin has them, Ladona has them. It was a method of construction that allowed for the sole to be a little bit lower, so you could have a smaller boat and still have headroom without big deck houses.

MS: When you say “hockey stick” you mean that the futtock flattens out at the bottom and becomes the floor?

JR: Yeah. The futtock looks almost identical to a hockey stick. There’s a foot coming from each side, the forward foot on starboard and the after foot on port. They come across and then they’re bolted together and then bolted down through the keel. That becomes in essence the floor. So you don’t have to have these 24” high floors, in order to get that structure in the bottom of the boat.

MS: Are you finding it difficult, as you replace frames, to find stock with that curvature?

JR: Yeah, that has been the trickiest part of our acquisitions of lumber so far: finding boards that have as little run out as possible in those areas, and are wide enough to land on the keel and then run out three feet across to the other side of the boat. You’re talking about a 30” wide board.

MS: Seems like a tall order.

JR: Yeah! You could tell when we had pulled [the original frames] out, these are a hundred years old, they had seen a lot of service. There were some that had grain runout and some cracking in them, but very few. We have met the same quality thresholds as far as grain runout as they did originally, so I’m hoping to have just as good luck as they did. I feel like the materials that we’re using now are hundred-year materials instead of, you know, white oak. I feel like the black locust we’re using will outlast white oak.

MS: Before we get lost in the weeds of construction, let’s circle back to Erin and ask her why you’re rebuilding the Hindu.

Erin: The collective experience on the Hindu, and the investment of the communities that have spent almost a hundred years sailing and crewing the Hindu make it totally worthwhile! As well as the historic experiences of the Hindu, which make history come alive in a much more visceral kind of a way than textbooks.

MS: As far as the history of the schooner goes, I’ve read that Hindu was responsible for starting the whale-watching industry here in New England.

JR: Yeah! Al Avellar served in the Corsair Fleet on Ticonderoga, which was called Tioga then. He was the captain. At the end of the war, when they mothballed everything, he had the option to buy Tioga or any of the boats, and he chose Hindu.

When I asked Susan, his niece, why that was, she merely said that he wanted a schooner and that Provincetown had been built on the backs of schooners and he thought that it was a prettier rig than a ketch. He picked Hindu because of her lines and her seaworthiness. She’s just such a nice boat in all conditions. As you know, some boats thrive in certain conditions, but are miserable in others.

MS: What was he choosing her for? Did he already have an idea that he was going to take people out to look at whales, or was he just hoping to use her as an excursion boat?

JR: Well, this is the story I’ve heard. Before the war, he had run a catboat off of McMillan Pier and had a couple other rental boats, and he did sailing excursions. When he got back, he did it in a grander scale, with an obviously nowinspected boat. When they were taken into the Corsair Fleet, the boats were refitted with copper-lined engine rooms and fireproof bulkheads between the machinery space and the crew living space and so on. Lifelines were added. He chartered this boat and was doing four sails a day off of McMillan Pier before there was a float.

And Nappy — I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Nappy’s in P-town — Nappy was his crew that first year. He used to regale us with stories about those days sailing with Al, and he said that when they were out there with passengers in August, when the bait fish and jellyfish came around to the inside of the Bay where they sailed, and people saw whales, they lost their minds. Al realized that he could run whale trips. When they would sell a whale-watching trip — because they knew the whales were there and they had seen them and they would put up a sign — people would sign up in droves.

Al would make a lot of money off of whale watching in August and September, but he couldn’t make any money the rest of the summer. So he bought the Dolphin to be a fishing boat and to do whale watches when they were close enough. We’re in the end of the 1940s, into the 1950s. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that he really doubled down and did something that was just for whale watching, had a boat specifically built to be able to go out and the rough conditions that existed on Stellwagen Bank on the regular with passengers.

That was when he teamed up with Dr. Stormy Mayo, who was starting the Center for Coastal Studies and is credited with helping to save the right whale, among other things. The two of them created this utopian scientific and entrepreneurial partnership. Basically, the scientists needed time out with the whales, to study them and document them. And the vessel taking people out to see the whales needed authenticity and to provide an educational experience. The Center for Coastal Studies has the most time on whales of any organization in the world because of that. They have one or two naturalists on every boat.

There’s four boats and they’re doing four trips a day and they’re out there for, you know, three hours a piece. They have documented all of these whales. They know who’s calved who for the last 40 years. It’s amazing to have the Hindu be a part of that.

But when Al realized that he was taking this other path, he sold the Hindu to his cousin, Justin Avellar, who kept the tradition of sailing the boat, and in August and September doing whale watch trips like his cousin did. And then his daughter, Susan Avellar, became a captain, and the boat stayed in the family until 1980-something.

