The Worth of a Boat

[Clyde A. Phillips]

After a few years of (hopefully) helping Newporter owners make changes to their boat I have had to scrap my thinking that the Newporter was a well built vessel.  Let me make that more clear.  When I was helping to build these boats the building technique used by Ack in the design and building of these vessels was considered high tech.  We had a naval architect come to our yard (in Leesburg, NJ) to look over our operation and interview the men on the job in his hunt for a boatbuilder to build his boats.  He left saying that the Newporter was the best built boat to his knowledge.  He wanted us to build his designs, even after surveying yards from Maine to at least as far south as Leesburg.  That confirmed my thoughts on the Newporter.  Add to that the experience of the one Newporter that was thrown up on the rocks in a hurricane and suffered several days of pounding on those rocks until she could be taken off.  She suffered no damage and that account became an often told story in the selling of new boats.

Now, let’s fast forward to recent times.  During my last few years of Newporter watching I came to the conclusion that what was top of the line in the building of the boats failed in the long term because some of the materials used were living with a reputation to which they found it impossible to keep.  Ack advertised a dry boat to the point that he pictured a sweet young thing putting a supply of flour under the main cabin sole in the bilges.  After a half century of sailing many of our fleet were found to be, even with the bilges completely pumped out, carrying a lot more water around with them than could be accounted for by the sizes of the water tanks.  The plywood became sponges, the oak frames harbored and fed thousands of bacteria and fungi in places here and there, mostly where it was hard to find.  As a result, many of the boats were dismantled and left in “landfills.”

In watching Bob Mitchell (and others have done the same) rebuild his boat I have come to the conclusion that if the boat is floating with only a couple of bilge pumps helping to keep them afloat it will serve as a good starting place in rebuilding to “as new or better.”  I say better because things like glue and fasteners are much better now than the ones available when the Newporters were built.  In various places in this site are accounts and pictures of “lost causes” that have been made new.  Bob told me, via email, that he found a section of the apron (that major piece that caps the outside keel and on which the frames sit) that was rotten and he was going to replace that part in his effort to effect a fix.  I told him all that I knew about the apron.  I have built a few of them myself, but that was with all new wood and, remember, the apron was one of the first pieces put together to form the backbone (meaning that I didn’t have a boat sitting on the aprons I built).  That didn’t bother Bob too much.  He set to work, cut out the rotten place and started what became a complete replacement of the apron, which starts at frame 7 and goes all the way aft to the transom.  I figured he would complete the boat after that little job.

What’s the worth of a Newporter?  It depends on its condition, and your desires for the boat.  But if a boat is as bad as Bob’s was when he started could be saved and rebuilt to a mighty fine boat, then combining the cost of repairs and the cost of the boat will be X number of dollars, and I’d say from what I’ve seen (Bob’s boat and others) that what you finally put in the boat, money wise, will be less than its market value as a fine sailing yacht.  I’d say if built new in these days you’d be paying more than $250,000 for one.  Starting with a well used and thoroughly rotten boat that, as I said, still floats, you could wind up with a virtually new one for about a third of that or less.

 

[bob mitchell]

   One lesson to be learned: NEVER LEAVE THE EDGE GRAIN OF PLYWOOD OPEN - ALWAYS SOAK WITH EPOXY.

[bob mitchell]

Well thanks for the encouragement!!!!!! You have been a great partner - and probably the only one who could have gotten me as far as I have gotten.