Aboard: COASTAL QUEEN

In 1928, a Chesapeake Bay workboat, 65' LOA with a beam of 21' and draft of 5' 6", was launched near Cambridge, Maryland. Named A.G. PRICE, she was a typical boat of the Bay, hard-chined with a cross-planked bottom, and she immediately set to work as a buy boat, gathering oysters from all manner of dredging and tonging boats for delivery to packing houses.

Some 30 years later, her sweet sheerline caught the eye of Slade Dale, an experienced yachtsman and businessman who was looking for a boat well suited for passages between Florida and New Jersey along the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW), a route that was then overlooked by pleasure boaters. He bought the boat and in 1959 had a boatyard in Oxford, Maryland, convert her for pleasure use with the addition of a two-level deckhouse including numerous staterooms. He renamed her COASTAL QUEEN and began running ICW charters, the only boat to do so at that time.

Five years after COASTAL QUEEN’s conversion, the writer Anthony Bailey joined her for a northbound passage in 1963; his article about the experience spanned 32 pages in The New Yorker’s October 31, 1964, issue. He described the beauty and solitude of the coastline, which was then largely undeveloped, and also wrote about Dale and his crew’s pride in COASTAL QUEEN.

In October 2022, a massive rebuilding of COASTAL QUEEN for her new owners, Peter and Cynnie Kellogg, was begun at McMillen Yachts in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Many luminaries of the region’s wooden-boat trades were involved in this project: the white oak for her new timbers was felled and milled by Duke Besozzi of New England Naval Timbers (see WB No. 213); her replanking, using double-planking for her cross-planked bottom, was supervised by Clark Poston, the yard’s head shipwright; Schell Custom Boatworks of Andover, New Jersey, built new Sitka-spruce spars to replicate the gear originally used for hauling oysters aboard; and de Rouville’s Boat Shop of Bayville, New Jersey, built the rig’s silicon-bronze hardware.

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