A sweet mahogany antique powerboat with downeast lines tied up to the dock at our yacht club recently, and even from a distance I could see her brightwork gleaming in the summer afternoon sunlight. Curiosity prompted me to go down to the dock and have a look, and the closer I approached her, the prettier she became. She was (and is) a completely restored Bunker and Ellis cruiser named Grayling, and her owner, Steve Kloeblen, just happened to be aboard.
I’ll confess that I have an incurable fondness for antique wooden cruisers, but as we began chatting, Steve interjected, “This story really isn’t so much about me, though,” he explained, “but more about Doc Clarke—Malcolm Clarke, but we just call him ‘Doc’—who found her and restored her. Doc has a ‘thing’ for these Bunker and Ellis cruisers. He has saved a couple of them, at least. I bought her from him. You’ll want to talk to him first.”
“Well, I’m a sailor and actually a boat that I had restored in 2011 was my first powerboat,” Doc told me. “But when I was growing up, I always had sailboats and my best buddy through high school was a sailor and had an antique schooner named Surprise. But his father, John Porter, was a real powerboat guy. In 1964 he had a 44-foot Bunker and Ellis built, the biggest they ever built, with only one engine, which was unusual for a boat that big, but he wanted only one engine for simplicity.”
“Visiting in the summertime in Maine, I had a chance to go out sailing often, and I said to myself back then that ‘if I ever get so old that a sailboat becomes impractical, I think I could get one of these Bunker and Ellis Boats.’ John Porter’s boat was built in 1964. That was at the end of the Bunker and Ellis boat building era. They built, I think, 58 boats over about 30 years, just the two of them, in Southwest Harbor, Maine. Raymond Bunker was the designer, and he and Ralph Ellis built the boats.”
Around 2010 Doc sold his sailboat and found a Bunker and Ellis 42-foot boat, which is named Alaria. “It was in a dump in Ellsworth, ME, but it was still nominally owned. I bought it for almost nothing. I have a nephew, Peter Johanson, who has a boatyard in Rockland, ME, named Johanson Boat Works, and I asked him to truck it to his yard, and we got together restoring it. And oh, $800,000 later, I had a spectacular powerboat.”
“I really still don’t like powerboats,” Doc continues, “But the Bunker and Ellis boats, they’re so pretty. When summering in Maine, whenever I saw one, I kept saying to myself that if I ever had to have a powerboat, that would be the way to go. And they’re all very well-built boats. They’re all cedar planked over oak frames, and the planking just pretty much never wears out. They built about half yachts and half lobster boats. And the yachts such as Alaria and Grayling are really built to very high specifications and there’s quite a bit of very nice joiner work in them too,” Doc recalls.
“And then, one day, I happened to see a boat in a boatyard in Rockport, ME, right on the corner of Route 90 and Route 1, and I said, ‘boy, that’s an old Bunker and Ellis.’” It was abandoned and covered but ‘kind of ratty,’ Doc relates. Doc asked about it and was told that the owner had moved to Florida, hadn’t paid a storage fee for about five years, and would he like to buy it?
“So, I said, ‘God, what’s the alternative?’ And they said, ‘well, another year or two, we’re going to take a chainsaw to it and put it in a dumpster.’ So, what was I to do? It’s sort of like a dog that follows you home.”
The dog that followed Doc home, once restored, became Grayling, actually her original name, a Bunker and Ellis 35-foot cruiser. “I bought it for basically nothing, but it was perfectly sound.
“The first year when I had her, after I had her restored in 2011, I took her to the Mystic Wooden Boat Show, and she won “Best” in the category of professionally restored powerboats,” Doc recalls.
“I wasn’t using the boats enough, so I decided I would sell Grayling. Steve Kloeblen ended up buying it, and he’s been a very good home for her. She was originally built in 1954.”
Steve Kloeblen, who bought Grayling from Doc, now tells his story: “I’ve had a number of boats over the years, power and sail. We bought Grayling four years ago from Doc, but we were looking for more of a picnic boat, perhaps a boat for doing a little cruising on, and she’s just the right size for that. We just came back from a three-night trip through Buzzards Bay, Marion, Quisset and Hadley’s Harbor, and Cuttyhunk last night and back this morning, and she’s perfect for that. But we’ve also taken her to Maine three times and one time for I think five weeks. She is perfect to cruise to Maine on for my wife and me. It’s two long days, but we average about 12 knots. So, we’ll do basically 110 miles to 120 miles each day. So, it’ll be Bristol to Gloucester or Bristol to Rockport, first day, and then on to Boothbay or Penobscot Bay in the second hop.”
“In summary, she is a tight, very strong boat. Even after 70 years, we took off the garboard planks and the wood was solid like iron. What they did with those boats, with the keels anyway, they were all cut from a single tree, and they would take the trees out and bury them in the muck in a salt pond and leave them there for years until they thought they needed them. And then the Bunker and Ellis guys soaked them in motor oil and creosote, and probably something to thin it. You can’t put a scratch into it after 70 years.”
By Capt. Michael L. Martel