The Glory of the Seas has seen more glorious days.
The 70-foot schooner — 87 feet with the bowsprit — is dry-docked at the rear of Port Haven Marina, its rotten ribs exposed, paint chipped and exposed wood weathered by the elements.
A sign at its base outlines its history, which dates back more than a half-century. A copy of a pencil drawing depicts the vessel in its sailing beauty. And a notice indicates that the owners are trying to raise funds to complete the restoration.
It could be a long haul for an old maiden such as the Glory.
“She’s quite a project, but we are optimistic we can build a community around her to get her sailing as she was intended,” said Trevor Snapp who with his father, Jeremy, is restoring the boat. “Our long term goal is an Arctic circle circumnavigation, but realistically we would just love to get her sailing around the Sound connecting people with the Northwest’s sailing history.”
From whence she came
Glory of the Seas, originally home-based in Lake Union, was built by brothers Bob and Frank Prothero, who achieved near-legendary status in the competitive boat-building business in the early part of last century.
They came from a long lineage of Welsh boat-builders, dating back to the 1600s.
Their great-grandfather immigrated to America in 1870 and opened a boat and furniture shop on Lake Union, and passed the skills to his son, Bob, who passed them on to Frank.
In 1927, Earnest McDonald and Bob founded the Prothero and McDonald Boat Company in a floating seaplane hangar, and Frank joined them as shop foreman in 1930. Among the boats they built were the 42-foot schooner Allure in 1931, which they eventually sold to Johnny Weissmuller former Tarzan and Olympic swimming gold-medalist actor.
McDonald left the company in 1942, and in the ensuing three decades, the shipwrights would construct some 250 fishing vessels, tugboats and pleasure craft and repair thousands more.
The Prothero brothers’ last wooden sailboat, Peniel, a 42-foot pilothouse sloop designed by Bill Garden, which they completed in 1956. As of 2017, it was used for charter cruises in the San Juan Islands. The Peniel was made with steam-bent oak frames, Alaska yellow cedar planking, ironbark in the keel and a spruce mast and spars.
In 1956 Frank Prothero also launched Alcyone, a 65-foot gaff-rigged schooner he built for his own use. Later owners would sail Alcyone across both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans; she has appeared regularly at Port Townsend’s annual Wooden Boat Festival.
Frank tried to retire in 1965, but that didn’t last but eight months: “If you don’t keep moving, you’re dead, boy,” the Seattle Times reported him as having often said.
He then began his true labor of love, crafting the Glory of the Seas on his floating dock in Lake Union. The boat’s design, with fir masts and teak trim, was designed after Donald McKay’s clipper ship of 1869, which sailed between San Francisco and New York.
In December 1995, however, a fire broke out at his shop, but Lake Union Dry Dock workers were able to cut the mooring lines and free the Glory.
According to an article in a 1999 edition of Wooden Boat magazine, the Glory schooner was the one everyone was waiting for. But Prothero was taking his time. Even he said he wasn’t sure he’d live long enough to see it to completion.
It was indeed his last hurrah; he died on Nov. 16, 1996, at the age of 91.
But in those three decades, he incorporated all the skills he had learned over a lifetime. He and a crew could have finished the boat in a year or two, but it was as if he opted to instead finish his life working as a hobbyist on his last cherished project, son Bill said.
“Every day I’m down here I get something done,” Frank was quoted in Wooden Boat Magazine in 1993. “How could I be happier than that?”
“He just enjoyed working on boats,” Bill said when his father died. “He used to say the only reason for taking them out was to have something to work on when you came back. He was still working on the boat the night before he passed away.”
Bill intended to get the boat completed, adding ballast, installing a 100-horsepower John Deere engine and repainting and revarnishing her brightwork.
The boat was purchased by Mark Lerdahl of Lake Union, but he didn’t have the opportunity to work much on her. It sat for 23 years before he gave it to the Snapps for free.
Jeremy was in the midst of restoring the Fisken, another Prothero vessel built by the Northwest School of Boatbuilding, when the Glory landed in the yard.
“We’ve followed it over the years,” Jeremy said of the schooner. “We heard it was going to be broken up in 2012 and hated to see that happen.”
The work ahead
The men have their work cut out for them just to get it in the water and motored to San Juan Island for the major work — hopefully, this summer.
Last week, Jeremy was nailing cedar planks to the hull; he’ll put on another layer of those, followed by a plywood epoxy glued “patch.”
Some of the ribs are rotten; he plans to sister in new cedar there.
“This is the easy part,” he said, smiling. “Well, none of it’s easy, really.”
The boat features 2-inch old-growth teak on its deck and cabinetry topside. Downstairs are the main and dining saloons where he’s living while doing the work. When complete, it will feature four double staterooms, two singles and four in the fo’c’sle.
The interior is planked with red cedar and heavy hanging knees, typically found in clipper ships.
Once the old schooner is deemed seaworthy, they’ll take it to Anacortes or Lopez Island where the major work — refinishing the teak, refurbishing the hull and deck and where the nine sails, totalling 3,572 square feet of material — will be done. He was lucky, he said, when he found the drawing plans for the original sails in the fo’c’sle.
“The sails are the least of our worries,” he said. “We just want to float it.”
Fortunately, the project isn’t out of the mens’ scope of experience.
Jeremy had built 47 wooden boats prior to 1996, after which he got into restoring houses.
“I call myself a preservationist,” he said. “I’ve been messing around with boats since I was 5, sailing since I was 6; it’s just what we do. We grew up thinking that’s what everyone did. Maritime has always been my thing, but it takes a lot of money.”
Getting there
They recently set up a GoFunMe site to raise money.
“It’s path is full of peril, its possible failure is high and your investment risky,” the site reads. “But the Glory of the Seas is no normal ship.”
So far they’ve raised $750 toward their first goal of $8,750, but realize to do the job right will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it likely won’t get done for a long while.
The first phase will involve sheathing the hull in marine plywood, then sailing her to show the community her potential. Further reconstruction will be done as an educational and community project, and then, with any luck, Trevor’s dream is to sail the Northwest Passage as a testament to art, technology, social justice and storytelling, the GoFundMe site reads.
“We’re not magicians; we’re not millionaires,” Jeremy said. “We’re going to take our chances on it. We’re just trying to keep the ship-breakers away.”
