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They headed straight
for the Huckins yard in Jacksonville. “We pulled the boat out the
next morning to change the prop, and I noticed a crack about this big,”
Bracewell recalls, spreading his thumb and index finger about two inches
apart. “It kept leaking water, so I said, ’If we’re going
to put this boat back in the water, let’s investigate.’”
By that afternoon workmen
had exposed at least ten feet of rotten wood. Within a week they discovered
that a previous owner had allowed oil to collect in the bilge. Corisande
VII’s keel had soaked it all up.
“The first crack
I saw, I said, ’Oh, that’s seven, eight thousand dollars,’”
Drummond says as he recalls that day at the yard. “Then it went up
to 15, 20, 25. Then I went home.”
Drummond had contracted
for a survey before buying, but as Bracewell explains it, surveyors look
for consistency in a wooden boat’s hull. If they knock and hear a
different sound in one part of the hull than another, something’s
wrong. Corisande VII’s hull was consistent. Unfortunately,
it turned out to be consistently ruined.
Many owners would have
walked away, but not Drummond. In keeping with his family heritage, he
just plain likes classic things—and he still felt Corisande VII
was a good deal. He decided not only to fix the structural issues, but
to refit the interior as well. “If I’d abandoned the boat, I
would have lost a significant investment,” he says. “Even all
in, with all we have in it, you’d still be looking at a middle-range
production boat. There’s no way, in a new production boat, that you
can get the same feeling. You can go and have a custom one like this built
for about $2.5 million, but that’s a lot more than I wanted to spend.”
Fortunately, Huckins
still had the original templates for Hull No. 369, which Bracewell says
was key. With the boat hoisted over their heads, the Huckins team built
everything down to the ribs, the same way it was built in 1962. “Building
a boat upside-down is a hell of a way to build a boat,” Bracewell
says. “It would have taken three times as long and probably been
cost-prohibitive anywhere else.”
Next page >
Part
3: About six months later,
Corisande VII set off as good as new. Better put, she was as good
as old. > Page 1,
2, 3, 4
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