The Anna Maria Island Sun Newspaper

Vol. 17 No. 25 - April 5, 2017

FEATURE

Schooner owner gives up the ship

Anna Maria Island Sun News Story

joe hendricks | SUN

The San Francesco once sailed the seas of Europe. It now rests
on bottom of the waterway in front of the Seafood Shack restaurant.

 

 

CORTEZ – Rick Stewart has abandoned his efforts to raise and restore the 66-foot wooden schooner that sits sunken in front of the Seafood Shack restaurant.

On St. Patrick's Day, Stewart signed over ownership of the San Francesco to the restaurant and marina owned by VanDyk group of companies. The local Seafood Shack management group now hopes to salvage the ship.

Stewart is also resigning as manager of the nearby Florida Institute of Saltwater Heritage (FISH) Boatworks, effective May 1, and he's already resigned from the FISH Board. FISH had no direct involvement with the schooner, but Stewart hoped to one day transport the schooner by land to the Boatworks so he could replace the hull.

Repeated sinkings torpedoed those plans, and last week Stewart said he was "throwing in the towel." He attributed the ship's lack of historic ties to the village of Cortez and Anna Maria Island as factors that contributed to his fundraising challenges, and he will continue operating his non-profit Cortez Classic Yacht Guild at a new location.

Ship's history

The San Francesco was built in in Italy 1870 and originally used to transport granite. After falling into disrepair, it was converted into a luxury sailing yacht in the mid-1960s. It arrived in Clearwater in 2008 and Stewart bought it in late-2014. He had the schooner towed by sea to the Seafood Shack, where he began restoring the deck and interior in hopes of it eventually serving as a living, breathing nautical museum.

The San Francesco sank at its dock in January 2016 when a bilge pump stopped due to a power outage during a heavy rain. The schooner sank again during Tropical Storm Hermine in September 2016. Attempts to raise the ship in November and again in December provided unsuccessful and led to the recent transfer of ownership.

The future awaits

On Friday, Seafood Shack's Chief Operating Officer Jed Lippincott discussed the schooner's future.

"We are looking at our options … floating the boat and getting it up and out of the water so no more damage can occur. We understand there's going to be a lot of water damage, but we won't know until we see what the hull looks like. Right now, it's just sitting on its keel. We like the boat, and we're trying to salvage as much of it as we can. Our goal is not to dismantle it completely," Lippincott said.

"I'm a big history buff," he added, citing the village of Cortez's emphasis on marine history and his own desire to preserve the schooner.

He hopes to have an action plan in place within two weeks.

"With how long it's been down there, we have to be quick. The worst-case scenario is we would have to dismantle the boat. I truly hope that's not the case, but there always is that possibility. We're partnering with other individuals that are going to be able to help us. The parent company isn't getting too involved. It's really the marina and the restaurant that are taking ownership and trying to raise the boat," he said.

"We tried to give Rick every opportunity we could, but it ultimately came down to timing and liability, and we had to get some kind of resolution. Rick did an excellent job maintaining the boat. He's a very smart guy, and he knows a lot about wooden boats. He'd get it floating and something else would happen. He knew what he was doing, but it just didn't work out."

The riddling rack

My uncle George was the fountainhead for much of my instruction in the facts of life.

George kept Playboys in his basement in a big wooden crate. Once the cousins found the crate, the stork was history.

George explained the "Wine Facts of Life" to me when we started making wine.

Uncle George had desecrated his suburban front lawn and covered it with horse poop and planted blueberries. It turned out that blueberries love horse poop. George discovered that if we made wine from the blueberries then he would be a vintner, and we were off and running. George began to speak of his vineyard and vintages and fellow vintners.

That blueberries grew on bushes and not vines was an alternative fact.

George was overjoyed when I asked how wine was made. He loved stuff that was iconoclastic. He showed me some grains of yeast and explained, "It's called fermentation. These little yeasties drink the sugar in blueberry juice and pee alcohol until they pass out in the alcohol. They also pass gas."

It sounded a lot like one of our Irish birthday parties.

It occurred to George as we were bottling the wine that if he added a little extra yeast and sugar he might get more alcohol. This started what is known as second fermentation.

George had invented blueberry champagne.

The myth of real champagne's creation is as odd as my Uncle George story.

The credit is accorded to a couple of monks - Dom Perignon, a big tall guy, and Dom Ruinart, his little helper. Dom Perignon was a cellar master in a monastery in Champagne, a province of France. He probably stumbled upon making champagne by putting wine in a container that had leftover sugar in it. After the good father mastered the basics of bubbles, he tried to keep it a secret, but his little helper took off down the road to the next monastery and started making his own champagne.

The bubbles were on the loose.

The champagne the boys made had stuff floating around in it and looked more like cloudy beer than bright and sparkling champagne. It took a woman to make champagne beautiful – surprise. The neighborhood widow, Mrs Clicquot – in French the veuve Clicquot – radically improved the look of champagne by inventing the riddling rack.

A riddling rack is big board with holes in it. You stick the bottle of champagne sideways in one of the holes. All the junk slides down to the bottom side of the bottle. The bottles are turned and increasingly inverted until the bottle is upside down and the junk is in the neck. Then the neck is frozen, the frozen junk is removed – degorged – and the bottle is recorked and wired shut again.

The widow's portrait is still on the famous orange label of Veuve Clicquot. She is kind of scary looking. She spent a lot of time in the basement.

When George invented blueberry champagne, he left out the wiring-the-cork-shut part.

The bottles did not blow all at once. It was spread out over a few days. Most of them blew in basements and sheds, so it wasn't too bad. One unfortunate bottle exploded in Aunt Mary's dining room. Mary was the sister who almost became a Sister. She damn near killed Uncle George.

If you are inclined to see a real riddling rack, I bought a couple and used them to make sliding doors at the Doctor's Office, our new little craft bar.


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