There is one in every boatyard along the Maine Coast; a refugee from the past that has survived hundreds of storms and dangerous voyages, only to meet a lingering death, rotting slowly ashore.
At Ducky’s, also known as Spruce Head Boat Yard, it is the mighty HIPPOCAMPUS, with its illustrious, almost 90-year history hidden by rotting timbers and rusting fixtures. It is hard to tell that the aging dowager was once a stunning beauty and very few who pass would ever guess at the places she has been.
Ellic Carter Mottram, 19, knows. He visits the aging relic, much like one would visit a relative at a nursing home, because the “hippo” is clearly part of Mottram’s family.
The HIPPOCAMPUS, Greek for sea horse, was launched in 1913 by Consolidated Yachts in Morris Heights, New Jersey. The builder used thick white oak and cypress, a major reason the boat is still together today, Mottram said. The boat started as a double-ender yacht for the Porter family of Great Spruce Head Island, when the family was prominent in the city of Chicago. Since that time she has been a mailboat, a scallop dragger, a research vessel, a fisherman and even a submarine patrol boat.
In one of her many “deaths,” the HIPPOCAMPUS sat rotting and sinking lower and lower in Camden Harbor. She was towed to Spruce Head Boat Yard and was headed for scrapping in 1987, when Waldoboro clam digger Donny Boynton decided to rescue the boat with his stepfather, veteran boatbuilder Fern Carter. Carter is Mottram’s father.
Although only 19, Mottram has already served several summer tours on the Camden windjammer MERCANTILE and has plans to add the “hippo” to the Camden pleasure fleet. The Hippo is about the size of the schooner MISTRESS, but its wider beam would allow more room for six passengers and crew.
“I saw her dying when she was tied out on Keene Narrows off Bremen and I didn’t want it to happen. I fell in love with her and used to row out to her at midnight. I decided than it should be back in the water,” Mottram said.
The plan to add her to the windjammer fleet is not without a cargo load of problems. The HIPPOCAMPUS has been sitting for too many years to preserve the wooden planks and has a shallow bottom. Mottram plans to turn the HIPPOCAMPUS back into a double ender and add a centerboard plus a weighted lead keel to allow the hull to sail.
Not much can be saved. Parts of the inner keel and the timbers amidships are “as sound as they day they were nailed.” Everything else is “pretty ripe” from exposure to fresh water, he said. Mottram faces three more years in the U.S. Navy and then plans to enter Maine Maritime. In his spare time, if he has any, he plans to buy the boat from cousin Boynton and take her to the Carter boat yard in Waldoboro.
“We have to keep her in the family,” he said.
He thinks he can scrape up about $80,000 for the project. “After that, I will be looking for investors,” he said. Crew members of the ‘jammer fleet’ have already pledged winter labor.
“There will be no fiberglass and she will be as traditional as the day she went into the water – except for the sails,” Mottram said. He will use cypress if he can find it, yellow pine if he cannot.
The HIPPOCAMPUS has “died” twice in Spruce Head. “My goal is to get her out of Spruce Head within a year and never let her see it again,” he said.
The unofficial historian of the HIPPOCAMPUS is Peter Clifford of Hallowell, who also makes deathbed visits to the Spruce head yard. The boat is also a piece of his family’s past as well, and he approached both the Maine Marine Museum and the Apprenticeshop in Rockland in a last ditch effort to save the “Hippo” before Mottram came to the rescue.
Clifford, who penned a love letter to the boat in Down East Magazine in 1988, says the HIPPOCAMPUS is the oldest motorboat still existent which has spent the majority of its marine life on Penobscot Bay – with time out for some military service, of course.
Clifford will preach to anyone who will listen that the HIPPOCAMPUS preceded the famous HESPER and LUTHER LITTLE, which rotted off Wiscasset, the schooner BOWDOIN and the CLYDE B. HOLMES and the JOHN WANNAMAKER.
The HIPPOCAMPUS was memorialized in Summer Island by Eliot Porter, the son of the original owner, who recalled that the vessel was “a double-ender, 55 feet long with a deckhouse and awning which was the style of the period. She was powered by a Murray and Trigurtha engine, big bore and slow turning. She was the biggest motorboat on the bay at that time.”
The first skipper was Lamont “Monty” Green, who was at the helm when the wooden double-ender was drafted by the U.S. Navy for anti-submarine work. The HIPPOCAMPUS was moored off the Rockland lighthouse waiting for a submarine attack that never came.
The Navy added a ton of cement as ballast to the HIPPOCAMPUS, which was blamed for the boat’s first “death” when it sank in Boston Harbor in 1918, just after World War I. The Navy offered to pay Porter for the boat and leave it at the harbor bottom. But Porter insisted on getting his boat back, and the Navy towed the boat back to Camden, where it experienced its first rebirth.
The Porter family kept the HIPPOCAMPUS until 1932 when they sold it to Capt. Arthur Ladd, who held the mail contract for Islesboro, Belfast and Castine for more than 20 years. The double ender became a familiar sight in upper Penobscot Bay.
Clifford rode the HIPPOCAMPUS in all sorts of Penobscot Bay weather to visit relatives on Eagle Island. Gradually, the boat became part of the family, Clifford said
In the early 1950s Ladd lost the island mail contract and sold the boat to Clarence Howard. He and the legendary Capt. Erland Quinn used the boat as a scallop dragger and bait carrier. Quinn became the model for Cappy’s Restaurant in Camden.
The HIPPOCAMPUS struggled to make its owner a living and was eventually sold and used by the University of Maine as a research vessel. Eventually she was again abandoned in Camden Harbor, then finally towed to Spruce Head.
Waldoboro boatbuilder Fern Carter came to the rescue in 1987.
“She was a basket case. Some-body had fiberglassed the decks and the topsides were all rotten from the fresh water that had got in. The decks caved in when we went aboard. But the deeper I went, the sounder she looked. We filed off a few rivets. They were all copper and as good as the day they went in. There were good white oak timbers in her, too. She was built super and I knew we could save her,” Carter said.
With heroic rebuilding, the pair brought the “Hippo” back to life and even revived the 1950 Mack Diesel.
Clifford is thrilled that someone else has taken an interest in saving the HIPPOCAMPUS. “It has done little bit of everything. It has been fishing, used by the University of Maine as a research vessel, hunted submarines. It has done everything possible but pull lobster traps. I can remember playing ‘captain’ aboard her when she was moored in Camden around 1953 or 1954.
“It’s no worse now than when Boynton and Carter restored her. It doesn’t look worth saving until you really take a look at her… and her history,” Clifford said.
There is no reason the HIPPOCAMPUS cannot be restored again, according to boatbuilder Carter. “Yes sir. The timbers and keel are as sound as they day they went in. It could be restored; I just wish I was younger and could help.”