Kit Jones is Waiting for You by William C. Fleetwood Jr.
HISTORIC SHIPS ON A LEE SHORE
oatyards can be interesting, but oftentimes melancholy, places. Scattered among the newer boats getting fresh varnish or bottom paint, there are always a few rusting, past-their-prime hulks-once somebody's darling but now derelict and forgotten, liabilities more than assets, a step away from the chainsaw or cutting torch. In every one there is probably a story, but the old wooden rug now at Bay Marine Boat Works in Biloxi, Mississippi, has seen enough characters and drama over both Atlantic and Gulf waters to make her name a fond remembrance to some of the world 's foremost marine scientists. When launched into the waters off Sapelo Island, Georgia, in March 1939, the sixty-foot rug Kit Jones already was of sterling pedigree. Her design sprang from the draftsmen of none other than Sparkman and Stephens, famed New York naval architects and designers of custom watercraft
for yachting cognoscenti. R. J. Reynolds Jr.-tobacco king, bon vivant, and one of the wealthiest men in the country-need-
ed a vessel to carry supplies and passengers to Sapelo Island, which he had recently purchased from northern industrialist Howard Coffin. Reynolds, an accomplished sailor and yachtsman, hired local carpenter and shipwright Holger Sparre to build the rug on Sapelo, using live oak and pine cut and milled on the island. It was not his first Sparkman and Stephens vessel. Reynolds had named his other Sparkman and Stephens yachts Blitzen and Scarlett O'Hara, after the beautiful women in his life, 1 and the new rug was no exception. C hristened Kit Jones (after Katharine Talbott Jones, the wife of Bill Jones, Coffin's island manager and business partner), the new boat was a craft of her times, representing the owner's money, the designer's art, and the builder's skill. As she was launched in 1939, on the horizon were momentous changes that the coming war years would bring-including the advent of polyester resin and Owens-
Kit Jones was designed by Sparkman & Stephens in New
Kit Jones Sparkman & Stephens Model No. 236 Length Overall (LOA) 60.33 feet Beam 16 feet Draft 4.5 feet
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York City but was built locally on Sapelo Island in Georgia for tobacco magnate R. J Reynolds Jr. to ferry passengers and supplies between the mainland and the island, where Reynolds had an estate.
1 "Blitz" was aa nickname used by Rey nolds's first wife, Elizaberhh McCaw Dillard. His second wife was starlet Mariannne O'Brien, who bore a resemblance to Scarlett O 'I-Hara in Gone with the Wind, played by actress Vivien I Leigh.
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CO URTESY SPARKMAN & STEPHENS, LLC
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SEA fHISTORY 154, SPRING 2016