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
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