One morning, I headed to downtown Charleston, S.C., to plink the keyboard at my favorite coffee shop instead of in my home office. The drive to town runs right above Safe Harbor Charleston City. This marina makes it hard to keep an eye on the road because the Mega Dock regularly sees a litany of seriously interesting and, in some cases, globe-circling, passagemakers.
That morning was no exception. Near the end of the Mega Dock was a boat that looked at least 100 feet long, with a steel hull finished in a dull blackish-blue. Perched atop that hull was an imposing gray pilothouse with an observatory of forward-raked windows. Even a quick, rubbernecking glance said she was a boat meant for business, but what business? An Arctic research vessel? A radar-absorbing U.S. Coast Guard hull?
As it turns out, she was a fishing vessel called the Anne S. Pierce. A shipyard in Newfoundland, Canada, had overseen the refit of this 130-foot, 500-ton, former North Atlantic scallop dragger into one heck of a purpose-built expedition rig for a man whose taste in boats had evolved quite a bit over the years.
A Boat for Every Purpose
The owner told me he’s had a litany of boats. When he was young, he liked to waterski and go fast. A Donzi speedboat fit the bill. He eventually came to own a cruiser, too—a 66-foot Pacemaker—that carried his family to the Bahamas.
“But I didn’t know anything,” he said. “I got it and tried to charter it, and you know none of that ever works out, right? I said, ‘I don’t want to do this. I want to run my own boat.’ So, I had Don Aronow build me a 36-foot Cigarette.”
The Cigarette was perfectly fine for Florida-Bahamas runs, but when he bought a home in Maine near Hinckley Yachts, the 300-hp ocean racer didn’t match the local vibe. He then ordered a 38-footer from Maine’s Young Brothers, which builds lobster-boat racing hulls. He sourced an engine from the same Mercury Racing crew that custom-built his Cigarette engine.
Then, as he started to limit his hours working for a company he’d run for nearly 50 years, he took to touring on motorcycles with his lifelong best friend. “And I turned this ankle completely backwards,” he said, pointing down. “I said, ‘You know, we can get killed doing this. We’re getting too old. We’re both retiring.’”
His friend replied, “I always liked boats. Want to buy a big boat?”
The owner and his buddy then bought a Fleming 55 to add long-distance cruising to the repertoire. “They wrap you up in service,” he said of the builder. “They teach you to run it. It’s a good place to start.”
Andrea Gaines became captain of that boat (and, today, is also a sales broker with Essex Boat Works). Gaines not only navigated, but also taught the pair serious offshore seamanship. A 65-foot Fleming soon followed, and then a steel-hulled, 75-foot trawler that originally was built for Jeff Druek, who today is the CEO of Outer Reef Yachts.
Then, the Northwest Passage and Bering Sea beckoned, so the owner moved up to an 85-foot Northern Marine. “We circumnavigated from Labrador all the way out to Kodiak, Alaska.” he said. “We went through the Panama Canal. We went all over the place.”
All the while, though, he was thinking about the look of vintage Feadships. “They all have that same sailboat stern, where she looks like a cocktail glass,” he said. “It just rides beautifully.”
That’s about the time, in 2019, when an unusual boat popped up online. She was called the Anne S. Pierce.
Building the Team
The big, steel hulk was built in 1982 as a scallop dragger. She was 124 feet long, sported a 26-foot beam and had a draft of 14 feet. Her fuel tanks held 21,000 gallons and burned around 26 gallons per hour at 9.5 knots—enough for her single, 1,100-hp Caterpillar D399 to take her nearly 8,000 nautical miles. Her displacement? A whopping 1.28 million pounds.
The ship—and she was a ship—had been designed to head out into the teeth of 60-knot North Atlantic gales and make it home safely with 500,000 pounds of scallops and ice in her hold. After doing a couple decades of hard time, she became a maritime training and research vessel for Newfoundland’s Memorial University, until she needed a substantial restoration to earn modern certifications for a commercial boat.
And then, there she was, for sale on his screen. “It was beat to crap and looked terrible, so there was no market for it,” the owner says. “It had everything set up on it for research, but it had the Feadship stern. Very unusual, with a soft chine. She’s made from American steel from the late ’70s, the best steel ever.”
He spoke to naval designers and architects, including Steve Seaton of Seaton’s Marine in California, and David Menna of DFD Marine in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Seaton said he could work with what was there, and Menna had devoted much of his life to building and refitting big ocean boats for civilian and official use.
