THE GLORYBE
The Destruction and Restoration of the Grandy built raised deck cruiser: GloryBee
Snow swirled around the Seattle Yacht Club docks the evening of January 31st, 2002. The 88 year old GloryBe was one of the yachts moored along the dock when one vessel burst into flames. Fed by exploding propane and fuel tanks, the roaring inferno soon reached the GloryBe. As the dock roof collapsed upon her, she quickly burned, rolled and partially sank, probably saving her from total loss. Thirteen yachts sank that night and many others suffered damage.
Reading a salvage report on the 20 affected boats, Betsy Davis, who had recently purchased the GloryBe, nearly swooned when she saw her boat listed as “gone.” But the old girl wasn’t done. Expert salvage operations by Foss Maritime – using the last remaining steam-powered barge crane on the West coast, successfully raised the hull, flipped it right side up, sat her back in the water, and wonder of wonders, she floated! Betsy later wrote: “After all she had been through, missing her pilot house and badly burned, she never forgot how to be a boat. She floated, and within minutes she was holding on her deck a few people who were finalizing the rigging for the final lift to the barge. Happily, the lift to the barge was uneventful, she was blocked up well, and the barge took the boats to an area on land set up to contain any environmental hazards. Over two weeks after the fire I was finally able to see GloryBe up close and examine the damage. It was devastating. Both the structure and contents of her pilothouse had vanished entirely, many frames, deck beams and planks were charred or gone, and the forward deck and cockpit were badly burned.”
Could it be that the boat, or at least her ghost, might just live? Given the boat’s history, it seemed possible. Sunk, holed, lost and burned, this boat has flirted with disaster for nearly 100 years. Yet through it all, she’s displayed a will to live so strong it’s a bit spooky. Her story began one happy 1914 day when L.A. Jacox motored his proud new yacht across Puget Sound to her Tacoma berth. The last in a series of raised deck cruisers built by partners Charlie Taylor and Lewis Lee Grandy at their Vashon Island boatyard, the 36’ double ender was essentially a narrow sail boat hull. Powered by a 16 h.p Eastern Standard single cylinder gas engine, the boat cruised at 7 knots. Taylor and Grandy were responding to Northwest sportsmen’s growing interest in raised deck cruisers. Usually equipped with bunks, a stove and an open aft cockpit suitable for shooting ducks and drinking whiskey, the raised deck style afforded a measure of luxury above the usual open skiffs. The gas engines, while not especially reliable, were a great gift in the fickle winds of Puget Sound. Still, the 40’ Kingcole, built by Taylor & Grandy in 1911, still has a mast stump in place indicating that at least one owner backed his motor with an auxiliary sail rig.
World War I ended the Taylor Grandy partnership when Lewis Grandy and sons Willard (Bill) and Earl took their shipwright skills north to Bremerton earning good wages at the Naval Shipyard. Using his shipyard savings, young Earl Grandy purchased a floating boatyard (possibly a former Boeing yard) in 1922. Mooring it on the Northwest corner of Seattle’s Lake Union, he opened the Grandy Boat Company as a repair facility. Brother Bill soon joined the business and success enabled them to purchase adjoining lakeside property complete with a haul out railway. Grandy Boat Company then competed with Blanchard, Vic Franck and Lake Union Drydock as a bonafide boat yard, quickly establishing a reputation for fast work of the highest quality. The Grandy brothers had learned more than the boat trade from their father and Charlie Taylor. They absorbed an ethic for hard work, long hours and unmatched craftsmanship immediately clear to anyone who ever worked at the Grandy Boat Company.
While the prohibition years brought the yard good money repairing fast runabouts, the yard’s bread and butter came from steady production of skiffs and small boats. Legend holds that Bill Grandy, working alone, could complete a lap strake skiff in one day, and whether true or not, the yard produced hundreds of skiffs which remained affordable even during the depths of the Depression. As late as the 1940s, Grandy skiffs sold for $3 a foot.
During the late 1930s, the Grandys began building power cruisers to the designs of Ed Monk who maintained a drafting office in the Grandy yard. Monk, who began as a shipwright at the Blanchard yard, went on to a long career designing diverse vessels constructed by Grandy and others.
