July / August 2023

Fixing HERON

A lesson in cold-molded repair

Text and photographs by Sharon and Paul Tisher

When the 50′ cold-molded, Dick Newick-designed trimaran HERON was holed by a truck while she was stored on a remote piece of land in Down East Maine, the subsequent repair required a resourceful coordination of local talent.

It was a phone call you never wanted to get…never, ever, expected to get. One morning in October, shortly after our trimaran had been hauled and secured for the winter, came this message: “Paul, I put a hole in your boat. It’s about the size of a basketball. I’m so sorry.” The caller, who operated a mussel dragger, had been unloading his catch onto his truck.

We’d owned the boat, HERON, since 1988. It was built by Larry Bedell in Padanaram, Massachusetts. He was one of the earliest East Coast trimaran aficionados, with a sideline in dentistry. This was his fourth and largest cold-molded tri, at 50' × 33'. It’s a Dick Newick design, the only sistership, but more of a cruising version, to the famous MOXIE in which Phil Weld had won the 1980 Observer Singlehanded Trans-Atlantic Race, sponsored by London-based The Observer newspaper. Larry consulted closely with Newick on the construction of the boat.

We’d become interested in multihulls after seeing a photo of ROGUE WAVE, a 60' Newick trimaran, on the cover of WoodenBoat. We were, with a growing family, ready to transition to a larger and faster boat, our first having been the lovely Fenwick Williams yawl ANNIE, which we first saw on the pages of this magazine as well. But we needed some help in learning to sail this new craft, which included a 70' rotating wing mast. So, Larry’s proposal that we buy a half-interest in HERON, sail her on Buzzard’s Bay on alternate weekends, and join with him when possible for tutorials in multihull sailing, was ideal. After several years of successful joint ownership, we bought Larry’s half-interest and moved HERON to Maine, where we had relocated. Larry has sailed with us from time to time since, and we sailed the Marblehead-to-Halifax race with both Larry and Dick Newick as crew.

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