Around the Yards

By Michael Crowley

Wesmac Custom Boats launched the Sarah B, a 46-foot tuna boat, at the end of August.

here’s no shortage of boats being built at Wesmac Custom Boats in Surry, Maine. “We have many, many to build,” says Steve Wessel, owner of the yard, adding that Wesmac is booked through next summer.

One of those is the Sarah B, a 46' 3" x 14' 7" tuna boat launched the afternoon of Aug. 26 for Gavin Boucher out of Harwinton, Conn. She has a 55-gallon bait hold, a fi sh hold, and “everything up forward,” says Wessel, referring to bunks, a shower, galley and head. The Sarah B is powered with a 1,000-hp Cat C12.9.

“We are selling a lot of 50s,” Wessel says, referring to the Wesmac 50 and the Wesmac 54. Both have a 17-foot 6-inch beam and 6 feet of draft. One of the 50s is a lobster boat for Matt Huntley of Machiasport, Maine. The hull was being laid up at the end of August and should be completed in late fall.

Another Wesmac 50 with a 1,600hp Caterpillar C32 will be trucked to the West Coast and launched as a commercial tuna boat and a sportfi shing boat for Robert Pedigo, probably in the fall of 2022.

Among the mix of 50-footers are several 40-footers. That includes two tuna boats, one at 42' x 14' 6" and the other at 46' x 14' 6". Both should be launched next June and will be powered by 1,150hp Scania diesels. Wessel says it’s a new model Scania — D116304M. “I brought the fi rst two into this country.”

The 42-footer is for Chris Peterson in Freeport, Maine, whose previous boat was the Mojo. This will be the Mojo 2. The 46-footer is going to Cedric and Tricia Vohden in Oceanport, N.J. Both boats will have a fi sh hold and bait tank. Up forward will be bunks, a galley, shower and head.

Among the boats being built, the only one under 40 feet was a 38-foot passenger boat for the Coast Guard that will be based out of Laurel Hollow, N.Y., but operate out of Montauk. “We don’t do small boats very often,” noted Wessel.

Due to be launched in December is a Coast Guard-certifi ed 54' x 17' 6" clam dredger going to Bridgeport, Conn. For power there’s a 1,000-hp Caterpillar main engine, while a Nanni 4.5 will power the dredge pump.

All the above-mentioned boats have Northern Lights generators — 9, 15, 16 or 20 kW.

The weekend before the Sarah B was launched and about 100 miles to the southwest, Maine’s lobster boat racing season ended with races at Long Island on Saturday and Portland on Sunday. At the conclusion of the Portland races, 645 boats had traveled to the 11 races that began June 19 in Boothbay.

This year’s numbers would have been higher if the Friendship and Harpswell races hadn’t been hit with heavy rain and choppy racing conditions, and if the weatherman hadn’t announced, “Hurricane’s coming!” for the Portland race, says Jon Johansen, president of Maine Lobster Boat Racing.

Still, the 2021 total number is a big improvement over the 379 boats that

Jon Johansen Continued on page 41

They weren’t the fastest boats at the Long Island races, but Lynn Marie and Hook & Ladder put on a good show in the Diesel class-A race.

By Larry Chowning

ric Hedberg of Rionholdt

of Gywnns, Va., swears by PVC sheets and planks as a viable substitute to wood in boatbuilding and for maintenance of wood boats.

The Chesapeake Bay’s wooden boat commercial fi shing fl eet is aging, and quality boatbuilding wood is getting harder to fi nd. Hedberg has persuaded some bay watermen to try PVC as a substitute to wood. He has built several 20foot and over deadrise-style boats out of PVC sheets and planks.

“You can bury a boat made from PVC in the ground and dig it up 20 years later, and it would be as good as new,” says Hedberg. “PVC takes the issues of moisture and wood rot in wooden boats off the table.”

Hedberg says the material is also good for repair of older wooden boats. He recently installed a waist made from PVC sheets on the deck boat Peggy. The boat was built in 1925 to work in the bay’s pound net fi shery.

The Peggy’s new 56-foot-long waist butts up to the stem and extends to the stern. Each waist is 3" x 4" at the base. The upright portion is 1.5" x 8" and it has a 3/4" x 2" PVC cap that fi ts over the top of the upright piece. The two waists are attached to the deck with 50 stainless

The 1925 Chesapeake Bay buyboat Peggy is getting a new 56-foot waist, made from PVC sheets.

steel bolts bolted into the wooden sides and deck of the Peggy.

