A Labor of Love - Palmetto 1987 Dyer 29”

In the fall of 2013 this boat found me. I wasn’t looking for it, but it had project written all over it, and was recently repowered with a beautiful Yanmar 315-horsepower engine. Once show season, sailing season, and the holidays were over, we found some space in a local warehouse and began work. The storage space was huge, about 30,000 square feet, so we had to get creative and economically build a place to work where we could have some heat and keep the dust contained. We ended up building a shrink-wrapped encloser around structural steel beams with wire. A little shrink wrap, some dangerously high ladders and we were in business. I could afford the space for about 5 months…barely.

What started as a minor re-fit got bigger and bigger. I ended up deciding to eliminate the motor box and put a bridge deck and L-shaped settee in its place. This would give the boat a much better layout, similar to more modern boats. This also created space for guests to hang out closer to the driver. I also decided to remove the awkward cockpit gunnels so that guests could all sit around the cockpit. I would walk around the boat, sitting in places, thinking about each space, and contemplate any improvement that I could make to make it cool, and my own. It went on like this, endless changes, some structural and some just cosmetic, but they all took time.

I ended up building that bridge deck and installing a custom teak floor. I added a storage locker into the floor complete with the boat name and crossed burgees inlaid in the lid. The beautiful L-shaped settee and matching transom seat all had custom Captain Navy-colored cushions with Toast-colored piping. I tore out every single wire, re-wired the entire boat with a custom flush-mounted Garmin electronics and an updated helm pod from Dyer Boats. I installed new port lights and hatches and created custom teak cockpit coaming similar to those on the Bass Boats. I even painted to bilge white. We added hot water and a cockpit shower because my friend told me “A hot shower separates us from ANIMALS”. He was right, it’s been heaven to have hot water on the boat!  We topped the boat off with a custom ‘Stars and Stripes Blue’ paint job, Toast-colored non-skid decks, and bright white cabin house and water channels.  I’m not sure there was any part of the boat left untouched when I was done.

I loved this project. It made the dark New England winter fly by, filled my evenings, and led to so many late nights I lost count. This boat was everything I wanted at the time. I kept her for two seasons until the next project called to me. I ended up selling her to a woman from Ohio who came out to Connecticut with her sister and took her out to Lake Erie, where, last I heard, she remains and is still loved. Below are some photos of the project. I hope you enjoy these as much as I loved making and taking them!