“It’s a pigpen right now,” said Melissa Lynch as she stood in El Primero, a boat that has carried four U.S. presidents as passengers and has been compared to an older actress who can still turn heads.

Lynch serves as caretaker for the 127-foot-long luxury yacht, built in San Francisco in 1893. The boat hosted presidents Teddy Roosevelt, Warren Harding, Herbert Hoover and William Taft, said Lynch.

Lynch explained that she was tired and a bit “out of it” due to a lack of sleep and exhaustion from all the maintenance work she and others have performed on the boat.

The El Primero was at the Port Townsend Boat Haven for 21 days, Aug. 16-Sept. 6, for haulout and maintenance.

During all the hustle and bustle, the yacht’s living room became somewhat of a mess.

The boat sailed from Bremerton on the evening of Aug. 16 and arrived at the Boat Haven eight hours later, at 5 a.m. in the morning. The crew got two hours of sleep and was then out to pressure-wash the boat and build scaffolding.

“We worked all holiday, are you kidding?” Lynch said.

“Labor Day was labor day for us,” she quipped.

“We have been sandblasting the bottom of this boat down to bare metal. We had to tarp it all up.”

ONE-OF-A-KIND WOODWORK

As Lynch extolled El Primero’s elegant and exotic interior woodwork, Christian Lint, the boat’s owner, captain and chief engineer, sat in oil-smeared coveralls while grabbing a bite to eat.

Next to Lint was the ship’s mast, which is wrapped in rope to lend a decorative element.

The boat features hand-carved mahogany, teak, English pecan and fir wood.

“This is a hand-carved 1893 fireplace,” Lynch said, pointing out one of the ornate features. “The woodworkers would salivate up at the boat school.

“This woodwork will never be duplicated again. Bill Gates could never afford to have any kind of money that people had that build this. He can’t even dream about it. This was railroad money.”

She demonstrated the easy, smooth movement of a wooden sliding hatch that opened to reveal stairs to berths below.

“It slides like butter,” she said.

Two bathrooms, several berths and the engine are located below deck.

The yacht originally had a 226-horsepower, 3-cylinder steam engine. The first cylinder was the largest, with the exhaust steam then going into the midsize cylinder, and in turn to the smallest cylinder as a way to extract as much heat energy as possible.

In about 1955, the engine was replaced with twin Detroit 671 diesel engines, with about 250 total horsepower, Lint said. Top speed is approximately 14.5 knots.

Up top, the wheelhouse has a rounded exterior shape. The boat’s wooden wheel, attached to hefty exposed metal gears, turns 16 times around from full port to starboard, Lynch said.

8 HOURS FROM BREMERTON

El Primero has been moored at Bremerton for the past two and a half years, Lynch said.

“That’s where the cheap moorage was and that’s where they can handle a 127-foot-long boat,” she said.

Lynch said the Boat Haven was chosen as the site for maintenance, “because you don’t have to pay people to do it. You can do it yourself if you want to.

“We pulled it out. We pressure-washed it. We sandblasted it … down to bare metal. It’s a huge project.

“And then it’s down to bare metal, and it hasn’t seen the light of day since 1893. So she was undressed.

“Then we put a product called Blue Seal, which is the wave of the future. It’s a composite – unbelievable. It’s like spraying an eggshell enamel over the whole boat,” Lynch said, adding that the “adhesion factor is incredible.”

A second coat followed. Workers wore protective suits and respirators while applying the coating. Then a “ugly brown” coat of paint was applied below the water line, Lynch said.

“But the fish won’t care what color it is. It’s under the water,” she said.

A red water line was also painted on the boat.

“She’s a long canoe,” Lynch said, with 32 portholes.

Lynch said the boat’s recent maintenance was akin to having plastic surgery.

“I’ll tell you what, if she was a person, she would have had cosmetic surgery. She would have had a face lift and a butt tuck on the bottom,” Lynch said.

Lynch compared El Primero to the actress Sophia Loren.

“She’s like an old actress. She’s got it. She’s going to be sexy till she dies. And sometimes people say old actresses are no good anymore – ‘We want the young 20-year-olds.’ This is a boat that is an old actress and is wise beyond her years. And the stuff that happened on this boat … you think Vegas is bad, baby?”

A NAUGHTY BOAT

After it was first built, the boat was brought to Tacoma in 1906 by Chester Thorne, who lost it to newspaper publisher Sidney “Sam” Perkins in a poker game in 1911. Perkins died in 1955.

Lynch said a 75-year-old woman visited the boat recently to have some tea, “and she said, ‘When I was young, my dad said don’t go anywhere near that boat because they used to have “hospitality and girls.” She said, ‘My dad said don’t go anywhere near that boat. It’s naughty’ … and here I am having tea out on the back deck.’”

“There were colorful things that happened on board. This was owned by railroad money and big businessmen,” Lynch said.

She thought the boat might one day wind up at Pier 70 in San Francisco. But before then, it is to return to Bremerton for a while as the crew will need to take time to travel to Astoria, Oregon, to do restoration work on yet another boat, the 200-passenger ferry Tourist II (aka MV Kirkland).

CAPTAIN KEEPS IT AFLOAT

Lynch said Lint is a working captain.

“I guarantee, there’s never been an owner of this vessel that ever got his hands dirty in the engine room [before Lint]. I guarantee it. All of ’em were rich men who hired everybody else to do the grunt work, and [Lint] would rather be in the engine room than with his white suit and his cap and his little epaulets.”

Lynch said Lint first saw the boat in 2010 under a canvas in Blaine, Washington, and was lured by the unusual fantail.

Lint talked to the owner, Lynch said, who told him the engine wouldn’t start. Lint was able to get the rusty “old school” boat running.

“So he takes the thing out, and then the [owner] comes running down the dock with papers in his hand [yelling], ‘Christian, Christian!’ And Christian’s like ‘Nuh-uh, I can’t afford it.’”

The owner handed over the title, saying that Lint was the only one who could maintain the boat.

“It’s yours,” the owner said, handing the title to Lint, Lynch recalled.

How lucky can a guy get?

“But it’s a curse,” Lynch retorted. “It’s millions of dollars to try and fix this thing up.”