MS: Let’s skip ahead to the current day. The Hindu is an elderly lady at this point. She needs work. Talk about the work that she needs and your decision to do that work in Maine.

JR: Okay. So, when we did the rebuild back in 2011, it was obvious that she was going to need a legitimate, keel-up rebuild. I put together a 10-year plan of how I was going to do it, how I was going to fund it. Bloodhound was a huge part of that. Hindu and Bloodhound were supposed to operate for three summers together — the last was supposed to have been this summer of 2022. We planned to baby the Hindu along to make it to that goal, so that she wouldn’t be lost like so many boats have been.

My goal was to put away a kitty that was big enough to give her the rebuild of queens, and that stupid human that drilled holes in their boat and let it go in front of Tropical Storm Fay, basically took my very elaborate 10-year plan and destroyed it [Hindu struck this submerged derelict in Long Island Sound in July 2020, while returning to Provincetown, suffering major damage]. So, financially, we started off in the worst way. We had less than a tenth of the money that I had hoped to have — and that was with the small amount of help from our insurance that we ended up getting.

Originally the plan was to do all the stuff that hadn’t been done in her 2005 rebuild: the keel and those lower hockey-stick futtocks. Basically three feet of framing from the keel out on either side, all the way down the backbone. All the framing and the backbone itself. And then we planned to replank the boat and put a new deck on it. That was the scope of our hundred-year rebuild.

But when we pulled off the ceiling, revealing all of the frames, we noticed that the framing had been lightened substantially. Many of the original 3” double-sawn frames had been replaced by frames that were just an inch and seven eighths. Her movement, and the reason the boat was hogging worse and worse every year, was due to the fact that she was way too lightly framed now to be able to carry that design.

Her design, as we talked about earlier, was brilliant. It didn’t need a lot of bulkheads and it didn’t need to have the best planking in the world. But between the lightened framing, bad planking and no real structural bulkheads, she continued to hog and decay to the point where we had to do this massive rebuild.

We were sitting there in the boat — Simon Larson, Mike Rogers and myself — sitting on the frames after we had ripped the interior out and pulled all the ceiling off. Mike said, “I think you’re gonna have to replace all the framing.” And I said, “Well, we can’t afford to do that.”

Like, we could replace every third one, but there was just no way… the scope of this project had just gone from huge to beyond enormous. Basically we were building the entire boat now. That was not the original intent.

I had to reevaluate my ten-year plan. We reached out to the community to try to get support. We did receive some support from our customer base, but we didn’t get any support from outside our customer base. And we had three really bad deliveries of wood from South America. We used to be able to get wood that was free of heart. Now everything was boxed. And so we ended up having to compromise on things that I didn’t want to have to compromise on. The biggest piece that we had ordered, the forefoot, had a rotten check running through the entire thing, all the way out to the edges!

At that point, we realized that we could no longer have a timeline. We decided that for the same cost of spending a year in any of the boatyards in Maine, we’d buy a piece of land for the project and put up a heavy timber building so that we had no cost except for $1400 a year in taxes to keep the Hindu where she was. And it meant that we could breathe, without having to worry about losing the boat.

MS: It was really the collision in Long Island Sound that caused your plan to disintegrate.

JR: It was that collision, or I should say, when we hauled the boat at the end of McMillan Pier with two cranes. That was when we saw the damage that had occurred, which was even worse than I thought. And that was when I realized there was no saving that summer. No matter how hard I worked, I wouldn’t be able to get the boat back together.

COVID had already changed the plan a couple times on us, and then that happened. We operate under the same premise that most Jones Act charter boats operate under, which is that everybody is a private contractor. As a result, we didn’t qualify for PPP loans or any of that. We were in dire straits. We had been insured for about a quarter of the value of Hindu, and you can only make a claim up to about half of the insured value of something before they just take the asset. So we were only eligible for about an eighth of the value of Hindu.

HINDU is back in Maine, where she was built — and where land and labor are less expensive.

And we had been so excited about what was looking to be a very promising summer of 2020. It was all private charters and everyone had already put a 50% deposit down — during that first summer of the pandemic, everyone wanted the boat to themselves. We had a sold-out boat for every trip. And to go from that to nothing was devastating.

We began talking with various shipyards in Maine, and doing the math, and realizing that even if we were in a normal boatyard and got a really good deal, we would still have to build a structure over the boat. So Erin and I left the boat in P-town with bilge pumps running, zoomed up to Maine, and ran all over to these different properties that we had looked at on Zillow.

MS: Why Maine?

JR: She was originally built in Maine, and that history meant something to both of us. And Maine has the best economy for something like that. There’s enough shipwrights and enough land that the prices are still attainable and there’s a lower cost of living. The same shipwright working in Massachusetts would be 30% more, right? The same person in Florida would be 50% more!