Citing their experience building the Monk cruisers, the Grandy yard won many World War II military contracts. From skiffs to 40’ patrol and various workboats, they built hundreds of military vessels. Like all the Seattle yards, they came out of the war years with a new level of financial security plus the tooling and knowledge for new directions.
Before the yard went up in a spectacular 1967 fire, the Grandys produced a steady stream of work boats and motor cruisers culminating in the “Marlineer” sport fishing vessels for Californian Ted Tate. Tate had been highly impressed by Grandy’s quality construction as well as the sea kindly hulls developed by Ed Monk and Lynn Senour, a Grandy shipwright with a genius for bottom shapes. The largest Marlineers were 62’, the last of which came down the yard’s railway the day the yard burned to the ground.
So a Grandy built yacht survived a big fire? Humm, sounds a lot like the GloryBe story. Except that her 2002 fire was only one of several close calls. Not long after L.A. Jacox brought the GloryBe to Tacoma, a winter storm beached her inflicting severe damage. Towed off with only her funnel and flagpole showing above water, she was rebuilt and subsequently sold to an owner who moored her off his San Juan island summer home. Still a restless adolescent, she broke free and drifted unscathed past islands and reefs some 40 miles north to the Canadian border.
She settled down after that, serving a total of 17 families as a fine inshore cruiser. Taken north to Desolation Sound on numerous occasions, she proved an ideal summer vessel. So great was her aesthetic appeal, she even served as a liveaboard for two different families, somehow accommodating two adults and two children within her 36 foot hull. While she was maintained, updated and improved (mostly), all of her owners honored the original raised deck configuration with only the addition of an enclosed pilothouse and a cockpit canopy altering her lines.
But the boat’s history seemed irrelevant as Betsy observed the charred and sunken hull. Saving the boat appeared impossible until a call to the insurance agent assured Betsy of full value coverage. Just as important, Betsy was protected from potential pollution charges amounting to millions of dollars. So Betsy began to wonder if the Marine Carpentry program at Seattle Central Community College, a program she knew well, might reconstruct the GloryBe.
During an earlier career change, Betsy had joined Seattle’s Center for Wooden Boats board of directors. Plunging into the world of wooden boats inspired her to think about building a boat and after friends talked her into taking an introductory marine carpentry course, she found she loved wood working. She soon signed up as a full time student in Seattle Central Community College’s marine carpentry program. “I was a pretty poor woodworker but I had the smarts to partner with someone who was really good!” As fate would have it, Betsy was finishing her two-year course when her boat, the GloryBe, burned and sank.
Dave Mullen, Betsy’s chief marine carpentry instructor, observed the GloryBe salvage.
When the boat floated, he agreed with Betsy that the GloryBe might just qualify as a marine carpentry project as it met the school’s criteria. That is: 1. The project would provide instruction in contemporary boatbuilding skills. 2. The restoration offered a high ratio of meaningful work compared to menial work. 3. Betsy could support the project financially. 4. The project could take an undetermined length of time. 5. And finally, students could take pride in completing a difficult restoration.
He urged Betsy to apply her new skills and generate both a budget and work schedule. She came up with a materials budget of $55,000, which seemed sound to Dave, (actual materials ran to over $75,000). Soon the hull arrived at the school where students and faculty stood dumbfounded as the blackened hull was eased into the corner it would occupy for the next three years. Charred and burnt to the waterline, the boat looked beyond hope, especially to students – where would we begin? First things first led to stabilizing the hull with 2x4 exterior framing connected by long through-bolts. That done, strategy and philosophy came to the front. Betsy decided to listen to all opinions, establishing a precedent she maintained throughout the restoration. She deferred to Dave on technical applications while considering input from students, friends and former owners. The restoration became a community project.