“I built and installed the wooden waist that was on the Peggy myself 10 years ago with the best kiln dried fi r we could fi nd. It did not hold up,” says Hedberg. “They won’t be pulling this (PVC) waist off in 10 years.”

Hedberg says he has been using PVC to repair pilothouse roofs and window frames and other top work on older wooden workboats. “Watermen are having me use PVC in areas where there is not as much wear and tear,” he says. “I think as time goes on, they will see that

PVC will hold up in areas where there is more stress.”

Moving up to Maryland, a six-year boatbuilding project at Mt. Airy, Md., is moving forward as the hull of a 46-foot deadrise deck boat, the John Swain, is complete and ready to turn over.

Back in 2015, Jim Drake and his wife, Brooke, let us know they were building a 46-foot Chesapeake Bay deck boat, also called buyboats. NF has been following the project in this column. (See ATY South, June 2019).

The boat is named for John Swain because of the couple’s admiration of the Chestertown, Md., boatbuilder. Swain is renowned as the main builder of the Sultana, which is a reproduction of a 1767 Boston-built merchant vessel that served for four years as the smallest schooner ever commissioned in the British Royal Navy.

Traditionally, Chesapeake Bay wooden deadrise hulls are built upside down and fl ipped right side up for the top work and decking to be installed. The challenge is to fl ip the boat over without damaging the hull. Drake has constructed an adaptation of a method used by Reuel B. Paker to fl ip hulls as described in Paker’s book “The New Cold-Molded Boatbuilding.”

Drake has installed two four-sided “turning frames” that encircle and wrap

around the hull from sheer to sheer. The turning frames are made of three layers of 2" x 12" Douglas fi r boards and joined at the corners with gussets and braces. The two frames are positioned so that each

Attached turning frame that will be used to fl ip the John Swain over.

A crane will come soon to fl ip the 4.5-ton hull of the Chesapeake Bay deck boat John Swain.

By Michael Crowley

Petrzelka Brothers’ last commercial fi shing boat was the Thunder, a 32-foot Bristol Bay gillnetter.

fter 44 years of building, repairing, fi nishing off and outfi tting commercial fi shing boats, Petrzelka Brothers (Joel, Jon and Paul) in Mt. Vernon, Wash., has completed its last commercial fi shing boat. The only boat left in the shop is a pleasure boat that will be completed by the end of the year. And when that’s gone, the doors will be shut for good.

That last fi shing boat was the Thunder, a 32' x 19' Bristol Bay gillnetter built by Madden Metal Works in Bellingham, Wash. The Thunder has a pair of 800-hp MAN diesels matched up with two Thrustmaster jets, a Pacifi c West RSW system, and it packs more than 20,000 pounds. Petrzelka Brothers did some outfi tting and interior work to fi nish her off , but not a lot. “The interior was sparse. He wanted to keep it light, so it would go fast. She did around 35 knots,” says Jon Petrzelka.

“By far it was the largest boat we’ve ever done and the largest boat up there (Bristol Bay) that I can think of.” He’s referring not only to the 19-foot beam but to the 18- to 20-foot height of a “fairly tall cabin and a fl ying bridge.”

Thinking back over the past four decades, Petrzelka refl ected on how Bristol Bay gillnetters have changed over the years he and his brothers have been in business. For one thing, most of the boats in the 1970s and early ’80s were fi berglass, and “very few of the Bristol Bay boats had refrigeration. It was ice or nothing.” Of course, fi sh could be delivered to a tender, which had refrigeration, but it might be several hours before the delivery took place. “Now you want to cool them as quick as you can, almost before they die.”

Back then it was shafts and props that provided the thrust. When waterjets started to be part of a gillnetter’s propulsion system, you could go up shallow and not worry about chewing up nets, “but you probably lost 20 to 30 percent of horsepower as far as thrust,” says Petrzelka. “Jets have become so much more effi cient.”

In general, the electronics package on a Bristol Bay gillnetter started pretty simple before becoming more complicated. All you had was a couple of radios, then crude lorans, then GPS and plotters.

