Haulout day!

Well, it was finally time to get her out of the water and look at the bottom. I had to wait nearly a month for a slot at the boatyard.

Leaving the dock under her own power for the first time since God knows when.

And off across the harbor we go. Looks bereft without a mast.



At the stand-by berth waiting for the lift.

Starting the lift

On the hard and power-washed. Looking better than expected.

The hull is in great condition. Lack of care to the zincs, though, has allowed electrolysis to corrode the steel fin keel. It's pretty pitted, and has lost almost all its anti-fouling.

The cutlass bearing was more worn than you'd expect for so few hours, but the reason is easy to see. The shaft is not centered in the strut, it's riding on the bottom. This will have to be rectified before we relaunch.

Wiring panel

Like a lot of other things on theboat, this is a mix of good and bad.

The original wiring is good. Good solid marine panel, marine grade wiring, soldered joints with waterproofing, top quality components. The original wiring is all run inside bulkheads or above the false deckhead.

Then there's the extra wiring that was added to make the boat more liveable by the last owner. Ordinary domestic extension cords, wire nuts, unlabelled wiring dropping behind cabinetry or running over surfaces. Yuck.


Here's the main panel. The labels were handwritten on scraps of masking tape, and many were illegible. The temporary labelmaster labels are my work till I get engraved ones, and were largely identified by trial and error.

This is the back of the main panel. The nice neat lines and bundles of red and green wires are original. The spaghetti of white indoor extension cord is not.

Main Engine

The engine in "Glory B" is a 1977 Ford Lehman 120HP diesel. It was installed by Ford Industrial Power in 1977 brand new from the factory. Unfortunately, according to letters found on the boat, it was installed wrong. The raw water pump was mis-installed, and as a consequence when the boat was finally launched in 1996 the engine overheated. As a result, there's now an annoying 'tick-tick-tick' exhaust leak noise, and I need to change the exhaust gasket.
Here are a couple of pictures of the engine. Not very exciting, I'm afraid. As of now, the engine has 206 hours on it from new.

More of the interior

Just a few last pictures of how I found it.
Looking down into the aft cabin from the cockpit. There's a berth at the bottom of that pile!












Here's the port side of the aft cabin. There's another single berth under there somewhere!



Almost the only place to see the workmanship in the aft cabin is to look up at the deckhead - everything else is buried in junk.

Interior condition

Here's a few more pictures of how the interior looked when I took possession of the boat.


This is the galley, looking to Port.














Main stateroom, port side, looking down from the pilothouse.

Main stateroom, stbd side, looking down from the pilothouse.


This is the main stateroom, looking through between the head and the closet to the forward cabin.

This picture shows the detail in the overhead.

Here's the head. The Lectra-San was blocked, but turned out to be repairable.

Main passageway, looking to port, showing the door to the head.

Main passageway, looking to Stbd, showing the door to the closet, and drawers. The prior owner cut out a bunch of the drawers to accomodate the back of the TV.

"As found" condition

I've been clearing away piles and piles of the previous liveaboard owners stuff, and getting down to a level where I can see what's ahead of me. When I first saw her, she looked like this...

Buried under piles of junk, and with a "cover" made of old truck tarps over a frame of plastic irrigation piping, she was looking pretty sad. At this point the most usefull piece of equipment was the four wheel pull cart sitting next to her, which made many runs up to the dumpsters - She sits, of course, on the very last berth of the slip.

After the covers were off, the deck junk cleared away, and several years accumulation of "seagull exhaust" steam-cleaned off the deck, It was possible to see what the old lady might one day look like.

The interior was mostly in good condition, except that the pilothouse interior was unfinished. It was, however, full of 'stuff'.

home

I have just become the latest owner of the 54' motorsailor "Glory B".

Construction of the "Glory B" began in 1962 in the warehouse of the Nelson furniture company in San Jose, CA, as a project of the owner, Robert Nelson. He purchased a surplus US Navy 90 man motor launch, made of Honduran mahogany over grown oak frames, and dissasembled it for the material. He bought additional oak and mahogany so as to be able to build the 54' boat he wanted. The keelson of the original boat is a single full length baulk of oak heartwood, over 40' long. Such a timber was almost impossible to find even in the 60's, and would be simply unobtainable today.

For a design, he started with the then well known 50' motorsailor sloops designed by Wendell "Skip" Calkins of San Diego. Skips first boat to this plan, the flush decked "Legend", had won the 1957 Transpac a few years earlier, and he had then modified the plan to add a large saloon to produce a luxurious yet fast cruising yacht. The modified boat was featured in the March 1963 edition of "Sports Illustrated"...March '63 Sports Illustrated

Robert Nelson went to Skip with sketches of the 50' sloop extended to 54', with its pointed stern changed to a transom. The extra four feet, plus the added room of the transom stern, allowed for the addition of an aft stateroom in "Glory B". Calkins drew the conversion drawings as Nelson was starting the construction. Drawings are dated from 1962 right up to the end of 1965. The massive full length oak keel of the original motor launch was retained, with a 3 foot deep steel box fin keel below that, the bottom half of which is lead filled.

Nelson did not launch the Glory B until 1996, 34 years after he started. The boat was never really finished. The mast, as the most important example, was never stepped, and has been lost over the years. Regretably, Robert Nelson died just a few years after launching the boat, and she has been owned since then by a liveaboard, sitting at one dock in Berkeley Marina. Her 120HP Ford Diesel, bought and installed brand new in 1977, has only 206 hours on it!

I picked her up for a song, and intend to finish her the way she was meant to be, as a beautifull example of late 50's / early 60's wooden boat design.