Restoring a Classic Skiff
The throw-in-the-towel moment came about two-thirds of the way through the job. With the hull of the vintage 14-foot McKee Craft painstakingly prepped and a complete underside coat of two-stage epoxy paint catalyzing on the bottom, a late spring front blew through our neighborhood. Overhead, palm trees began dropping grit from their seed sprouts while biting no-see-ums sought refuge from the gusts in the hull’s lee. The tacky paint was only happy to provide a sticky resting place for both. Clenching fists and jaw as brown dots swirled and stuck, my 15-year-old son Fritz had had enough. “I hate this!” he shouted. At that point, I was right there with him. I ran to the garage for a tarp.
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I wrote about the decisions that went into buying Fritz’s 1992 McKee Craft Custom Deluxe skiff in a May Power & Motoryachtfeature called “A Christmas Story.” It was Fritz’s first boat. It wasn’t perfect or terribly pretty, but it ran fast and handled beautifully. Funded half by Fritz and half by dad and mom, the McKee provided Fritz a couple of weeks of Yuletide bliss with his friends, but he had bigger dreams for the tough little hull. He wanted her dialed in for the upcoming summer, he wanted her beautiful and he wanted to do most of the work himself. There would be a second chapter to the McKee’s story.
Rebuilding a car or boat with your son, is of course, a bucket list item for a lot of dads, and I was no exception. My own dad was an adventurous advertising guy and we had a ton of fun skiing, sailing and traveling, but he didn’t give a crap about turning a wrench. My maternal Granddad Ricks on the other hand, passed me a mechanical gene. Granddad and I spent untold hours together wrenching on his tractor, old Cadillacs and Chryslers and fixing up my own machines: two go-karts; a ’73 Monte Carlo; a ’62 Coupe deVille; and the 1977 Renken center console he ultimately handed off to me. You could not measure the knowledge and confidence he passed along. He somehow managed to be a teacher who could not only make my know-it-all teenaged mind grasp mechanical and electrical concepts without seeming like a curmudgeon, but see the value and reward in, basically, fixing up my own vehicles. We butted heads from time to time—once he said to me as I incorrectly insisted that I knew exactly how the alternator went back into the Monte Carlo, “If I knew as much when I was 16 as I thought I knew, today I’d be a genius.” But he also managed to talk me off cliffs when I grew frustrated with something like wet-sanding or installing a set of piston rings.
I wanted to help Fritz fix up and restore his boat in any way I could, but I wanted to emulate my granddad and have Fritz take the lead. I didn’t want to end up doing the work for him, or make him want to give up because we bit off more than we could chew—or spend. We had a conversation from the get-go about money. First, I told Fritz, “you’re going to spend more than you think.” Second, “mom and I would want to use the boat occasionally too, and it would be good to have the McKee as a backup if our other boat gets stranded.” In short, we would help out, but I expected Fritz to pay for half the materials that went into the boat. The old adage: You appreciate something more when you have a personal investment in it. I hoped to encourage him to make his own mistakes and devise his own solutions without my making know-it-all dad suggestions. You think and hope these things will just happen naturally, but fathers and increasingly independent teenaged sons invariably disagree.
By mid-January, Fritz had begun to compile what became an admirably detailed list of the steps and even sketches he wanted to follow to make his battered old skiff into a thing of beauty. On a chilly Saturday morning, we built an ad-hoc engine stand out of two-by-fours—watching a few YouTube videos for ideas and making up dimensions as we went along. When it came time to hoist the old Evinrude, we brainstormed and ran a heavy-duty eye bolt through the floor joist of the upstairs porch and winched it up with a big ratchet strap.
We then set to work stripping everything—rubrail, side console, controls, lights—and ultimately every screw. Granddad taught me about keeping track of everything—bagging or Tupperware-ing and labeling carefully, and I hope I passed that along to Fritz. I was a bit worried the foam in the boat’s hull, which had come with a big rectangular patch in the floor at the transom, might be holding a good bit of water, but unscrewing the depth finder transponder, there was only a mild drip-drip-drip that subsided within an hour. Whew. We’d leave that patch uncovered to hopefully evaporate everything over the ensuing few months.
Fritz had a notepad and started another list; rusty engine mount bolts and a questionable bilge pump would need to be replaced. He wanted to do away with the way-too-high post-mounted, fold-down seats and build a bench instead. That would have conceivably also involved removing the circular aluminum mounts epoxied to the deck. “Why don’t we just cut the posts so they’re shorter and you can reinstall the seats?” I asked. Nope, he wanted to build a bench that he could slide forward or backwards on a ridge along the inner gunwale. I argued with him for a bit then caught myself. This was his boat.
We descended on the hull with 80 grit. The previous owner had slathered on a very tough epoxy over a good many scuffs and dings both inside and on the bottom where the McKee had obviously encountered oyster banks. I told Fritz, “There’s no way around it, you’re gonna have to spend a lot of time on that stuff with the sander.” One key rule: Unless the wind is blowing hard and you’re upwind of it, you’re wearing a mask—no exceptions. The sanding job soon became the domain of Fritz and his posse of neighborhood buddies. They not only came over a lot to help with the sanding, fairing and filling in every screw hole with JB Weld—imperative to prevent heat-released hull moisture from blistering the paint. Afterwards, they’d all lean against the trailered hull sipping Gatorades and trading ideas like a bunch of good ol’ boys around a 1972 F100. “You should re-mount the console farther back; your rod holders should go here. You should put EVA foam on the deck. Are you gonna make a cooler holder at the back? How are you gonna mount the gas tank?”
