I was pleased to see one of my favorite vessels in repose in Great Cove yesterday morning. The yacht GRAYLING is a slim, sleek, mysterious-looking beauty with a rough past and a born-again life now. Her success is due in significant part to two of Brooklin’s finest, according to what I’ve read and heard.
GRAYLING was built in 1915 in East Booth Bay, Maine, as a double-ender to net mackerel and herring off the coast there. She did that grueling work for five years. When canned sardines became popular, she was sold to a high-volume commercial fishing operation up on Maine’s northeast coast and was demoted to the tedious, non-fishing job of sardine carrier; she’d pick up sardines from smaller fishing boats and truck them to a cannery. Back and forth; back and forth.
Then the sardine industry in Maine went bust and GRAYLING languished and deteriorated in the 1980s. By the 1990’s, she apparently was almost a wreck up for sale. The simple version of a complicated story is that she caught the eye of Brooklin’s Maynard Bray, a maritime engineer and marine historian. He and Brooklin boatbuilder and designer Doug Hylan thought that she would make a great yacht for someone who wanted a vessel with plenty of character.
They eventually helped convince Ted Okie to buy the boat and have it thoroughly restored and appropriately modified by Hylan and others at Brooklin’s Benjamin River Marine boatyard. It would give pleasure to guests instead of trucking sardines – and those guests would not be packed tightly together.
She was relaunched in 1997 here as the beautiful motorized ketch that you see here, almost 65 feet long overall, with only a 12 ½ -foot beam (widest part). She eventually was resold and now reportedly is owned by Michael Glasfield of Mystic, Connecticut, where she home-ports in nearby Noank at the mouth of the Mystic River.
By the way, a grayling is a fish found in cold, freshwater; it has a distinctive, large red dorsal fin (especially males) and pewter colored scales. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on August 29, 2024.) See also the image in the Comment space.