Interview with the Coronet Internship Team

On December 13, 2006, IYRS entered into a formal agreement with Coronet Restoration Partners (CRP) to transfer ownership and the restoration of Coronet to CRP and its managing director, Robert McNeil. In recognition of the yacht’s history with IYRS, Dr. McNeil not only agreed to restore Coronet at IYRS, but also to hire IYRS graduates and interns to work on the restoration project. The agreement also calls for Coronet, once launched, to fly the school’s colors and for IYRS to have rights to sail her one week a year.

During the summer of 2009, three IYRS students from the Boatbuilding & Restoration Program, Kyle Rectenwald, Adam Palmer, and Dan Burkhart (all  IYRS'10) spent their internship worked on Coronet.

Why did you go to work on Coronet this past summer?

Kyle Rectenwald: I wanted to work on a boat of that scale. I fell in love with the boat when I came for my admissions interview and bonded with it immediately. I wanted to put my hands on something that old.

Adam Palmer: Because it’s an interesting project. It’s the polar opposite of a Beetle Cat, as different as it can get. There isn’t one piece that can be put in by one person. And Jeff Rutherford, Chris Morrison and Eric Thesen have been all over the world and worked on big boats, so they have a lot of experience.

Dan Burkhart: My goal for this summer was to work on a big timber project. Before IYRS, I had been looking at working at Colonial Post and Beam. I’m young enough to move timbers around.

What did you do on Coronet this summer?

Kyle: For us it was all demolition – skill saws, sledgehammers and crowbars.

Adam: It was all boat breaking. We removed the deck and planking back to the first chain plates. It was interesting to figure out how to remove the deck without damaging anything. I was amazed how unstable the boat got when we started to take it apart. You could feel the deck move.

Dan: We removed the concrete ballast. We took all the deck hardware off. We removed the deck and the rubber sheathing on it. We shored up the deck beams.

What was it like working on a project like Coronet?

Dan: It’s a young man’s game. During this phase, you’re swinging a sledgehammer. I was tired at the end of each day, but it was a good type of tired.

Adam: I lost about 15 pounds and went through 3 to 4 shirts a day. At the end of the day, we’d go down to the end of the dock and jump in the water. There’s something incredibly satisfying about going home and falling on the couch totally exhausted. I had a desk job before coming to IYRS, and I never came home tired.

What was the hardest thing you did?

Adam: The constant real effort required. We were working with really heavy things all the time. There must have been 70 trips to the dump with all the rotten stuff.

Dan: Answering all the questions from the visitors watching the project. We wanted to get T-shirts with Coronet FAQs on the back.

Kyle: Nothing was easy.

Adam: Using the ship’s saw. That is one amazing device that is very complex. I remember Chris saying that for every 10 minutes of work, there needed to be one hour of preparation so you don’t screw up. We helped the shipwrights do practice runs. We had 2 to 3 guys pushing a big piece of wood through a big, spinning blade.

Kyle: We learned about the structure as we pulled her apart and could see the methods used to put her together when she was first built. I could also see the destruction caused by the iron fasteners.

Adam: I found that Newport has a sense of ownership and community around the boat. People told us they remembered when she came to town and having toured her.

Dan: It’s cool to run into a lot of people who know about the project. They’ve been on the boat or have a relative who had.

Adam: The amount of effort it took in 1885 to build Coronet. Every one of the holes for the 2,500 trunnels would have been drilled with hand augers. There must have been a lot of strong guys with big arms back then.

Were there any similarities to what you learned in your first year working on a Beetle Cat?

Adam: The basic principles of how to build a boat are the same. It’s just a matter of scale.

Kyle: You can see the frames, the keel, the rabbet, etc. It was good to have all the terminology on hand.

Dan: Despite the difference in scale, Coronet basically has the same construction as a small boat.

Kyle: Yeah, it’s just on a more massive scale.

Would you want to work on her after you graduate in 2010?

Adam: Absolutely. It was great – the sweat and blood and fun. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done and I want to do it again. Working on Coronet crystallized my belief that I really want to be here. If you enjoy doing something that difficult, you have to be in the right place.

Kyle: It’s a dream job with its scale, history and prestige, and it’s the ultimate resumé builder. A lot of boat builders go through their careers and never get to work on a project like this. I tell friends that I’m at the peak of my boatbuilding career before I even graduate.

Dan: Definitely.