July 2011 MAINE COASTAL NEWS Page 21. THE STEAM YACHT CANGARDA, A TRUE SURVIVOR
couldn’t afford to keep up the restoration and the yard took over the boat. They quickly put the hull back together and launched it. Later it sank in Boston Harbor, but it was just the bare hull. The hull was hauled out and the collection of parts and pieces were put at the International Yacht Restoration School in Newport by Elizabeth Meyer. When I first saw the boat it was still in Gloucester. I followed the project and figured that this would be the last American built boat like this so there ought to be some sort of funding to restore it. I spent the better part of two years trying to find somebody to do it. Along the way I ran into a summer person on Islesboro, who is interested in restoring old boats. He was interested, but I didn’t hear anything back. About a year later he called me back and said he was going to do the project. This was seven years ago and would I like to be in- volved and I have been with it ever since.” CANGARDA underwent a six-year res- toration at Richmond, California. They cut up the old hull, saved what pieces they could, trucked everything including the boiler, across country. They took over a whole building on the end of the dock, which was once part of Kaiser Shipyard. Finally they got her back in the water in August 2007. Still there was another two years of work to do. Once completed, they steamed down to San Pedro and then spent about three weeks in San Diego tied up next to another steam yacht, MEDEA. They then headed down to Ensenada and loaded CANGARDA on to a heavy lift ship, which took them around to Fort Lauderdale. They offloaded there at the end of June and headed up the East Coast to
Rockland. They steamed around the coast of Maine and ended up at Mystic Seaport. * * * * *
Captain Cobb grew up outside of Port- land. He explained how he got involved with the boat saying, “My dad had a friend who had a sailboat down at Handy Boat Service in Falmouth Foreside. We used to go down there to help him race the boat on Thursday night and Saturdays. I just got interested in boats and I started a little business. I had five or six yachts that I took care of. Then a number of my classmates at Gorham High School were going to Maine Maritime Academy and I thought I would do that too. So I followed them. I graduated from high school in 1968 and headed for Castine. I graduated from the deck program in 1972 and shipped out for a while. However, it was right after the end of Vietnam and there were an awful lot of people coming back so it was really difficult to find a berth. I sat in the Union Hall in New York City and eventually got a berth on a ship going to the Far East and then one to East Africa. I then came back and sat in the Union Hall for three months and got nowhere. So I started going nonunion and I took a job with an offshore towing company. And we towed big barges all over the place. That was Sheridan Trans- portation Company out of Philadelphia. They had the D. T. SHERIDAN. The first D. T. SHERIDAN is out on Monhegan. The sec- ond one is the one that I was on; she was an old boat, built in 1951. When I was still in high school, one summer I worked as deck hand on the VICTORY CHIMES. I decided that I would try to make a living at the end of the 20th century in sail. I managed to get aboard
Surveying Steam Yacht CANGARDA Continued from Page 5.
veyor. He said, “Well, one of the things you’ve got to look for, even up in fresh water, see if she is laying near a bridge, any kind of a bridge that has to open.” He said all of those old bridges are DC current and they found that a ship lying next to an old bridge like that she goes faster than anything else. “I went up there, with an assistant and the potential owner, and we found, to make a long story short that she was in very, very poor condition. Naturally I wanted to get down look around the bilges and see what I could determine about her condition. While I got down into the lazarette and I could look right out past the rudder tube. I started going through her bilges and found out that they were so poor that I better not step on any plating. I had just a knife in my pocket and I got down in the bilges and scraped a couple of places and went right through the hull and a stream of water would come in. I said, ‘Oh boy, what am I going to do about this?” There must be about 30 or 40 paint cans sitting on the stern deck. I sent my assistant up to see if he could find some old paint or putty we stick in these holes to keep them from leaking. It is funny it stopped leaking on its own. She was sitting in the mud and after sitting there a couple of minutes the stream of water stopped. The whole bilge was like that.” He found the engine room fine. Full said, “After we had been into it about four hours I finally told the prospective buyer this is a massive restoration job. I said unless you have got a lot of money to put into something like this you will go broke over it. I said we ought to forget this dream. So, we walked away from it. I didn’t like it, but you have to protect your client’s interest. Come to find out he went back a month later and bought it. He paid $100,000 for it. He called me up and said I want to save it and can you tell us how we are going to get it down to Gloucester. I said you have got to move her
down the New York State waterway system. You can’t go outside unless you put her on an oceangoing barge and that would be very costly. You can’t just put her on a barge and take her down the New York waterway be- cause she is too high. I got thinking about it and said why don’t we get a heavy vinyl liner made, float it underneath her and then lash to the rails and haul it up tight. There was a big liability involved in this. If we had some kind of accident and she sank in the New York waterway you would have real problems. Anyway, we got an outfit that would do the job. They got the liner made up, put it under- neath her, and lashed it up. That outfit had her down in Gloucester in about four of five days. They did a good job.