The boat became Fritz’s after-school regimen and respite. He’s aware that he already spends too much time on the phone scrolling Instagram and Snapchatting with his friends. But like fishing, surfing and drawing boats, this non-virtual boat became an escape from the screen.
By late March, the time came to sand and refinish the bottom and Fritz and I went around and around. I suggested it would be easier—and make mom happier—if we kept the boat off the lawn and sanded and painted it from underneath on the trailer. Fritz wasn’t having it, and as in many instances, I had to ultimately admit his young instincts were correct. With the help of more YouTube videos, his friends, our palm tree and the same ratchet strap we’d used on the motor, we gingerly lowered the McKee onto the grass. Eight hands flipped her over and got to work.
This was far from the only time when Fritz was right and I wasn’t. After we removed the pump for the livewell, we had to fill the one-inch hole by the drain plug. I suggested mixing up some epoxy and putty knifing it in. Fritz said, “Why don’t we just cover the hole with masking tape and pour clear surfboard solar epoxy resin into it?” That turned out perfect. When it came time to cover an eight-inch foam-drying hole the previous owner had cut into the inner hull wall, I suggested a Bomon marine hatch. Then at West Marine, Fritz saw a small, inexpensive louvered metal hull ventilation plate on the wall—one you might put in front of a blower hose. “Why don’t we just put that over it?” he asked. “It’ll keep out water but also let it evaporate.” Right again. For a new bilge pump, I suggested one with a separate float switch, but young wisdom correctly suggested a single, simple SeaFlo unit with a built-in float switch. When it came to the gas tank, I suggested we add a second six-gallon tank and put both in the stern. Fritz wanted the battery box in the stern portside, and a single portside twelve gallon tank that he could strap down amidships—under the ten-by-two-inch sliding bench he’d expertly sawed, sanded and painted seafoam. “It will balance my weight and move more weight forward,” he said. When it came time to paint the Evinrude 48SPL (which for all intents and purposes is a Johnson 50), I suggested we put it back to stock color and decals. Instead, Fritz wanted to give it the same paint job I have on my old Johnson Ocean Runner: white cowling with a black lower unit, a single black “Johnson” sticker on each side. I could go on about his good ideas, but you get the picture.
By the time Fritz got to painting the small starboard side console, he had been prepping and working diligently on the McKee for better than four months. We were ready to put it all back together but we weren’t quite there yet, and Fritz still wanted to do everything just right. This is where frustration began to rear its ugly head. The seafoam roll and tip job he did on the side console, to me, was just beautiful. But it had taken a long time to sand, fill and prep the console, and Fritz beat himself up over a few brush strokes you could still barely see after the paint dried. I passed on words my grandad once told me—more or less: “In this case,” I said, “perfect is the enemy of the good. The console looks insane and this thing is going to be the envy of everyone when we put it all back together.” I was the dad, so those words offered far less solace than I’d hoped, but when his buddies came over to oooh and ahhh the console, he clearly felt better.
The Turning Point
By May, Fritz had been working—and spending money—on the McKee for a long time. He had already been out with his buddies several times on their skiffs, and was simply ready to be on the water. Then came the gusts and the no-see-ums and dust in the epoxy, and the words I hoped to never hear: “I hate this!”
With little time to spare, I ran upstairs and grabbed tweezers and told a cursing Fritz to pluck the stuff out. Mom and I shook out a tarp and set it up above the boat on some chairs. I then tried to assure Fritz: We mixed the catalyst properly, the paint will harden soon and will quit ensnaring the bugs and dust. But even though we’d stabilized the situation, he was still simply pissed, disappointed and questioning whether it had all been worth it. “Look at how much you’ve done, dude,” I said. “Look how good your bench looks. Look at how good the console and hull actually turned out. When you put that swath of seafoam on the side, it’s going to look amazing.” A couple of rolls of sushi and a little more encouragement from Mom, and I think we’d talked him off the cliff.
The next day dawned warm and wind-free. Armed with blue masking tape, a very fine bristle brush and plenty of rolling and tipping experience, Fritz deftly laid on thin layers of seafoam, following a line in the outer hull mold. When his buddies rolled up, eyes widened and jaws dropped. Suddenly, all those months of work, callouses and curses had an end result. The McKee looked better than new.
After that, it was pretty much all downwind—and a lot of fun. We bought lots of stainless-steel screws, hinges, a new rub-rail and various bits and pieces. Fritz had the brilliant idea to take a pair of black aluminum ladder rungs we had in the garage, originally designed for a campervan, and put them on the front hatch as handholds. A member on the McKee 14 Facebook group posted a hack where he added a hydraulic automotive hatchback lift to the heavy hatch—so we did the same. When we went to attach the side-mount throttle, we realized the adjustable bench mount Fritz devised would get in the way of the throttle at full reverse, so we MacGyvered a wooden throttle mount to push the assembly out a bit. The steering and throttle cables that came with the boat were too long, so Fritz zip-tied them into a coil and elegantly fitted that coil into a battery box. With some guidance, but mostly of his own accord, Fritz’s wiring work was yacht-grade—heat-shrunk, properly gauged, fused and loomed up. When we went to fire up the now basic black and white Johnnyrude, it started on the first turn of the key.
At the Folly boat landing, a number of ramp champs complimented Fritz on the McKee. After a few test circles, we blasted the boat up Folly Creek and over the five miles it took to reach our dock—our smiles a nautical mile wide. “Was it worth it?” I asked. His reply was instantaneous: “Definitely.”
This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.
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Source: https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/maintenance/restoring-a-classic-skiff