Once the doors close, not only is boatbuilding a thing of the past for the Petrzelka brothers but so, too, is the Copper River fi shery they worked in the summer.

tion in Sedro-Woolley, Wash., recently completed the Intensity, a 35' x 13' aluminum crabber that is fi shing out of Westport, Wash., with a 500-hp Cummins 8.3 diesel.

Currently the crew there is building a 36' x 13' crabber that will work Puget Sound as well as Southeast Alaska. It will have a Northern Lights 22-kW genset and a very diff erent propulsion system. Instead of an inboard diesel

Continued on page 41

Continued from page 38

came to the 2020 races. That year ve races were canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic. In 2019, the last “normal” racing year, 813 boats raced.

At Long Island, the fastest races involved Blue Eyed Girl, a Morgan Bay 38 with a 900-hp Scania, and Maria’s Nightmare II, a Mussel Ridge 28 with an 800-hp Nanni. They were matched up in Diesel — Class K, 701 to 900 hp, 28 feet to 40 feet, again in the Diesel Freefor-All and then the Fastest Lobster Boat race. Maria’s Nightmare II took the rst race at 39 mph, was edged out by Blue Eyed Girl in the Diesel Free-For-All, and then beat Blue Eyed Girl in the Fastest Lobster Boat Race. Generally, “they were side-by-side all the way up the course,” says Johansen.

The next day Blue Eyed Girl was one of the boats that chose not to race at Portland. So Maria’s Nightmare II easily took Diesel — Class K, the Diesel Freefor-All at 50.1 mph, as well as the Fastest Lobster Boat race. The reason for Maria’s Nightmare II’s di erent speeds in Long Island and at Portland is “Maria’s Nightmare put a new prop on,” between the races, says Johansen.

Closing out the day, as is tradition in Portland, was the tugboat race. This year it was between three McAllister tugs, who put on their own high-speed display, running neck-and-neck at about 15 mph.

The Portland races usually have a fundraiser, and this year was no di erent with money raised for college scholarships and trade school scholarships. Some of the money came from selling racing T-shirts and sweatshirts, but the bulk of it came when race winners gave back their prize money to the scholarship fund. That would be $100 for rst place, $50 for second and $25 for third.

“Everybody put back to the scholarship fund,” says Katie Werner who manages the fundraising. She estimates that $4,500 will be raised. Scholarships are to be presented at the Maine Fishermen’s Forum in March.

Continued from page 39

one roughly divides the mass of the hull into thirds, says Drake.

The frames will be cross-braced to each other to prevent spreading, and braced to the inside of the hull. The lifting side has chain lift points attached with through bolts at the lower corners of the frames, and a crane will be used to “gently” lift the 4.5-ton hull up and roll it over, he says.

Drake built all structural aspects of the vessel’s hull using r planks laminated together to shape the keel, stem and other structural parts. Cold-molded plywood coated over with Dynel polyester epoxy and cloth was applied for sides and bottom. The boat will be powered by a Cummins diesel engine that Drake had in an old truck. The engine has been rebuilt and is ready to be installed, says Drake.

Several years ago, when attending the Sultana Downrigging and Tall Ships Festival in Chestertown, the Drakes were introduced to Chesapeake Bay deck boats. Brooke fell in love with the boats, and Jim set out to build her one. In their heyday, (1920s and ’30s) there were more than 3,000 deck boats on Chesapeake Bay. Today there are about 40 left — with a new one on the way!

Continued from page 40

there will be twin 350-hp Suzuki dualprop outboards.

“We do a lot of outboard crabbers — almost all,” says Velocity Marine’s Rob Smith. The Suzuki combination should have the crabber pushing 50 mph.

The advantages of an outboard are it weighs less, is faster and is easily replaced. “Something happens to an engine, you can just pull the bolts, take it o and bolt another one on the same day.” In addition, outboards aren’t as expensive. Smith says “you can get 700-hp for roughly $50,000, versus a 700-hp inboard diesel that’s roughly $80,000.”

One of the last boats Velocity Marine built has been getting some attention. That’s the Helisa Marie, a 33' x 11' aluminum landing craft that doubles as a gillnetter and a crabber and was shing Puget Sound in August. “It’s working amazingly,” says Smith, adding that the owner is very happy with it. The landing craft gillnetter/crabber combo also has a pair of 350-hp Suzuki outboards. At the end of August, Smith said he was talking with a couple of shermen interested in the same package.

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