EDWIN LEVICK COLLECTION, C/O MARINERS’ MUSEUMCLASSIC BOAT SEPTEMBER 2016 31BYSTANDER
are animate – there’s no question of it.” So Bystander
was rebuilt frame by rotten frame, with most of her
hull planking remaining intact. The other thing to go
was the backbone, which had had it, and was replaced
like for like in oak. The doghouse roof, sidedecks and
forward decks were, as stated earlier, done in white
lead and canvas. Another of Elizabeth’s hobbyhorses on
restoration is needlessly discarding time-proven methods:
“People assume you can’t do things like this, but you can
use it safely if you do it correctly.” On Elizabeth’s 1960
Concordia yawl, for instance, the white lead and canvas
decking remains strong. “The other solutions people
come up with are hard and slippery.”A PHOTO FINISH
The designer of Bystander is not known, as her gestation
was boatbuilder-led. It seems possible, not to mention
desirable, that it was the great Starling Burgess, given
that he designed the 1930 America’s Cup-winning
Enterprise, the yacht for which Bystander was
commissioned. But whoever the designer was, the upshotTop: Bystander
towing Ranger
in 1937.
Above: Olin
Stephens on the
bench, also taken
in 1937REBUILDING BYSTANDER
“You know what I hate?” says Elizabeth. “Those people
who say ‘if Herreshoff had had this [modern material]
at the time, he would have used it.’” For this reason,
Bystander was restored authentically for the most part,
down to materials like white lead and canvas decking,
but with heed to her present usability and long-term
survival. Although Bystander was strongly built, her
unique role had given her some unique problems. “Her
shape was pretty good,” Elizabeth says, “but there was
some twist in the very long cockpit after all the pressures
that were exerted on it.”
The team’s method for straightening Bystander out
was to remove every other plank – “or enough of them
to make the basket flexible” – then slowly twist the
boat back into shape, measuring all the time. “It is
not advisable to do this by eye,” adds Elizabeth. This
is all done to the datum of a level boat – “we used to
do this [set the boat level] with hosepipe and water,
but these days by laser”.
Bystander’s construction is pleasingly simple: a
skeleton of steamed white oak frames wrapped in a
single hide of cedar planking, which is doubled above
the waterline, fastened in bronze and strengthened by
lots of larch (now Douglas fir) knees. And her restoration
also proved to be simple, carried out, again, to a sound
philosophy. “In any wooden boat, you never take it
apart. The entire boat has to be there for the whole
time.” This is not simply a matter of preserving shape,
given that the boat was already shored up on plywood
supports every 8ft (2.6m) or so, but a way to preserve
the continuity of identity. The theory might be a little
anthropomorphic for those who don’t know boats but
Elizabeth justifies the position well, by placing the onus
on the beholder: “People relate to boats as though they
EDWIN LEVICK COLLECTION, C/O MARINERS’ MUSEUM