Reviving ADVENTURESS

When I first found ADVENTURESS in November 2024, she had been out of the water for about 20 years. She sat on her stands, dry and patient, red bottom paint falling off, caked in dust, and inhabited by mice and filled with forgotten sails. She hadn’t been sailing since I learned to sail as a child in the early 2000s.

ADVENTURESS is a Sparkman & Stephens Gulfstream 30. Unlike the other boats of this design built by Robert Derecktor, she came from Norman Hodgdon’s shop in East Boothbay, Maine. She’s mahogany-planked on oak frames. She’s the only Gulfstream 30 Hodgdon built, and he couldn’t resist a few departures from the original design: a cockpit about 1′ longer than specified, a mast 6″ taller, and a more-rounded house. These small differences add up; Hodgdon’s hand in her is vivid.

When I bought her, her frames were dry but sound, her mahogany planks surprisingly tight, and her fastenings mostly if not all bronze. The hull was tight enough that I could run a putty knife along most seams without it vanishing. For a 1959 carvel-planked boat that hadn’t floated in a generation, that was something.

I started with what Greg Rössel might call the “triage phase”—the work you do so that you can take her sailing and keep her afloat. Her bottom paint was too far gone to guess at, so in March 2025 I invited nine friends to help me hand-scrape the bottom down to bare wood. It took one afternoon, followed by 16 hours with a 6" orbital sander attached to a shop vacuum.

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