To Betsy’s thinking, the boat had lasted 88 years because it had been used. So the best preservation would come from rebuilding her to her original appearance using modern methods and materials that made her stronger and better suited to cruising another 100 years. Further, the project was for and by students preparing for today’s marine trades, so power tools and epoxy would be used. In Betsy’s mind, the GloryBe was, and should be, a classic raised deck cruiser, not an antique. So with insurance money in the bank and the hull stabilized, the restoration process began in the spring of 2002.
Blessed with a jillion wood clamps, hundreds of vintage hand tools and state of the art power equipment, plus the expertise of instructors Dave Mullen and Gordon Sanstad, the marine carpentry school might appear as the GloryBe’s ideal reconstruction site. However, it is a school and that meant constant turnover of experienced students (nearly 200 worked on the boat). Four plus months each year would be lost to vacation when no GloryBe work would transpire. And students, as Betsy well knew, make mistakes and waste material. Finally, the restoration would be one of many on-going projects and only a small part of an educational package. In short, this rebuild would stretch out – and it did, taking three academic years.
By default, the GloryBe became a “demo” piece. Because so many people had worked on her, there was a plethora of how to do (and not to do!) procedures. For example, five kinds of planking wood had been applied with fasteners ranging from square boat nails to silicon bronze to stainless steel to ring nails and galvanized screws. Frame sistering went from laminated frames to sisters less than a foot long to sisters abutting their frames. Butt blocks had been shaped in a variety of ways as well, some with bevels to encourage water to drain off, some only inserted to fasten plank ends, and still others hiding sins like plank cracks.
The Reconstruction:
Betsy had nothing like the original plans or line drawings. She did have a photo album with an irreplaceable collection of GloryBe history. As luck would have it, Betsy had removed the album from the boat the morning of the fire. Those photos proved vital to the reconstruction process. With the cabin completely lost, it would have been near impossible to match the original dimensions without the photos. Employing modern technology to rebuild a 90-year-old boat, Dave and the students scanned and enlarged the photos until they reached full scale. Then line drawings were generated for working plans.
They began reconstruction by removing every other hull plank to appraise what they were dealing with. Further, an opened boat allowed access for proper repairs, many of which were needed beyond the fire damage. The white oak stem proved rotten. Replacing it was one of the first replanking steps. However, getting the needed dimensions in solid oak proved difficult, so following much consultation, Angelique was selected as the replacement wood.
Surprisingly, the remaining unburned oak frames appeared largely rot free and in good condition, due, Betsy was told by an old timer, to urine deposited by Grandy-Taylor workers on oak lumber stacked below the shop rear door! However, years of fastening, refastening and sistering had turned the frames into pincushions. They decided to reframe the hull while leaving most of the original frames in place to maintain structure. Clamping new frames to existing ones proved difficult until a student fabricated a moveable jig that provided rigidity. Most of the new frames were inserted as sisters as they found it difficult to remove the old frames without damaging planks. New frames were milled from green bending oak to 1.5” squares beveled to match existing frames. Stored in water until use, each frame steamed for two hours before being quickly driven and clamped into place. Because original galvanized boat nails were in place, new fasteners had to be galvanized screws to prevent electrolysis. All the short-planked mixed wood was replaced by full-length red cedar planking.
With the hull strengthened and refastened, the first “ethical” question had to do with deck configuration. The original deck beams had been rather wimpy sawn fir. Collective decision-making opted for epoxy-laminated replacements for strength and interior beauty. Once in place, they were covered with tongue and groove vertical grain fir that the school milled one epic day (1,500’ of wood). Marine plywood was fastened and epoxied to the fir, which in turn, was covered with canvas laid into wet oil paint. The result? A rock solid leak proof deck that looked “original” while contributed hugely to overall stiffness. A second ethical decision had to do with the cockpit cover. Although the cockpit was open in 1914, various covers had been on the boat since the late teens. While they lacked grace, they were a necessity in the damp Northwest. So students fabricated a jig and cold molded a new cockpit cover from red cedar topping it with canvas set in epoxy. The resulting rigid, leak proof cover is as beautiful to behold as it is functional.
