Boat Lovers Buy the Old, Fix Them Up

When Henry Wheeler began looking at new boats, he couldn’t find anything he liked. For one thing, most new boats are made of fiberglass and Wheeler wanted wood. He also liked the traditional lines of older vessels. So Wheeler bought a used boat and hired a yacht restorer to renovate the vessel from stem to stern.

Today, more boat lovers like Wheeler are opting to fix up the old rather than buy the new.

“Restoring a boat is more difficult than building a new boat,” says Bob Steel, the man in charge of the two-year project that will transform Wheeler’s 64-foot sailboat into something “better than new.”

Steel and his seven-person crew have been working on the boat for 18 months and expect to have it completed by September. First the hull had to be taken down to bare wood and refinished and the boat’s teak decks were replaced. The crew is now working on the boat’s interior.

“To do a boat restoration properly, you have to keep it as close to the original as possible,” says Steel, who runs a Costa Mesa company called Maritime Outfitters. “But in doing that you can marry the old traditional ways with new technology while relying on old-world craftsmanship.”

One way Steel plans to do that is by using some of today’s newest and strongest materials, such as titanium, which will be used to make the spreaders on the ship’s mast. He also is coating the boat’s wooden bottom with an environmentally safe paint that contains no anti-fouling ingredients or solvents that could pollute the water.

In addition, he is strengthening the rigging so that the boat can carry some of today’s high-tech sails, which are often stronger than the hardware that holds them, he says. “Old sails could disintegrate. Now the new ones are almost bulletproof and won’t fail. The rigging could fail before the sails would. So (in an old boat) you have to have rigging to carry the new sails that are made of new, stronger materials.”

Whether you call it restoration or renovation, nearly everyone involved in such boat work agrees that it requires lots of patience, lots of skill and lots of money. Although Steel would not reveal the exact budget of the restoration project he is conducting, he says that typical restorations can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Robert Vanderwater, a marine carpenter who has been working on a 66-foot powerboat for a year and a half, says: “Any client we have is in the millionaire status.” Vanderwater, who has his own marine carpentry business in Costa Mesa, says his work on the boat involved remodeling three heads, three staterooms and an entire galley. “We even built a refrigerator, every inch of it from beginning to end,” he says.

The boat, which is owned by Mr. and Mrs. Patrick Farrah of Long Beach, has a steel hull and teak upper deck and was originally built in 1965 in Holland. The restoration project was under the direction of Sheryl Bretz of Yachts of Class, a marine design firm in Newport Beach. “Our goal was to keep the classic look of the boat,” Bretz says. “It even looks older than it really is.”

Bretz designed all the interior structural changes, including custom tables and settees, then hired a crew of four carpenters to work on the project. “The whole interior was redone,” she says. “There were structural changes in every single room. It was challenging, believe me. Everything on a boat is a challenge. There are no straight lines and everything has to be custom made. You don’t just go out and buy furniture.”

As an example, Bretz cites the custom teak cocktail table built by Vanderwater at a cost of about $6,000. The table had to follow the line of the settee and so is wider at one end than it is at the other. In addition, the table is convertible and can be raised to dining table height when needed.

Dennis Ambrose of Newport Woodworking compares boat restorations to redesigning a house. “Usually the owner gets a designer. And then you bring in the various trades--upholsterers, carpenters, shipwrights. On the upper end, where you have these mega yachts--the million-dollar-plus yachts--the owners will buy one and then change it to his personal preference. That makes up about 30% of our work for us.”

In addition to renovating mega yachts, Ambrose says he does a lot of custom built-ins. “The majority of our customers are building something in--like a nice master stateroom with a built-in TV.” Last year Ambrose says he built in a giant TV monitor on a 45-foot powerboat owned by a television producer who worked on “L.A. Law.”

Building something into the cramped quarters of a boat is always a challenge, says Dwayne Irvin of South Coast Marine, a Costa Mesa company that does custom woodworking. “On a boat you are conscious of every inch and how it works in proportion to the interior and how it will function to do what it is supposed to do and to give you storage. The design has to make all the compromise you need to make and still not make you feel crowded or uncomfortable. Almost everything you put into a boat has to function in many ways. From a building standpoint, you can’t get any more difficult.”

One of the biggest challenges facing such craftsmen is trying to figure out how to build in as much storage space as possible when doing a remodeling job. “They (boat owners) discover that they don’t have as much storage space as at home. And they want to know if we can put in a shelf here or enlarge this,” says Chris Shelley, owner of C. Chris Shelley Woodworks in Costa Mesa.

When faced with such a job, Shelley says: “The first concern is that the boat should look as if it has always been that way. It shouldn’t look as if it has been added on.”