Wavertree at Caddell Dry Dock 5

As a review, here and here were the posts I did on Wavertree going TO Caddell 11 months ago, and here is the series 1 through 4 focusing on Wavertree AT Caddell’s.

Below was she on March 10.  While I was away, she was refloated.

Below is March 19.  To my surprise, the masts had been unstepped.

And below was yesterday, April 17, the day when Executive Director of South Street Seaport Museum, Jonathan Boulware,  conducted a tour of the work in progress.  Any errors in this reportage are due to my having forgotten my pen and pad.

Since the masts–at up to 20 tons each, if I heard that right–were unstepped, their cleanup and refurbishment has begun.

A house has been built over the whaleback stern to protect the interior spaces.  There is some beautiful birdseye maple panelling in there.

 

 

The underside of the whaleback shows the details of work already completed.

 

This is the interior of the upper stern, looking to starboard.

Access to the cargo areas during the tour was forward.

I’m eager to see what work gets done to the bowsprit. Check out this post (and scroll) from many years ago when Frank Hanavan and I put fresh paint on that bowsprit.

This is a new deck . . . the tweendeck.  If you’ve ever eaten on Moshulu in Philadelphia, the restaurant is in this space.

Wavertree had a tweendeck back in 1895, when she called briefly in the sixth boro, which you can read about here (scroll).  In the photo below, you are looking through a hatch in the tweendeck down into the main cargo hold.

And here is the main payload space, the cathedral of cargo, looking toward the stern.  On a modern vessel, this would be divided into watertight compartments.

I can’t say this is the manufacturer, but this is the concept–as I understand it–for this ballast.

Mainmast will be restepped here.

Here Jonathan explains the spar work.

 

 

When the project is completed, all these spars will be aloft and potentially functional.

 

This cross section of a spar shows the lamination of the wood.  Some of these products are provided–I believe–by Unalam.

 

Here are some of the finer spars, along

with the directions for re-assembly.

Work going on in the rigging shed included stripping  off the old coatings and recovering the high quality old wire of the standing rigging.

Worming, parcelling, and serving protects the wire and produces such sweet smells of pine tar.

Many thanks to South Street Seaport Museum for offering this work progress tour.   Any errors here are unintentional and mine.

All photos by Will Van Dorp, who thinks anyone who hasn’t read A Dream of Tall Ships by the late great Peter Stanford would really enjoy the saga of Wavertree‘s arrival in the sixth boro as told in that book.