New York City’s rich maritime heritage goes unnoticed by a large swath of its population. Even with four of its five boroughs essentially surrounded by water, the city’s sheer density tends to drown out its robust waterways.
Brooklyn transplants Fitzhugh Karol and Lyndsay Caleo Karol were fortunate to spend some time on the Hudson and East rivers on friends’ boats, a welcome return to the halcyon days of their youth. Fitzhugh “knocked around” with his grandfather off Cape Cod, Mass., on a sailboat, camping out in his sleeping bag in the harbor, and did his share of canoeing and kayaking on the Connecticut River near his childhood home in New Hampshire. Lyndsay’s maritime experience ran deeper. She grew up on Canandaigua Lake, one of New York’s Finger Lakes, with all types of watercraft and often sailed with her grandfather on Lake Ontario.
By 2015, the couple had been living in the city for about a decade, running The Brooklyn Home Company, their interior design and renovation outfit. Escaping the urban grind and challenging careers meant hours-long slogs to the Catskills or the beaches of Long Island. They considered purchasing a vacation home, but also recalled the mere minutes it took them to escape the city via boat.
“At first, we were looking for something else besides a boat [although] we always had a fantasy of getting an old Cape lobster boat for dinner parties, but that was just something in the back of our minds, not reality,” Fitzhugh says.
It was right around this time when Lyndsay was on a boat ride with her father on Canandaigua Lake. They spotted a 37-foot Lord Nelson Victory tug, a rare sight on the landlocked body of water. Like the title character of Fitzcarraldo, the owner had painstakingly overlanded the boat to the lake, utilizing his heavy construction business.
Lyndsay was smitten, and, within a few hours, had jumped online and located another Lord Nelson in Stonington, Maine, on the hard at Billings Diesel and Marine. Her father encouraged the couple to look at that boat, so a few weekends later, they drove up.
The boat, which was built in 1987 in Taiwan, is Hull No. 8 of the now-defunct builder’s 49-foot line. She had been languishing on dry dock for a couple of years, with the owner, a DIY guy, unable to keep up the maintenance. But, according to Fitzhugh, she had good bones, and a 300-hp Cat 3116 in the engine room.
“She was, functionally speaking, very solid,” he says. “One of the things we were drawn to is that her old Cat engine and the core were in great shape. The hull had no problems [and] her other key parts, the most difficult parts to fix, were all in good shape. But the rest really, really stunk.”
Diesel fumes (likely from fouled fuel lines) permeated everything on board. There was old navigation equipment and dated electrical systems. Even still, the couple purchased her in October 2015 and rechristened her Lucy after a beloved family pooch.
“In our construction company, we’ve renovated so many houses of different scales and types in [and] out of the city,” Fitzhugh says. “It’s a boat. How different can it be?”
As it turned out, a boat refit was an order of magnitude away from their stock-in-trade. “We quickly realized that a boat was not like renovating a house,” he says. “The challenge was working within an envelope that was all curved on the outside, and we needed to make things straight on the inside of that. It was like a flip-flop from what we were used to.”
They called in the experts, hiring Derecktor Shipyards, which is about an hour north of Brooklyn in Mamaroneck, N.Y.
“It was nice because we could just get out there for the day,” Fitzhugh says. While the team at Derecktor began its extensive technical refit (Fitzhugh recalls a 55-gallon drum full of wires being removed from the vessel), the Rhode Island School of Design graduates tapped into their area of expertise.
“For the living and galley area, we knew we would … not change a lot, but make it a little more appealing,” Fitzhugh says. They added a bookshelf and a bar with an ice maker. The galley, which was essentially walled off from the salon, was opened by removing cabinets that hung from the headliner. “We wanted to make it what would be a family-friendly boat, even more so than it already was. We wanted a comfortable, liveaboard board boat that multiple friends [and] family could stay on for prolonged periods of time [and] with a goal to also have it be an owner-operator boat.”
Lucy’s amidships master and forward VIP stateroom were already set up to sleep four people, but the couple wanted room for more guests. They looked to the area just abaft the helm. The updated wheelhouse is not only one of the more stunning areas of the completed vessel, but also a study in maximizing space. Gone are the single berth and commodious chart table, replaced by a queen berth with stowage below the mattress. There’s still a sitting area in the pilothouse and, with the addition of the larger berth, a private sleeping area for guests or the captain. The salon’s settee also converts to a double berth.
Derecktor added new teak to the side decks and cockpit, and refinished the teak-and-holly soles throughout the vessel. The yard also restored the teak double doors that lead to the salon, as well as the pilothouse doors. The couple loved the extensive teak throughout the vessel, but its reddish hue on the tongue-and-groove headliner and walls was overwhelming, so they painted over most of it. Now a brilliant white, it provides a fine contrast to the brass fixtures and marble used on countertops and in the heads.
The work was completed in about a year. After a wring-out cruise around Florida and the Bahamas, Lucy returned to her home in New York City just as One°15 Brooklyn Marina was opening. It remains her home berth.
For those first few years, the couple was on board three to four times a week. While Lucy is still based in the city, she spends a lot of time on the east end of Long Island and cruises to Nantucket, Mass., during the summers. Maine remains a favorite destination.
The couple loves tucking into places at night, swimming off the boat during the day, and entertaining friends on board for evening dinner cruises. When I spoke to them in early February, Lucy was being fitted with a gyrostabilizer (to complement her Wesmac active fin stabilizers) at a facility in Savannah, Ga., among some other maintenance projects.
“She’s just a great all-around boat,” Fitzhugh says. “People say, ‘Oh, it’s slow.’ Yes, but when this is your boating program, you’re not thinking about going places fast. And that’s one of the joys of it and why she’s such a friendly boat.”
The couple wed on board Lucy in 2017. The boat remains their happy place, a respite from the dense urban environment. They have welcomed two children since Lucy became part of the family.
“When my daughter was four days old, we got on board, and we were cruising up the East River. And Lyndsay was on the back with her, our perfect little four-day-old baby, and a big splash of water washed over her,” Fitzhugh says. “It was like her christening with the East River waters.”
This article was originally published in the April 2023 issue.
