Dunkirk evacuation yacht restored in PT

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In its 88 years, the 130-foot yacht “Northwind” has not only ferried celebrities, royalty and heads of state, but has also been pressed into service during World War II and the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, and if all goes according to plan, it could wind up contributing to the efforts to shrink the Great Pacific garbage patch.

And for the past month, it's been renovated in the Port Townsend Boat Haven.

Christian Lint has served as the captain and engineer of the Northwind for nearly 30 years, but he emphasized that he is not the owner of the historic vessel.

Nonetheless, even before Lint and his crew of roughly 10 workers started putting in workdays of at least 12 hours each on the Northwind, for more than a month running, Lint himself has been personally invested in the ship since he took over its captaincy in 1989, after its previous captain bailed mid-voyage.

“We were sent to respond to the Exxon Valdez oil spill, when the engine blew up on the way up,” Lint said. “The captain quit and went home around Ketchikan, so I had to put the engine back together, with only 11 pistons where there's supposed to be 12, and drive her to Kodiak. We were going to lose the boat otherwise.”

Lint was called out to repair the Northwind's engine again, this time in Port Angeles in 2013, after it had been seized up for three years.

From there, the Northwind's homeport shifted to Bremerton in 2014, but within two years, it had suffered what Lint described as “severe galvanic corrosion,” a situation not improved by the repairs attempted prior to his being called back out to assess the damage.

“It was taking on water, so I flew up to find out why,” Lint said. “They'd spent $60,000 to pump out just the engine room, then destabilized the boat by taking out several tons of batteries that weren't even wet, plus a few thousand gallons of fuel.”

Lint and his crews patched the leak themselves, but even now, as they're renovating the Northwind in Port Townsend, they've continued to find areas where that previous crew had attempted to plug places that weren't leaking.

Lint credited the American Bureau of Shipping-certified welders with combating the corrosion damage, and he swears by the Blue Seal ceramic epoxy composite coating that was applied to the bottom of the boat two years ago.

“It's saving boats,” Lint said. “When we pulled it out of the water, two years later, the bottom of the boat was in perfect condition. It's only now that we're applying paint to it.”

In addition to applying epoxy glazing and a topcoat of gloss to the ship's exterior hull, Lint and his crew are applying Blue Seal to the interior of the hull as well, in addition to restoring the interior as a whole to its original condition.

“We're stripping all the decks, and getting back to the original wood flooring,” Lint said. “They didn't have wall-to-wall carpeting when this boat was first built.”

What the Northwind did have, and still has, are no fewer than seven staterooms, a guestroom, a room for a nanny with sliding doors connecting to a children's bedroom, and what Lint deemed “the most spectacular fantail” he's ever seen in his years of boating.

“Winston Churchill did some of his paintings out here,” Lint said, as he leaned against the railing.

Long before Lint was helping clean up oil spills, the Northwind already had a history of heroic service. Although it was built in Wisconsin in 1930, the Northwind was sent to Great Britain in time to patrol the River Thames and the North Sea during World War II, and even aided in the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940.

“Churchill personally oversaw the installation of smokeless engines on this vessel, after going to Parliament to promote their necessity,” Lint said, proudly touting the original Paxman Ricardo diesel engines that still power the ship. “You couldn't have a covert operation with smoke-belching engines.”

After WWII, Lint recounted how the Northwind was made a gift “to a friend of the son of the Sultan of Oman, for staging a coup against his father.”

Lint recalled that the Northwind's colorful exploits also included being sent on “a worldwide goodwill cruise,” which he and others suspected might have been a cover for spying missions, as well as facilitating the introduction of Jacqueline Kennedy to her future husband, Aristotle Onassis.

Since then, Lint expressed his gratitude to the ship's current owner, music producer Tom Jones of the Halo Group, for being willing to invest literally millions of dollars in the Northwind, which has enabled him and his crew of workers in Port Townsend to renovate and restore the ship.

“He had the vision to preserve it, but he's trusted me to do it,” Lint said. “And I've found a really good workforce here in Port Townsend. The atmosphere in this shipyard really seems to have changed for the better.”

Lint singled out the Port Townsend Shipwrights Co-Op for thanks, noting the discounts they gave him on scaffolding.

“Very few communities appreciate these old boats like Port Townsend does,” Lint said.

Indeed, Lint attributes the Northwind's upcoming move to its new homeport of Los Angeles as being prompted by no longer being as welcome in its former homeport of Bremerton.

“The port commissioners didn't want us outside the moorage, because they said we were obstructing the public's view,” Lint said. “Our ship was open to the public, and we paid $2,000 in mooring fees. We had people testify that the whole reason they came to the Port of Bremerton was to see the Northwind. Little kids talked about how they loved being able to go on board and learn stuff.”

With the Northwind soon to be setting sail for a new horizon, Jones and Lint already have high hopes for what its next “rescue mission” could be.

“There is a possibility that this vessel could be used to monitor plastic pollution in the Great Pacific garbage patch,” Lint said, referring to the concentration of trash debris in the Pacific Ocean, reportedly twice the size of Texas.

While Lint has invented a vacuuming system that he'd like to test out on the garbage patch, he said that both he and Jones realize, “We might not even make a dent in it, but at least we can bring more attention to it.”

In the meantime, Lint intends to continue promoting vintage maritime history through the Northwind.

“Look at this riveted hull,” Lint said, while touring the ship's still under-construction decks. “They just don't do them this way anymore. The woodwork, the integrity of the engine, just the whole way it's built is unsurpassed to this day. This ship has a pedigree. It's hosted Michael Caine, Omar Sharif, even Queen Elizabeth, back when she was still a princess. You can't reproduce that history, but we're losing old boats like this every day, and it's shameful.