Mike Wright and Jody Reynolds were asleep in their Syracuse, N.Y., home when a knock at the door woke them about 4:30 a.m. Two police officers stood on their porch.
“I wondered, What have I done now?” says Wright, 64. The officers asked whether the couple owned a boat moored at McCotters Marina in Washington, N.C. They did: they were winter-storing an antique motoryacht named Hermione.
Hermione was an 86-year-old, 56-foot Elco motoryacht, believed to be the last of 11 built to that design. The wooden yacht, named for a figure in Greek mythology and the Sicilian queen in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, burned and sank along with 25 other boats in a pre-dawn fire that swept a covered section of the 180-slip marina on the Pamlico River.
The officers wanted to confirm the couple hadn’t been sleeping aboard Hermione, as they sometimes did while working on her at the marina. Wright says the cold weather had kept him home that week; otherwise he might have been on board. He is a heavy sleeper, and the blaze consumed 100 feet of covered dock in under 10 minutes. One liveaboard was forced to jump into 37-degree water to escape. Hermione had no aft deck hatch where Wright would normally sleep. “I could have been trapped aboard,” he says.
Fire crews battled the inferno for five hours. Investigators suspect an electrical origin, but marina owner and operator Mark Henley calls the exact cause “undeterminable,” and the matter remains in dispute. Two liveaboards suffered burns to their hands and a third was treated for hypothermia. There were no fatalities, but several boats—many of them classic wooden yachts—were lost, including Hermione and Mercedes III, a 70-foot 1960 Grebe motoryacht.
By mid-May, marina staff had lifted all 26 sunken vessels and cleared debris. A 32-slip fixed dock without a cover was under construction with a planned midsummer opening, and the rest of the 200-slip facility had resumed normal operations.
Hermione
Built in 1925 at Elco’s Bayonne, N.J., yard, Hermione was commissioned for vaudeville stars—Wright refers to them as “Ruby and Ben”—for $25,000, a significant sum at the time. Her stewards over the decades included an executive from Corning and Milton Ragsdale, an electrical engineer who later led mission reliability operations at NASA from 1960 to 1974 and owned Hermione for 35 years. Sloan Wilson, author of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, chronicled the boat in The Talking Boat, highlighting early telemetry systems Ragsdale used to monitor Hermione remotely.
Wright and Reynolds owned Hermione for four years and used her for charters and long cruises, visiting destinations from Nova Scotia to Cuba, and cruising the Intracoastal Waterway multiple times. Reynolds remembers quiet cruises at eight knots—“the birds, the dolphins following you”—and being swamped by attention at marinas and boat shows. Wright, a classic-boat surveyor and delivery captain, and Reynolds, a publicist, invested substantial time restoring and maintaining the yacht. Hermione’s riveted 1½-inch cedar planking over oak frames, original brass controls, and twin rebuilt Chrysler 318 engines made her both elegant and practical: quiet at anchor and nimble underway. “She wasn’t perfect. She was just really nice,” Wright says. “She was a go-boat, not just a show boat. We just feel so bad she died on our watch.”
Hermione was insured, but Reynolds says the coverage did not match her full value. The couple continued to search for another classic after the loss, but remained boatless that spring.
Mercedes III
Dallas and Mary Foreman describe a similar sense of grief over losing Mercedes III. Built in 1960 by H.C. Grebe & Co. for the Kresge family—founders of the S.S. Kresge five-and-dime chain that evolved into Kmart—Mercedes III originally carried three Mercedes diesel engines and was later refitted with Detroit Diesels.
The Foremans found Mercedes III as a long-term restoration project while she sat on the hard in West Palm Beach with a hull breach and little chance of sale. The owner agreed to transfer the yacht for a dollar, and over 6½ years the couple and a few dedicated friends poured between 12,000 and 14,000 hours into a complete restoration—weekends and long hours to refurbish or replace nearly everything aboard. “For the last 6½ years, that pretty much has been our passion,” says Dallas Foreman.
They completed the restoration last July and celebrated with a first charter in August, taking a wedding party to Ocracoke. The Foremans live about 10 miles from McCotters Marina. When an emergency worker friend alerted them to the blaze after seeing the glow five miles away, they rushed to the marina. Passing through a police cordon, they watched Mercedes’ bow consumed by flames. Exactly five months to the day after they christened her, they watched the yacht burn. “I was completely and utterly helpless to do anything,” Mary says. “It still breaks my heart.”
The next day only five feet of charred stem remained above water. From the wreckage they salvaged a set of tableware and two decorative mermaids—one a brass hook, the other a cast-iron bottle opener. Mary kept some of the ashes to scatter in flower pots.
The Foremans carried liability insurance but had not yet obtained hull coverage; they planned a spring haul-out and inspection that would have been a natural time to add full protection. Despite the loss, they reflect on the boat’s craftsmanship—stained glass panels in the doors, a fine teak, rosewood and mahogany galley table, and sweeping curves throughout the design. “There’s nary a straight line on these boats,” Dallas says. They intended to operate Mercedes III as a full-time ICW cruiser and charter boat in retirement, and that dream endures. “We’ve actually been doing some retail therapy,” Dallas says, looking for another classic—preferably one essentially finished so they can avoid another multi-year project.
This article originally appeared in the July 2011 issue.