Besides working on my houses, the Cougar, and working offshore half the year, here is the other project that takes up my time. It is the family boat that my dad, brother, and myself all have shares in it. It is a 40ft fibergalss Lafitte skiff that was used for shrimping with skimmer nets in the shallow bayous in southeast Louisiana.
We bought the boat with a with an inline 6 Isuzu diesel in it that worked, but not well enough. With the boat loaded down, it was REALLY slow.
So we put it up in the shipyard, cleaned the couple thousand pounds of barnacles off the hull, painted the hull, put a new prop on it, and dropped in a 8V71 Turbo detroit diesel rated for 400HP at 2400 RPM. Here are some of the pics from that adventure:
By bigredtruck at 2012-04-04
By bigredtruck at 2012-04-04
After that, we used the boat with the plain steel rigging it had on it for a while, but after looking at all the other boats around with nice aluminum rigging, we decided to build our own, which came out pretty nice if I do say so myself:
By bigredtruck at 2012-04-04
By bigredtruck at 2012-04-04
By bigredtruck at 2012-04-04
About a month after all of that is done, it is August 2005. Hurricane Katrina decides to blow through. The boat is in protected water, has plenty of extra slack in the lines, and has about 100ft of heavy chain as a last resort safety measure going to the pilings of a nearby building.
After evacuating from the storm, we have no way of knowing how the boat faired through the ordeal. All we know is that the storm took a last minute jog east and the eye passed directly over where we are keeping the boat.
I stumble upon some satellite images taken after the storm following the path of the eye and start looking through them to find the one I am looking for. I see the pilings of what used to be the building that the safety chain went to and the marina is completely void of buildings, boats, cars, dumpsters, etc. The whole area has been wiped clean. My uncles 60 ft steel hulled boat is across the bayou on land, in the trees, so it is not looking good.
I keep looking through satellite images and I see a hull up on land that looks to be the right size for our boat. All we can do it wait to get home and see.
Fast forward a month, we are back home, my house just needs a new roof, my brothers needed a few shingles, but my parents house took just enough water to ruin everything in it, but not the electrical. That magical number is 4" of water.
We all ban together, gut my parents house, get them a travel trailer (not a fema trailer) to put along side the house while redoing it, and start to go look for the boat.
As we are driving down the highway that has water on one side of it and about a 1/4 mile of land on the other side, then a levee, we are seeing all the boats there were in the bayou piled up on the levee. There is even a 200ft barge with a crane on it on land, on the other side of the highway, and the powerlines are still intact. A LOT of water went through there for the barge to float and clear the power lines.
We first stop at the marina where the boat was, and it looks just as bad as the satellite photos. It is decimated. One of the locals says the high water mark was 30 ft above the normal water line judging by the debris in the top of the train bridge.
Now we go to look for the hull we saw in the picture. Sure enough, it is our boat, 1/2 mile from where it should be, upside down, and half sunken into the marsh grass. Luckily, the hull is intact. We pull the prop before it gets stolen and paint the registration number and our phone number on the hull so it can be seen from the air and go back home to figure out how to get the boat back. We buy a back hoe in need of repair for cheap, get it running reliably and start to plan how to move 20,000 lbs of upside down boat 200 ft back into open water.
While this is going on (about 8 months total while renovating my parents house), we get a call from the Dept of Wildlife. They ask what we are doing with the abandoned boat. We tell them its not abandoned, that’s why our phone number is on it, and we are planning to get it back in the water. They tell us they are coming through with heavy equipment the next day and are getting rid of all the boats in that area since it is a wild life refuge. We agree to meet them out there. They show up with a huge drag line crane on big marsh buggy tracks. They hook up to one of the motor mounts we build for that detroit diesel and pick the whole boat up from that one point and have it hanging from its side. They lay it back down slowly and now the boat is sitting upright again. The drag line then repositions in front of our boat and picks it up from the front eye where the rigging used to attach to, and spins it so that it is facing the open water. Next the boat is inch wormed back into the water by the drag line pulling it towards himself, then backing up and doing the same over and over.
Alas!! The boat is floating again, and here is the aftermath:
By bigredtruck at 2012-04-04
By bigredtruck at 2012-04-04
By bigredtruck at 2012-04-04
By bigredtruck at 2012-04-04
By bigredtruck at 2012-04-04
By bigredtruck at 2012-04-04
By bigredtruck at 2012-04-04
Fast forward a couple of years, including a lot of cleaning, fiberglass work, welding, and plenty of money spent, the Detroit Diesel is pulled out and the old cabin is torn off.
We have rebuilt a new cabin out of 2" foam board and fibergalss. The windows are RV windows on the sides, and we custom built the front windows from aluminum flat bar and custom cut windshield glass.
By bigredtruck at 2011-10-31
By bigredtruck at 2011-10-31
By bigredtruck at 2011-10-31
By bigredtruck at 2011-10-31
By bigredtruck at 2011-10-31
By bigredtruck at 2011-10-31
By bigredtruck at 2011-10-31
By bigredtruck at 2011-10-31
By bigredtruck at 2011-10-31
By bigredtruck at 2011-10-31
By bigredtruck at 2011-10-31
By bigredtruck at 2011-10-31
By bigredtruck at 2011-10-31
Fast forward once again to present day. The boat is back up in the ship yard getting painted again, the shaft has been machined where it had wear, and the new prop is put on.
We have run all the electrical, the hydraulic steering is installed, and the fuel tank has been emptied and cleaned.
By bigredtruck at 2012-04-04
By bigredtruck at 2012-04-04
And the new engine is going in. A 375 HP Caterpiller 3208:
It smokes a little because we were using the old fuel from the boat after polishing it, but we are not going to put it back into the fuel tank.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0FWsfSifR4
By bigredtruck at 2012-04-04
Hopefully in the next few days, all the measuring, cutting, welding, and fiberglass work will pay off and the boat will once again be moving under its own power!!!
All along we were asked that same question I am sure plenty of you have been asked about the cars while they are always being worked on: Why don’t you just sell that thing?!?
And we always have the same answer: Because its OUR boat!!!