Most of the wood reconstruction proceeded using traditional methods. For example, new cockpit clamps were scarfed and enlarged. Steam bent cockpit seats were configured into storage and iceboxes. The mahogany cabin sides were steamed and shaped over a full-scale jig curved to greater radius than needed to compensate for post-steaming springback. As Dave pointed out, that bit of jigging and springback compensation proved an outstanding educational exercise. A fiberglassed marine plywood cockpit floor, raised above the waterline (it used to flood with people in the cockpit), insured a self-draining watertight cockpit (the original drained into the bilge). The glassed plywood cockpit deck lies hidden under handsome laminated teak. Reframing the steering quadrant revealed rot in the stern “stem” so they spliced in a section with fasteners and epoxy.
The original bow chain locker had been accessed through a leaky bow hatch. Further, chain mud and water drained into the bilge. A more useable system was called for. Adding a self draining tray under the chain, eliminating the leaky bow hatch and providing access through the forward berth has proven to be a well thought out solution. The new custom bronze bowroller forward of a powerful new electric windless complete with foot-operated controls, makes for a clean look and much easier anchor operations.
More than any other part of the boat, the galley underwent a remodel. A new countertop increased working space and an innovative knee added both beauty and additional space. Airspace around the stove was expanded for safety. Overall, the galley went from being a jury rigged cramped make-do, to a compact working kitchen.
Safety sheet glass cabin windows open with a clever sliding system. The existing Edson cable/chain steering system was upgraded with enclosed cable housings. A new mast lowering system makes single handed take down easy. All the tanks, filling fixtures, venting and the engine exhaust dry stack are hidden behind beautifully worked wood. The engine turns a new oversized alternator. A new shore power system features an inverter. All electrical panels tilt out for easy access. When complete, the GloryBe will sport GPS and radar systems hidden under wood covers when not deployed. The handsome compass appears 100 years old, yet is a modern retro version set in an ornate bronze casting. Stuart Warner engine gauges (retro) look like they were lifted from a 1928 Stutz.
Betsy is especially proud of the bronze port lights cast by Port Townsend Foundry. Fire warped the originals, but not enough to keep Pete Langley from recasting them. The original eight port lights tapered from small to large, stem to stern. While it would have been much less expensive to replace them with one-size-fits-all, Betsy chose to do the right thing and replace them exactly. They look great and maintain the boat’s original appearance while operating perfectly thanks to Pete’s clever mechanisms. Port Townsend Foundry supplied several other bronze fittings that Betsy believes are closer to the original than the many “modern” fittings that had been installed over the years.
Cleaned up after the fire, the head sink, complete with original hand pump, sits proudly on a gorgeous Honduras mahogany cabinet. The Dickinson diesel stove, also a survivor, was cleaned up, tuned up and now works perfectly. The Isuzu diesel engine, which had been swiftly “pickled” with diesel after the sinking, runs just fine, needing a minimum of external replacements. New plastic water tanks, a pressure water system and a marine sanitation system hide behind tongue and groove interior siding.
Peering into the hold, lifting seats, opening drawers or hatches confirms that the GloryBe has been rebuilt with a mastery of disguise. For running over the new and old charred frames is the finest in modern marine plumbing, electrical wiring and control fixtures. She looks old and pampered, but she’s really quite contemporary where it counts. One hundred more years of operation seem entirely plausible.
GloryBe’s relaunching this past June can be seen as an epiphany. There she was, proud, beautiful, and resilient on the Jensen Motor Boat Company railway. Well over 100 people were in attendance. Past owners, shipwrights, teachers, fellow classic boaters, and of course, proud Betsy and Dave Mullen were all there. Betsy cracked a champagne bottle across her bow that burst with particular vigor (it had survived the fire and sinking). Anchor Jensen’s ancient railway winch began to unwind easing the GloryBe slid back into service, as if to say “what, you expected me to die?”
There’s something quite romantic, meaningful and important about this boat and all the people who have touched her. I can’t really capture it all in words, but it has to do with humans touching art and art enhancing lives. From the hardscrabble men who built her in a primitive island yard, to everyone who owned and cruised her, to the students and teachers who helped revive her, to her mother Betsy who saved her; all were touched and made better through their proximity to the eternal GloryBe.