As part of Proptalk’s 20th anniversary celebration, I sat down with Joe Reid, proprietor of Mast and Mallet in Edgewater, MD, and builder of Sawdust, the boat featured on the cover of that premier edition of the magazine in 2005. “Sawdust was a pretty important design for my company at that time,” Joe explained.
“We had been building boats already for 10, 15 years, something like that. This particular client was a repeat customer. I had worked on his previous boats. He actually lived onboard a Grand Banks for a while and cruised with it up and down the East Coast and everything. So he saw that I was making new boats for customers, one-offs, with Mike Kaufman designing them. He was very interested in having a boat built for his next planned voyage. That was very important to him. He wanted to do the Great Loop. So, he came to us and said he wanted Mike and me to design this boat from the inside out. He said, ‘I know you can build a beautiful boat on the outside; but this one has to perfect on the inside as well. I’m going to live on it for at least a year.’”
“So we had meetings,” Joe explained. “With Mike and me and with the person the client chose to do the electrical design and the electrical work, the people who would do the painting, and the engine people as well. So that started the idea, the concept for Sawdust. The owner liked the name Sawdust because the message on my telephone answering machine was ‘Sorry we’re not here right now, we’re out making sawdust.’” Joe laughed. “It took us a little over a year to build that boat. It turned out very nice, and six or eight months later they went on their trip and did the Great Loop. Everything went really great, and they had a fun time with it.”
I asked Joe where the idea for the Thomas Point name originated. “Previously, the boats we were building,” Joe answered, “Mike Kaufman had called them ‘Rabbits.’ This client was in advertising, and he said, ‘You’ve got to have a different name for your boats.’ He came up with the idea for naming them Thomas Point. So we changed the name on all of our boats to Thomas Point. We had lots of different lengths and beams, but all of Mike Kaufman’s boats were the Thomas Point line after that. Sawdust was not really the first of the Thomas Point line, but we learned some things while building her and incorporated those lessons into the next boat, and we continued to improve the designs as we went along. We were always trying to make a better boat each time. Sawdust is still around and is on her third owner. She’s right next door in winter storage. She should be back in the water in a couple of weeks.” In fact, she went back in the water in the last week of April.
“Another important boat in our history here in the Holiday Point Marina is Winsome,” Joe observed. “She’s really the first Thomas Point 30. She’s the first boat I built from Mike Kaufman’s drawing board. She was built in 1994. The Thomas point line of boats was more or less 25 of varying sizes from 26 feet all the way up to 44 feet. They are all similar in cabin shapes and hard chine boats. All are planing boats and Chesapeake style pleasure cruising boats.”
Joe explained why he liked Mike Kaufman’s designs enough to build 25 of them. “When you go out on the boat for your first shakedown cruise and feel how she handles the water, you know it is right. Mike was always improving his designs. That first 30 (Winsome), for example. We had to put trim tabs on her to get the bow down for visibility and to smooth out the ride. Mike changed the run aft and the amount of deadrise on the hull of the next boat. That one and subsequent boats were smooth riding, efficient hulls that did not require trim tabs. They cruised with a very low wake and low rpms as well.”
I asked Joe if he was building any more new boats. He replied, “We’re not doing new construction anymore. Now we’re doing mostly repair and restoration work pretty much on wood boats. I don’t get involved with fiberglass unless I have to. I had an Ellis 28 in here recently and replaced the cabin sides on it. They were originally made out of teak. We rebuilt them with teak on the inside for varnish, but the outsides are painted to prevent rot. The boat previous to that that I worked on was a Thomas Point 25 based on the Chesapeake Bay workboat style. We fixed her up to look a little more ‘yachty.’ We replaced the engine stringers and replaced some bad wood and then repainted and varnished everything on the entire boat. The year before that I had a Thomas Point 32 from the late 90s that was in here for some minor wood replacement and a full paint job, and she left looking like a brand-new boat. The owner then shipped her to San Francisco, so I’m well represented on the West Coast,” he said and laughed.
Even though Joe is not building new boats anymore, the repair and restoration business keeps his small Edgewater shop humming. And, if you give him a call, the answering machine still says “… we are out making sawdust.” Beautiful sawdust indeed!
By Capt. Rick Franke