Also, the idea was to find people with skills and not have to train everyone. Having done the first rebuild in Key West and having to train everybody and import everything — I never wanted to repeat that, even though the winters are so much nicer.

MS: So what was the timeline of your buying the land, bringing the boat up there and building the structure?

JR: Well, July 10 was the collision. I think they had opened up Provincetown on July 7, and we left the day they opened for business, allowing people to run trips. Provincetown was really strict during lockdown. We took off running up as fast as we could, and we were just ahead of Tropical Storm Fay, five hours ahead of it by the time we were running down Long Island Sound. And that was when the allision occurred at like 3:30 in the morning, right on the Port Jefferson ferry dotted line, in 150 feet of water.

MS: And being underinsured… even though the boat was insured, you weren’t made whole, or anything like it.

JR: I mean, we were beyond underinsured. Most people are, in this industry. Very few of us have our boats insured for their replacement cost or build cost. And my annual insurance premiums right now are over $60K!

MS: On three boats.

JR: True, on three boats, but it’s still a lot of money, for a decade now, going out the door and having only gotten, you know, basically two years worth coming back through the door. It just makes you want to start an insurance company.

MS: Yes, it does.

JR: I had already engaged Mike and Simon in talks about starting the project earlier than planned, and what their availability was, and they were both were available that summer and were very hungry to do the Hindu. I had to make up my mind. If at a certain date, if P-town didn’t open, we would just start the project early. That was Plan C, never thinking that we were going to do that. If we could, we were going to run the contracts that we already had that summer in Provincetown. We needed the money.

But then the allision, the damage, the loss of all those contracts… and now we were headed to Maine. Erin and I left, just the two of us, on Hindu, with a big brand-new gas crash pump on the deck and two bilge pumps running continuously. We drove right up through the night, into Davis Cove. And by the following week we owned land, we got the masts out of the boat at Rockport, who did it at like five in the morning, before work, and in the fog. Then we transported the rig by land, from Rockport to Thomason, to the property.

Meanwhile, we took the boat to Ladona’s slip, took out all the internal ballast,and then brought her around from Rockland and up the river into Thomaston without any ballast, which was pretty funny.

The bow was up like two feet and she was just like wobble, bobble. It was a very interesting ride. I mean, she had her 16,000 pounds of iron bolted to the bottom of her, but she didn’t have her 16,000 pounds of lead that was inside her or 8,000 pounds of rigging. It was a very different motion. Erin actually got seasick, although it was a nice calm day.

Dan Miller from Belmont Boatworks did us this awesome favor, trucked the Hindu to our property, hauled her up the hill around that corner, and it’s a very steep grade! And his truck starts spitting out and the whole thing slides backing around the corner. Erin and I are up on top of the boat, because we’ve got to pick up all the phone lines to pass them over the top of the boat. My dog Finn is up there too.

I remember, I was like, “Erin, we’ve gotta jump off the high side, not the low side!” Dan took Hindu from Lyman Morris, where we hauled, about three quarters of a mile to our property, which at that time didn’t have the building I built. It was just a parking lot for the probation office for the old Thomaston prison. The Shawshank Redemption prison.

MS: So now you’ve got three boats in three widely separated places: Key West, P-town, and Thomaston. How does this work? Where do you find time to work on Hindu?

JR: Winters. I’m the only idiot that goes to Maine for the winter.

MS: I thought you were running that catamaran, the Argo Navis, in Key West during the winter.

JR: I am, I’m doing the management side of it, and I run it for the month of January. But other than that, it’s run by my best friend and business partner.

The new backbone and frames have restored HINDU’s springy sheer, bringing the stern up 16”

MS: So what’s the timeline of the rebuild, now that you and Simon and Mike have had your come-to-Jesus moment where you pulled out the ceiling and saw those frames, and you’ve got the boat up in Maine and built a shed around her. What’s the new plan?

JR: The new plan is a June 2024 launch. I was thinking about pushing this year, and being in by June of 2023. I was going to beg, borrow, and steal and put together a massive yard crew to pull that off. And then I decided that I didn’t want to go that far into debt. I would rather get through this project with my sanity and without killing myself. I’m just not as young as I used to be. And I don’t have the patience to deal with that big of a crew and that many things going on and the many inefficiencies when you start to get into a big crew.

The cost of the project goes up by like 35% when you end up with a big crew, because you have people standing around, time that isn’t being utilized. And there’s just waste that happens. I want to enjoy the project, and I want to be more hands on, rather than paying other people to do the stuff that I love to do.

MS: Tell us a little bit about Bloodhound. Here’s this sexy cutter that you found out on the West Coast, and you brought her East and got her certified. I know you had a lot of hoops to jump through. How is Bloodhound doing in Provincetown?

JR: Awesome! No one even knows that they’re not on Hindu [laughs]. It’s pretty funny.

