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| Sea Change |
Resurrecting a Wreck
Michael Verdon
07/01/2005
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Six months ago, Curtis Stokes figured he had found a diamond in the rough in
Louisiana. Hundreds of them, in fact. A client had asked Stokes, a yacht broker
at the Sacks Group in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to check out an oil supply boat
that had been retired from active duty. He found such vessels all over the
Louisiana bayou, some nearly 200 feet long, with massive engines, 3¼4-inch steel
hulls and 300,000-gallon fuel tanks. Many were priced between $200,000 and
$300,000.
 “There was a lot of money sitting there,” he says. “Even some of
the huge Caterpillar engines alone are worth that kind of money.” The oil
companies had just launched a new fleet of supply vessels, and were selling off
the old generation rather cheaply. Stokes initially listed a few of the vessels,
and says that his phone has been ringing nonstop ever since. “They make a
phenomenal platform to build an expedition yacht or shadow boat,” he adds. “We
have a 194-foot geophysical vessel under contract now for $285,000 that the
owner eventually plans to convert into a yacht. You couldn’t touch a new
expedition yacht for anything close to that.”
Not all of these supply boats
are contenders. “I’ve looked at hundreds of them,” says Stan Antrim, who bought
the 186-foot supply boat that he converted into Lady Lola’s Shadow. “They’re
just lying around the bayous. Some of them are in decent shape, but others have
trees growing out of them. Some of them are used for scrap or spare parts. You
need to look through them with a fine-tooth comb.”
Buyers can still find
bargains, but they should work with a broker who knows the Louisiana turf—which
is far removed from the tony docks of Fort Lauderdale. “It’s not like they’re
all lined up next to each other at the Bahia Mar Marina,” Stokes says. “You need
someone who knows how to weed through the nonsense to find the inventory. These
(sellers) can be slick characters.”
Stokes adds that some other Florida
brokers have found treasures in the bayou, but are asking outrageous prices.
“I’ve seen boats listed for $1.2 million that I would sell for $300,000,” he
says.
Even after finding the right boat, owners need to be prepared to invest
ample time and capital in the refit process. “It’s not always easy to convert
them,” says Bill Murray, president of Murray & Associates, a naval
architecture firm in Fort Lauderdale. “They tend to be pretty beat up by the
time you get them. The interior has to be gutted and made into yacht quality and
all the systems updated. The hulls need a lot of fairing to look good,
too.”
Antrim spent four crazed months creating Lady Lola’s Shadow. “We
brought it down to a blank palette by stripping the boat bare,” he says. A huge
garage was added, as well as the latest electronics, crew quarters, freshwater
systems and a new paint job. “We did the project on time and on budget, but
getting there wasn’t easy,” he admits.
Still, everyone agrees that the supply
vessels, if chosen carefully, offer the best bang for the conversion buck.
“They’re not always easy and they don’t always turn out as the owners wanted,”
Murray says. “But it’s many times cheaper than what it’d cost to build a
similar-size yacht new.”
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