Yachtswoman Restores Legendary J-Class Sloop

Friends told her the legendary boat would sail again when pigs flew. Still, Elizabeth Meyer was determined to breathe new life into the 55-year-old Endeavor, one of the three remaining J-class sailboats.

Five years and $10 million later, Endeavor is racing again.

“J-boats are to sailors what Mount Everest is to climbers,” said Meyer, 36, a lifelong yachtswoman who spent more than 20 years following the J-class yachts. “I’ve always been in love with their history.”

Only 10 J-class sloops were ever built, the last in 1937. The Endeavor, which had eight owners in its 55 years, and two others are left.

When the 130-foot boat that challenged for the America’s Cup in 1934 came up for sale, it was berthed at Calshot Spit, England, wrecked, out of the water it once ruled so gracefully.

“When I saw Endeavor, I said . . . ‘Somebody has to do something,”’ Meyer said. She decided in “a thunderclap” that she was the one to undertake the challenge.

“I didn’t hesitate and I haven’t regretted it,” she says.

Meyer, the granddaughter of financier Eugene Meyer Jr., a former owner of the Washington Post, could certainly afford the whim.

“In order to do something like that properly it takes a lot more than money. It takes a lot of attention to detail. That’s what I gave it, and that’s what the people I hired gave it,” she said.

Meyer has “the sense of quality to not just get things right, but make them perfect,” said Gary Jobson, a member of the team that defended the 1977 America’s Cup and recently skippered the Endeavor off Newport. “This boat is nicer now than it ever was.”

Meyer would not disclose the “negligible” sum she paid for the boat. Its former owners paid approximately $16 for it in 1979, when it no longer floated.

Among those who helped Meyer rebuild Endeavor was Frank Murdock, one of the boat’s original designers and crew members.

Meyer also met with Sir Thomas Sopwith, for whom the Endeavor was built in 1934. Although he was interested in her undertaking, Sopwith, who died in January, told her that “the boat was ridiculous then and they’re worse now,” according to Meyer.

He told her it was a monstrosity, wild and dangerous. Meyer, however, said that when she sailed the Endeavor, she found the boat to have “very good manners.”

“I was not prepared for how good she was,” Meyer said. “She was quick and responsive. It’s just so much fun to sail that boat.”

The monstrosity boasts a solid cherry interior and carved marble fireplace.

“It’s the J-boat aesthetics as seen by Elizabeth Meyer,” she said. “Beauty took precedence over safety, good sense, practicality. Because the prime function of a J-boat is to be beautiful--and sail wicked good.”

Jobson calls the Endeavor the finest yacht in the world.

“Donald Trump’s (yacht) is a statement in glitz. It’s expensive. It’s big. (The Endeavor) is a statement of excellence,” he says.

Meyer moved to England for 18 months while the ship was being rebuilt, and oversaw the reconstruction of the hull. The weather was miserable and it was often difficult to get supplies for work on the boat.

“It was hard a lot of the time, but I never wanted to sell the boat, get rid of it or walk away from it,” Meyer said.

Meyer said it was necessary, for the sake of the boat, that she be the sole voice in its rebuilding.

“A group can’t do a boat like this. It’s got to have one owner who calls the shots and pays the money. You have to assume you know what’s right. The minute you start to wonder, you fall apart”--but while stern and decisive on the outside, Meyer said there were many nights when she cried herself to sleep.

Things are easier now on the Endeavor.

“You go below off-watch to the air conditioning--take a hot bath, watch the VCR,” Meyer said.

But even in the luxury below are reminders of the trying times.

In the boat’s salon, above the 10-place dining room table, hangs a friend’s painting of a flying pig, embellished with the caption, “Endeavor? When pigs fly.”