No, it’s been awesome. It sails so amazingly well, with the delivery mainsail that William Fife designed for the boat in 1874. That sail was never made until I got the boat and Dave Barrack made it and then we raced the boat and couldn’t believe how well it sailed and how well balanced it was with just the delivery mainsail and staysail.

And then Dave and I, when we were sailing it, we were joking about how cool it would be if we didn’t even have to raise it, if we could brail it like Pride and Lynx. As soon as we built the new, real mainsail, Dave took the delivery main and installed the brail system in it. Now literally one person can set the sail. It’s so easy, it’s easier to set sail and drop sail on the Hound than on the Hindu!

MS: I would love to sail with you and see that. What kind of COI did you end up getting for the Bloodhound?

JR: The COI is 37, three crew and 34 passengers.

MS: And how does that feel?

JR: It is amazing. 34 passengers is just the right amount of people on the boat. It’s far less crowded- feeling than the Hindu with the same number, which is weird, because the amount of deck space is far less. But I designed the benches to keep the deck clear, and keep people as far outboard as possible, and it’s amazing how well that works.

MS: So what’s it going to be like, when you bring Hindu back to Provincetown in a couple years?

JR: The Bloodhound will do sunset sails and private charters and Hindu will do all the day sails. The one difficulty with Bloodhound being a day sail boat is her lack of maneuverability. Every exit from the slip is an Austin Powers maneuver. When it’s windy, we have to use a push boat.

The Hindu is so nimble. She can turn it inside of her own radius. Bloodhound is definitely not that. I had this big, fancy bow-thruster system that I designed, purchased and installed. I started it in 2016 and finally got the system to work this summer.

MS: A five-year project!

JR: [Laughs] You know how those things are. And it was the most disappointing thing I’ve ever done in my life! The 37-horsepower motor just cannot overcome the 12-foot keel of this boat. She’s eight feet deep, just four feet back from the stem. There’s no pushing that around! She wants to go in a straight line, basically.

MS: I’m sure P-town will be excited to see Hindu again after such a long hiatus. And hopefully she’ll have her springy sheer back.

JR: Oh, it’s back already! It’s incredible. We brought the stern up 13 inches, and the bow up 16. We badly wanted the boat to take its shape back. We have a sideline drawing of the boat, and we put the bow and the stern at the position that they should have been in the line drawing, which we got out of Rudder magazine.

Once we got to those places, the boat just looked and felt right. And then we went and copied every frame and made new frames. Now 85% of the frames I would say are done. The entire backbone is done now. And she’s bolted together from stem to stern. MS: These frames are locust, that you’re putting in.

JR: We went with locust because it’s far more rot resistant and easier on the metal fasteners. White oak is an incredible wood, but it’s not great in the tropics and it’s not great for fasteners because the closed cells and the acids in white oak make fasteners dissolve over time with the interaction with the salt water.

I’m a believer in woods like purpleheart and locust. They’ve proven themselves as being incredibly rot resistant and incredibly strong. They’re also, from a metallurgy point of view, a much more stable medium to run bolts through.

I also got some live oak from Andy Tyska at the Boothbay Harbor Shipyard. Andy’s been great. We got a whole bunch of live oak from him to use right at the turn of the main mast, at the chain plates. I really wanted that part of the boat to have no worry of grain runout and no worry of strength. I went to live oak because of the way that the grain runs in every direction and, and even curls around itself. I’ve tried to break the stuff. And I couldn’t! I wanted that part of the boat — which is where boats fail, right by the chain plates, right at that turn of the bilge — to be right.

That’s the only place I did live oak, and only on the piece that’s actually making the turn. On either side of it is black locust, but the actual turn turning piece is live oak, both port and starboard, at the really sharp turn of the bilges.

MS: I’m not sure I’ve seen futtocks in the same frame being made of different woods. Are the expansion rates similar? You don’t feel like there there’s going to be an issue there?

JR: No, they’re definitely different. But the wood that we put in was incredibly dry. It was, I think, five years seasoned wood and then it is bolted with half-inch bronze bolts, and all it’s going to do is swell and tighten. I don’t see any issue as far as the movement there. If anything, it might expand away from the locust.

MS: All bronze fastenings?

JR: All bronze. The most painful thing I’ve ever done. [Laughs] I got all of my fasteners from Rob at Fair Winds. You should write his number down, he really can get any fastener you need. (401) 314-344.

He buys fasteners from all the manufacturers and then does his own tests, putting them in an electrolyte and shearing them and seeing what the shear strengths really are and who’s using what metals. He takes it to the next level, and he doesn’t charge what he should charge for doing that! I just appreciate him. He’s worth looking into.

Find out more about Hindu’s 100-year restoration at sailschoonerhindu.com