“They got her haul out and they called me and wanted to know if I would re-inspect bottom. When I got down there they were starting to sandblast her. I told him to stop and said this is ridiculous; there is nothing here to sandblast. Every time you put the gun to this thing it becomes cheese. It needs to be cut off. You’ve got to have all new frames, and all new bottom plating. I didn’t have that much to do with it after that.
Full added, “Then the next thing I heard was the owner was bankrupt. He lost his company and his house in Rockport. I really think that the vessel was the root cause. You just don’t realize what these jobs cost. The next thing I know she was moved from Gloucester and went to Boston. She laid there a few years and finally sank up at the old Bethlehem Steel yard. At some point Eliza- beth Meyers became the owner. She was towed to Fairhaven and they hauled her out there. She was then sold and cut up into sections, put on a flatbed and shipped to California. I think it’s wonderful what they did. In my time there have been a half a dozen yachts like that that went to the scrap heap and I never felt good about it. This is one of the last ones and she deserved to be saved.
CHRISTIANRADA as second mate in Nor- way. I sailed on GAZELLA for three seasons out of Philadelphia and then on a little brig called UNICORN, which was down in Florida. I worked on a number of other boats, includ- ing the South Street Seaport’s WAVERTREE, a 2500 ton full rigged ship, which I was skipper on. Unfortunately the following year was 9/11 and South Street has never really recovered from that. My wife and I then purchased owned the MARY DAY and run her for 12 years sailed her in the Maine Windjammer Association. Then government regulations and being too close to too many tourists we kind of lost interest and sold the boat. I tried to make a living at home again, and I started a vessel management business here and I had a number of boats that I took care of. I did a lot of yacht deliveries and I was just trying to figure a way to go on. That sort of went on for several years, but then this job came along.
Captain Cobb studied deck at MMA, but since he had kept in contact with some of his old classmates he was able to find the infor- mation needed to learn steam engineering. He added, “A fellow named Pete Jordan, who was a year ahead of me at Castine and an engineer, we had remained friends. He retired from working most of his career on the Great Lakes in ore boats, which were steam. Then he went to work for Delta Queen Steamboat line on the Mississippi. He taught me a lot, but I had to teach myself thermodynamics and design.”
This helped Captain Cobb designed the engine room with the help of Pusey’s own drawings and reinstalled all the machinery. Fortunately the drawings are at the Hagley Museum in Wilmington, Delaware. “The engine itself and the machinery is really pretty simple,” said Captain Cobb. “It
Capt. Steve Cobb of Camden.
is extremely robust and forgiving. Getting steam to it and maintaining it is not all that difficult. What is difficult on this is that in order to be able to operate a semi-unmanned engine room, we had to automate the boiler control systems. So we have a modern boiler, which is run by a computer system that se- quences the boiler operation. Learning to operate and to maintain that system has been the difficult part. I am not a computer geek. So it has been a struggle. It is a beautiful engine and it is quite modern for a reciprocating steam engine that has a lot of Herreshoff design developments in it.
Captain Cobb said helming CANGARDA can also be a challenge. He said, “She is extremely narrow and long and like an arrow she wants to go straight. So, it is difficult to get her to turn. You have to use power to turn her around. She is 120 feet on deck and 18 feet wide with a single screw. There is no auxiliary power. She used to carry a few sails, not enough to go to weather, but she could get out of her own way. It helped with fuel economy. We are working with the Coast Guard to get licensed to carry those sails again.”
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