Cape Karen
The Nantucket Lightship WLV-612, that once kept vessels off the shoals southeast of the island, has been completely restored into a floating home and vacation charter boat.
I guess I'm homesick - all these articles about New England. . .this is my compilation of a bunch of articles I found on this subject.
I saw the restored ship on The Travel Channel yesterday, and it is unbelievably beautiful! I'd love to charter it for a week, and I know for sure I can't afford that - but, I can afford to dream!
So, come. . .dream along with me. . .
After lying in a state of rusting, hulking disrepair for more than a decade, the vessel has been reborn. Former state Senator Bill Golden and his wife Kristen purchased the lightship on eBay, and have completed a deck-down restoration that has converted the former utilitarian workboat into 4,000 square feet of floating opulence.
Where once there were undecorated steel passageways, spartan crews' quarters and a functional mess area, there are now five staterooms that comfortably sleep 12, a grand salon with burnished wood flooring, leather furniture, a large-screen TV, and a galley kitchen with granite marble countertops. The ship even has its own chef.
Following a two-year restoration, that required a crew of 11 master craftsmen, the lightship made its way from the docks of New Bedford to its winter home at Rowe's Wharf in Boston, cruising through the Cape Cod Canal at speeds that reached 12 knots.
It all began with a piece of sushi. At a Christmas party several years ago, Kristen Golden bet a family friend he wouldn't eat a piece of raw fish. He said he would, if she agreed to live on a boat for five years. She agreed, and promptly forgot about the wager. Until a phone call. . . .
"A friend literally called us and said, "Your ship has come in," she remarked.
"The state had put the Nantucket up for auction, and he thought we should go down and take a look at it," Bill Golden said. "My wife and I both grew up on the South Shore and were familiar with lightships and their noble purpose - and what seemed like a sad end for them as scrap metal. We looked through the ship, but we weren't in the market to buy that day. I went back to the office, but all I could think of was the ship. So, I went back down as they were closing the doors, and the captain agreed to show me around. That's when I fell in love with her," he said.
"We made about 150 phone calls trying to find what you would do if you owned a lightship, where you could get it repaired, etc. About 20 minutes before the end of the 10-day auction on eBay, we began bidding, and we won the bid. We didn't even tell our families that we were doing this until we were successful."
Thus began the two-year odyssey to refit the ship.
The Golden's plan to bring it to Nantucket in the summers, where it will be offered for charter. They have already booked the vessel for several holiday parties at Rowe's Wharf. While they declined to say how much was spent on the restoration, the amount was obviously substantial. For example, Bill Golden said they replaced the vessel's aging engines with a single state-of-the-art Caterpillar power plant, "the size of my Ford Explorer and seven times as expensive."
"Let me just say that the project cost much more than we anticipated," Golden, 54, said with a laugh. "We're not at a level where we could do this and not have a commercial aspect to the project. But it's worth it to keep a piece of history alive."
Stepping aboard the renovated ship is like stepping into a British gentlemen's club. There is polished wood everywhere: mahogany, cherry, oak. Even the former steel stairways are now wrapped in oak and mahogany.
"We wanted a wooden interior inside a steel-hulled ship," said Kristen Golden, who served as the designer and general contractor on the restoration. It's all American cherry with mahogany trim on the main deck. We went for a gentlemen's library feeling."
It's just spectacular, right down to the last detail. There are tall wing-backed chairs, earth-toned colors, and a tiger-maple dining table that seats twelve. There are beadboard ceilings and mahogany beams throughout. The galley kitchen has a five-by-three foot island, a butler's pantry, a 36-inch refrigerator, a double-wide oven, a six-burner cooktop, two trash compactors, an ice machine; and the kitchen cabinet door handles are little metal replica's of Nantucket Lightship baskets.
"Living on the boat has been an amazing experience," said Kristen.
The only time you feel like you're on a boat is when you're looking out a porthole. You don't get that claustrophobic feeling like you do on some boats. We've never slept better. It feels like you're sleeping in the world's largest waterbed, no tossing or turning. My family aren't boaters, but they slept like babies; even through a nor'easter."
~ Bill Golden, is the environmental attorney who in 1990 ran for lieutenant governor and who in the 1980's led the charge to clean up Boston Harbor. ~
~ Nantucket Lightship WLV-612 was built in 1950 at a Coast Guard shipyard in Curtis Bay, Md. She served off San Francisco for 18 years, at Blunt's Reef, California and in Portland, Maine, before finally coming to Nantucket where she served as the last manned lightship in the country from 1975-1983.
It is the third-oldest ship currently in the harbor, superseded only by the USS Constitution and the USS Cassin Young, a World War II destroyer. ~