Page 42: of Marine News Magazine (June 2005)

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What You Pay For?

Vessels facing retirement seldom receive lavish sums for their maintenance.

The Harvey sat in reserve, then in retire- ment for the better part of a decade, before being auctioned. A survey was made in the middle of retirement, March 1997, by

Charles C. Deroko, Inc. whose repeated adjectives include "wasted:" "Frame 30 is totally wasted with no rivet connections below the waterline," "Rivet heads are severely wasted." "Hull frames are wasted in the forward end of this space. Bulkhead stiffeners show similar damage. Rivet waste is widespread in this area." "The transom floor and portside cant frames, in the stern, are wasted with poor connec- tions to the hull plating." Other discon- certing adjectives flow frequently throughout the report, and the casual boater might find the list of repairs a bit daunting. In the opinion of Huntley Gill, the report is a thoroughly accurate and unbiased appraisal, whose authors under- stood it was in their sponsor's interest for the boat to sound bad. The sponsor was the South Street Seaport, which like many others in maritime New York recognized the importance of the artifact and the icon embodied in the Harvey. They wanted to add it to their collection, but were stopped, in John Krevey's view, by that same old stopper: money. He describes a proposal that the museum receive the fire- boat and a half-million-dollar endowment to keep it afloat. The city declined. "After that, the city seemed to get tired of the sit- uation, just wanted it off their hands. They started worrying about liabilities and things."

Mr. Gill reports that the next-highest bidder at the auction was Witte, at $10,600. "Someone told us another scrap- per was planning to bid $27,000, so that dictated our bid - $27,010. It was untrue, of course. We could have had the boat for ten dollars over Witte's bid. We paid the full twenty-seven-ten. Plus the salestax."

A commercial vessel would face all kinds of regulations before re-entering service, but the Harvey was, for the moment, simply an offbeat yacht to play with. "From Day One, we were all of one mind," says Mr. Gill, "and that was to get the boat running. Period. Unlike some people who are more orderly. Tim Ivory came to work for us as chief engineer, and that's when we started getting a grasp on the scale of what we had to do."

When John Krevey first described the boat to the investors, Mr. Gill recalls, "he said oh it's diesel, and we hadn't contem- plated the fact that it was five diesels, and diesel electrics at that." Five main diesels, two auxiliary diesels, and Westinghouse drive motors. And pumps, and specialized equipment of all kinds, and a massive electrical system that had been modern seventy years before. Quite a wonderland for an engineer. "Tim said let's get it going, and see what comes up." Before too long, the boat was running at speeds

Mr. Ivory places at about 15.5 knots. In her prime, the Harvey has been described as the world's fastest large fireboat.

A drydocking at Caddell's for general fixups was performed the following year.

By that time, according to Mr. Gill, a dash of sobriety was setting in. "We realized the Harvey was a very important boat, and that she caught peoples' imaginations. A lot of people wanted to volunteer to work on her. Meantime, the owners were begin- ning to think about the long-term future of the boat, and wondering if we could deal with it successfully on our own. It dawned on us that if there were a lot of volunteers 42 • MarineNews • June, 2005

September 20-21, 2005

Jacob Javits Convention Center

New York City 3000 Attendees 200 Exhibiting Companies 37 Countries

Organized By:

IN ASSOCIATION WITH:

The U.S. Maritime

Administration

The U.S. Merchant Marine

Academy

Society of American Military

Engineers

Corporate Event

Sponsor:

Booz Allen Hamilton