The Story of ‘Serendipity.’ A free nineteen foot Bartender

Over the years I have had intermittent cravings for a boat to get me into the ocean, where all the salmon are bright and lingcod and halibut patrol the rocky reefs.  Seeing the damage Nate has been doing offshore turned this occaisonal craving to a full time obssession.  I have to get out there.

Just like with my drift boat, I decided I could get more boat for the money if I  custom built rather than  bought a production boat.  Now, what to build?  I knew I really wanted a Bartender, a seaworthy craft indigenous to the Pacific Nortwest designed to cross rough river bars and bring you home safely that even served as Coast Guard search and rescue boats in our waters for many years and have migrated to Australia and anywhere else with rough ocean conditions.

But, I also knew the Bartender would be expensive to build and I was looking for economy and settled on a Nexus Planing dory.  Built in an open configuration it would be economical to build.  Being of very limited offshore experience I checked in with the crew at Wooden Boat Forum to get their thoughts and explained my intended uses.  Now, I added as a caveat that no one should mention the Bartender. 

Well, someone mentioned that they knew where there was a Bartender, that had never been finished and was free to a good home and would I be interested?  Yes, I might be interested.  We corresponded for a few weeks and I received these daunting images:

But, the gentleman assured me that for the price, the boat was in excellent condition and as far as he could tell had no major defects, meaning rot. I decided to go for it and cruised down to San Francisco, spending the night with old friends before venturing further south to Santa Cruz where I bought a cheap trailer that ended up fitting the boat perfectly.

The next stop was the Davenport Mill to actually extract the boat from where it had been stored upside down for about twenty years. It was quite a chore to get the hull out but with some finessing and finageling she was on the trailer by the early afternoon:

Tragically, the trailer winch was discovered to be defect so I had to head back to Santa Cruz and buy a new one. After a few hours of dealing with those logistics I was ready at 6:30 pm for the long road home and therein was a problem: did I drive the long road home through the night or stop somewhere short of home? In the end I elected to drive the whole way. A couplke fitful hours of sleep in the Ram didn’t seem like they would help much.

I got home at 7:30 am, slept for a couple hours and got right to work cleaning up the boat. I scrubbed the exterior for sanity’s sake and she didn’t look horrible anymore:

Next I turned my attention to the interior of the hull and even that didn’t look to shabby with a bit of elbow grease:

Unfortunately but understandably, Shelly put the kabosh on any chemical work in the garage and I was sent scrambling for a suitable shop, aka Man-Habitat in which to work. I got lucky again, finding that my coworker had just purchased a country property that had been foreclosed. The shop neeed a ton of work but would be free to me if I cleaned it up. The previous owner had a metal shop there and his disposal technique involved dumping steel cuttings and slag on the ground. I had to clean that up-it wasn’t exactly tire friendly:

The slag piles and steel made gravel and stone seem light. I removed it half a bucketload at a time and loaded the Ram down. You know you are dealing with some nasty stuff when employees at the dump question what you are up to but ultimately the supervisor gave me the go ahead. Next, I brought in a couple cubic yards of gravel to cover the cleared section and bury any tire mauling steel scraps I might have missed, overloading the Ram with one yard per trip and fretting the whole way in. But, she performed like a champ and the shop was ready to receive the boat:

So now, I am done working on the shop to work on the boat and now am again in the process of restoring the boat. I removed some trim that was too far gone and the port gunwhale:

The boat is mostly solid but I plan on replacing all or nearly all the frames to be on the safe side as well as rebuilding the motor well and reglassing the hull . Other than that, it is a matter of custom finishing the boat exactly how I want her. By next salmon season I hope to be trolling the open ocean.