Some boats have better stories than others. Take the Sequoia, for instance. Built as a private yacht in 1925 by John Trumpy at Mathis Boatyard in Camden, NJ, the 104-foot ship was soon after purchased by the U.S. Department of Commerce, who would use her on the Potomac to lure bootleggers. She quickly became somewhat of a “presidential party barge,” however. But she was also used for official business. Eisenhower lent her to Queen Elizabeth II. Kennedy negotiated the Cuban Missile Crisis on the ship. Nixon made the decision to resign the presidency in one of the yacht’s staterooms. During the Carter administration, the government sold the Sequoia for $286,000.
For the next 25 years, she went through a number of different owners. Most recently, the Sequoia was operating as a charter boat on the Potomac ($2500 per hour in 2003) and owned by The Sequoia Group. But beginning in 2012, a complex lawsuit involving the yacht started to make things murky. Just recently, a judge finally ruled on the case, awarding the Sequoia to F.E. Partners, a DC-based investment group that specializes in historic ship restorations.
The ruling stated that the ship, which was once valued at $7 million, would be sold for $0. The reason? The ship has fallen into serious neglect in the last few years. Earlier this year, surveyors estimated repairs could cost anywhere from $400,000 to $4 million. One aspect of the decision that surprised us was the idea that the Sequoia needed to be moved up to Newport, RI, for repairs. Glasscock even questioned this during the hearing, citing the expense of putting a 104-foot yacht on an ocean-going vessel and taking her north for repairs. But the problem doesn’t simply lie in the talent and skill of wooden shipwrights on the Bay: it lies in the ability to get the boat on the hard.
“Our marine railway is not nearly long enough for Sequoia, so we were never able to haul her out of the water or to repair her below the waterline,” says Pete Lesher, chief curator at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, where the Sequoia received attention in 2003. “We had hoped to get another opportunity to work on the boat, but that never materialized.” During her time at CBMM, the Sequoia had 23 topside planks replaced, but there was plenty more work to be done below waterline. “At her size, she needs to be on a railway,” says Richard Scofield, the assistant curator who was a part of the restoration work. “We did the work in the water here.” Wherever she does end up, the Sequoia deserves another life, Scofield says. “The boat is phenomenal. She’s a piece of history that should not have been let go the way she was. That boat is tremendous.”