When John Wilmot reached out to tell me about his classic boat, I was tickled, as John’s wife, Betty, was a fellow cocktail class racer in the Cocktail Class Wooden Boat Racing Association (CCWBRA). It’s been a few years since Betty’s Pink Lady went up against PropTalk’s Molotov, so it was great to catch up. But rather than reminisce solely on cocktail class boats, John wanted to tell me about the Lady J, a 1968 53-foot Matthews that he used to own. Of the 10 larger boats in his collection over the years, John says the Lady J was his favorite.
“I’ve always been involved with boats,” says John. He belongs to the United States Power Squadron (America’s Boating Club) and began teaching safe boating classes in 1989. Currently John and Betty own a pontoon boat, which they keep on Deep Creek Lake. “That’s number 31,” he says. The first five or six boats he ever owned were small ones he built himself in his woodworking shop. There were also many ski boats in the mix as John served as a promo dealer for Mastercraft ski boats from 1978 to 1992. Naturally, all of his kids were tournament water skiers. Betty’s too, which is how they met in fact.
But there came a point during those years where John says he “got tired of dragging my kids around the lake.” They decided to go down to Florida to buy a boat, a 42 Pacemaker. Later they had a 44 Hatteras and a 42-foot Chris-Craft, which they took down the ICW several times. John is a big fan of wooden boats, so it was around this time that they started looking again and found the Matthews.
“We finally found this 53-foot Matthews, and it’s the ninth (boat we owned),” says John. “It was the 1968 model and had big diesels in it. It was originally owned by a man who owned funeral parlors, and he had it all enclosed in the back. When I finally sold it to someone from Michigan, they took it to Florida to live on it.”
“It really is a beautiful, beautiful boat,” he added. “She was my favorite of all the big boats I owned.”
And each and every one of those boats, John has named Lady J. “Lady was for my wife and J was for my three kids (Jim, Jane, and Julie),” he says.
In 2015 they took the Matthews down the Intracoastal Waterway, and John says it was quite the experience, traveling down to Florida and back. He says, “Our good friends, Jim and Nancy Gorman, went along and were a great help with docking and navigation.”
John and Betty have doen that particular trip three or four times. To initially prepare, John decided to get his 50-ton captain’s license, and he also installed a lot of new electronics on the boat.
On those trips they would typically cover between 70 and 100 miles a day. They would stay at a different marina each night rather than anchoring out. “I only ran aground once,” says John. “Another problem occurred when the engine alignment went out so the gear shift wouldn’t work.” That was somewhere in North Carolina, he remembers, but luckily, they got the problem fixed quickly and were back on the water the next day.
After that trip, they did a lot of work on the boat, mostly cleaning up brightwork and revarnishing, as John remembers it. One year they took her to the Antique and Classic Boat Festival at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum and won ‘Best Restored Boat.’ But it wasn’t long after that that John began to wonder if he could realistically keep up with all the maintenance that would be required for this boat.
“It had a great, big teak deck,” he says. He talked to a friend on Kent Island, Eric Horst at Bayport Yachts, and mentioned he was thinking of putting it up for sale. He took a look at it and said, ‘there’s a lot of teak plugs on the front of that boat; you should replace those before you put it up for sale.’ John found that there were 97 places where he had to replace the plugs, and that’s when he finally decided to put it up for sale.
The boat dealer told John that he had to take it out for a sea trial before it was listed for sale, but when they went to take it out of the slip, lo and behold, the transmission was out. After doing a lot of research, he found one place in Newport at the south end of the Bay that would work on a transmission as old as this one. John had to take the transmission all the way down there and all the way back, but when the potential buyer finally came to look at the boat, it thankfully ran very well during the sea trials.
Naturally, it was a bittersweet moment. John hated to sell the boat, but it had a lot of maintenance yet to be done.
“With these wood boats you really have to love them, and they are worth it for a lot of people, but they are also a lot of work. But the Lady J was a nice old lady,” he added.
After the Matthews they bought a 36 Sea Ray. “It had these great, big gas engines,” says John. “And I couldn’t believe how much fuel you could put through those things.”
Now they have the pontoon boat, and both John and Betty are very content. They can take 10 or 11 people out, some snacks, and cruise along at about 10 mph on the lake, and John says, “that’s fast enough for me anymore.”
Betty celebrated her 94th birthday this past summer, and John hit 93 on Labor Day. Betty was still slalom skiing up and down the lake from her ski boat up until she was 92 years old.
It’s a good living, for sure, but John will always remember his Matthews fondly.
“I just love the wood boats,” he said. “They are more maintenance than the fiberglass ones, of course, but the wooden boats just seem to be more friendly in a heavy sea. I think they are a little more stable than a fiberglass boat, personally.
“If you have the time to spend a little time doing work on the boat, I think you would really enjoy one.”
That is one thing we’ve heard from so many classic boat owners over the years—these boats are a great deal of work, sure, but there’s just something about owning a classic (especially if it’s wood). Whether you own them for two years or 20, these boats stick with you and often come to feel like a beloved member of the family. For the owner willing to put in the time, there’s nothing else like it.
By Kaylie Jasinski