DECEMBER/JANUARY 2018 3 Pragmatic Reverence of the Re t Mind
I
met Reid Bandy of Bandy Boats (see “Rybovich Rebuild × 2 ,” page 20) in
2009 when he entered Professional BoatBuilder and WoodenBoat maga-
zines’ rst joint design challenge, “ e Pursuit of Pleasure at 2 Gallons Per
Hour.” e recession was fresh, fuel was still expensive, and designers had
very few paying clients looking for new boat ideas. e goal was to inspire
some creative design thinking that would deliver a ordable, fuel-ecient fun
on the water. It was a satisfying success, resulting in some superb designs,
including the PT Ski from Bieker Boats (Seattle, Washington), and Marissa
from B&B Yacht Designs (Bayboro, North Carolina).
Bandy’s outboard ski didn’t win the judged competition, but he did win
a very practical contest that was never explicitly recognized: he was the rst
entrant to build his design, and because of that, I invited him to join us at
the WoodenBoat Show (Mystic, Connecticut) that year with his boat as an
example of what the design competition had elicited.
Formally called the Carolina Canoe, Bandy’s boat was an imaginative
quotation of a 1950s outboard runabout, with topsides built of strip-planked
cedar and epoxy, nished bright, and a bottom and deck of Corecell-foam-
sandwich composite. Its deck painted a searing yellow, the boat was eye-
catching, and Bandy was an enthusiastic host, explaining the competition
and how he’d designed and built his boat. I imagine he provided a gentle and
understandable introduction to the versatility of foam-core composite struc-
tures for some die-hard wooden boat enthusiasts who dismissed berglass as
a material of mass production.
Bandy’s depth of understanding and appreciation of historical and modern
boats meant he could talk knowledgeably about anything from Edwardian
canoes to modern sportfishermen. He explained how in his design pro-
cess he’d looked back to a time when small outboard boats were limited by
more-modest ambitions and low-horsepower options. As a result, the boat
was powered not by an ecient, modern four-stroke but by a 1950s-vintage
Johnson 25, the biggest outboard of its day, that Bandy had rebuilt and re n-
ished to a high shine.
I was at our stand at METS in Amsterdam two years ago when Bandy called
to warn me that he and his friend Mark Hall had bought the twin Rybovich bas-
ket cases to rebuild. When I visited Bandy in the summer of 2016, the Rybovich
refit projects were well under way, with new frames and the cold-molded
bottoms on, the topsides repaired and sheathed in epoxy and berglass, and
the engine installed in one of the boats. ey were coming back to life, but all
around the shop were remnants of the old boats—a cross–section scrap of the
old keel rabbet with the double-planked bottom still fastened to it, twin readout
gauges for the old twin engines, an original tuna door, a single-piece sculpted-
mahogany footrest from the ghting chair, a cast-aluminum wheel. Bandy had
as much enthusiasm for the parts that were not going back into the boats as he
did for those that were taking their places. And while rebuilding a Rybovich, or
any other boat, to some curator-certi ed original form or condition that has
long been lost is of little interest to Bandy, his motivation when designing and
building new, or re tting existing boats with imaginative applications of mod-
ern materials, always includes a reverence for what came before.
at’s how he was able to justify the purchase of a dumpster-ready Rybovich:
“Even if I had to throw it away, I’d know how they were built,” he said.
We hope you’ll stop by Booth 615 at the Re t Show (January 10 and 11, Fort
Lauderdale, Florida) and share your challenges and projects with us.Professional BoatBuilderFebruary, April, June, August, October, and December in Brooklin, (ISSN 1043–2035) is published bimonthly in
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