Menna says that during their first meeting, the owner told him, “I want to be on an open flybridge with an ice storm hitting me in the face, chasing polar bears until the day I die.” The owner liked having a comfortable interior, Menna adds, but didn’t care what other people thought. His idea of a boat was to do things that he couldn’t do otherwise.
Then, there were pre-purchase inspections. The owner reached out to Leon Dowden, president of Newfoundland’s family-owned Glovertown Shipyard, which is known for builds and refits on fishing boats that navigate hellish conditions. Dowden says the owner told him, “I’m tired of going into working ports with a big shiny boat. We get hassled all the time,” adding, “We want something, you know, not fancy and shiny, just nice inside, like a home.”
With Dowden, Seaton and Menna all on the team, the deal was done and the refit commenced.
The Refit
Because the Pierce had a small wheelhouse and a big, open back deck, Dowden reckoned a refit could include a larger, custom pilothouse and salon. “And the fish hold was very deep and empty—very easy to convert,” Dowden said.
The owner was on the phone with the yard daily. Seaton designed the reimagined boat, and Menna was responsible for bringing those designs to life. The original vessel was gutted, every spot of corrosion was dealt with, and hull panels were heated to make sure they maintained their form. Many were replaced.
To build the interior, Dowden recommended an unusual choice—a kitchen designer named Kevin Walsh. His company, YourStyle Kitchens, uses CAD software to render virtual walk-throughs. “I modeled up the entire room, set it all up,” Walsh said. “And I was in.”
After a great many renderings and spray-painted floorplans at the base of the fish hold, the team came up with a four-stateroom configuration. It included tiled heads and a six-berth bunkroom for kids.
The build was not easy. Nothing, from the water-draining, angled soles to the hull sides, was level. The layout had to work around bulkheads, and every door (most have bronze portal windows) had to be unique.
The owner ordered galley appliances from a big-box store, on the theory that if anything breaks, there’s always one nearby to get service or a replacement. Similar thinking was behind the decision to fill the Anne S. Pierce with mini-split induction heat pumps instead of central climate control. A single pump is easier to swap out.
Abaft the galley are a dining area and seating with window views. The center of attention is an honest-to-goodness wood-burning stove above a brick-and-steel fire barrier. “That’s my backup if the climate system fails,” the owner says. “There’s nothing like a fire. It’s just fabulous.”
Sealed behind a watertight door, the blinding-white engine room holds the Caterpillar D399 engine that’s old enough to comply with early-tier requirements while being efficient and reliable. “It sips fuel,” Menna said. “And you can lose 12 of the 16 cylinders, and it’s still gonna run. It just doesn’t care. It’s a beast.”
The gearbox drives a 96-inch propeller. A modern electronic switchboard would have been costly and corrosion-sensitive, so safety components were instead upgraded and refreshed, and the mechanical control boards were left in place.
There’s only one fully new component in the engine room: a third Cat genset, as a backup. “The only microchip in this engine room is that generator,” the owner said.
Living the Yacht Life
Up top, the pilothouse and flybridge are within a 20,000-pound structure that was built in two pieces at Glovertown, and then lifted by crane and welded together on the boat’s deck. To ensure that this structure wouldn’t make the boat too top heavy—and to replace the weight of a half-million pounds of scallops—the owner asked for 350,000 pounds of concrete to be poured into the hull.
Aft in the pilothouse are a berth for the navigator, another wood stove, and a balcony built by the same foundry that cast steel for the hull. The pilothouse’s reverse-raked forward windows provide panoramic views.
While the Anne S. Pierce has modern communications equipment from Starlink and KVH, the owner favored more traditional systems at the three-seat helm. The seafloor is visualized with a vintage Furuno setup. “It’s from the 1990s, but it’s still supported,” he said. “We also have a 25-kilowatt commercial radar and TimeZero software running off a new marine PC. The boat doesn’t have electric switching, and all the systems, including the joystick control, are independent.”
There are so many things to like aboard the refurbished boat. Hidden in the Glovertown-built smokestack, a dumbwaiter runs down to the galley. Gazing out over the main deck, an owner could navigate from the outdoor helm. The array supporting the navigation lights can be lowered on a hinge for easy bulb replacement. And, out on the water, the Anne S. Pierce flattens swells like a tank.
“You know, I actually designed this boat on a very slim budget,” the owner says. “The reason being, there’s no buyer for this boat. She’s too personal. And when she’s used, she’ll be worth, you know, whatever she’s worth. But I love her.”
This article was originally published in the September 2023 issue.
