Old Lyman boat being restored for Maritime Museum

This story was featured in the July 2024 edition of Sandusky Living magazine. If you're interested in purchasing a copy, call the Register at 419-502-2130 while supplies last. SANDUSKY — Inside a barn on Wahl Road a bit west of Sandusky, an old wooden boat that connects two strands of Sandusky nautical history is being carefully restored. The Gull is a 1939 custom-built Lyman Boat Works boat, a relic of a famous boat-making company that was founded in Cleveland in 1875 but moved to Sandusky in 1929, where it remained in business until 1973 while cultivating a legendary local status. And the Gull's original owner was Lay Brothers Fisheries of Sandusky, once one of the biggest freshwater fishing companies in the U.S. Floating history The boat is being restored for the Sandusky Maritime Museum. The project to restore the boat and give it to the museum was launched by Bob Grimm of Lakeside, a wooden boat fan who located and bought the boat and is the lead donor for the project. The project's total cost will be about $250,000, and fundraising by the Sandusky Maritime Museum is continuing. The boat will serve as an ambassador for Sandusky, Grimm said. "She represents the historical boat building center that Sandusky once was," Grimm said. The boat is being restored by Classic Marine, 5719 Wahl Road, a wooden boat restoration company that has two large barns full of boats. The owner of the business, Dwight Davis, also collects boats himself. "I'm at an all-time low. I'm down to about six or seven (boats)," Davis says. "I'm kind of like a vet that ends up with stray cats." The boat was moved to Classic Marine in July 2023 and work on it by Davis and his sole employee, Isaac Zimmerman, will continue until the restoration is completed, which is projected to be early summer of 2025. The Sandusky Maritime Museum will then take possession of the boat, which is destined to go back into the water. While the museum owns many boats that it keeps on display, including some Lyman boats, the Gull will be the museum's first excursion boat, said Molly Sampson, director of the Sandusky Maritime Museum. "We are looking at doing historic waterfront tours in the bay," Sampson said. Those tours will likely pause at the Lyman Boat Works and Lay Brothers Fisheries site, but there are plenty of other historic activities to highlight, Sampson said, including the shipyard at the foot of Meigs Street, the Boeckling boat that took people to Cedar Point, ice harvesting in the bay and the Union prison at Johnson's Island that held Confederate prisoners of war. The process The project to restore the Gull began as a personal project for Grimm, who got interested in restoring boats years ago. He said he and his wife, Cindy, decided they didn't need to own another boat themselves but that they "had one more boat in us." So in 2022, a several-month quest began "to find the next boat," Grimm said. He had three goals. One was to find a boat associated with the Lake Erie islands, and another was to find a boat that had significant historic value. "So we were likely looking for an antique boat," Grimm said. The third goal was that a museum had to be interested in the restoration. Grimm's search included checking possibilities in Burlington, Vermont; Tallahassee, Florida and the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, although the search finally culminated closer to home, at Jockett's Marina in Toledo. There, Grimm located a 24-foot Lyman custom runabout boat, built in 1939. And when Grimm dug into the boat's history, he found that it was owned by Oscar Lay, vice president of Lay Brothers Fisheries. According to the Sandusky History blog maintained by Sandusky Library, Lay Brothers Fisheries was a family business founded in Sandusky in 1870. By the 1950s, the business had run into hard times, pressed by competition from Canada and a decline in the fish population, and the business closed in 1961. But in the 1930s, business at Lay Brothers Fisheries was booming. According to a history blog entry, the company had about 30 fishing boats in that decade. It's believed the Lay family mostly used the Gull for recreation, Grimm said, although it may have been used to supply fishing boats. As it was powered by twin engines and could run at 35 mph, it could have been used for rescues as well, he said. "There's not a lot of prewar Lymans left due to attrition," Davis said, referring to boats built before the Second World War. He said the project that he and Zimmerman are carrying out aims to provide the Sandusky Maritime Museum with a "museum quality restoration." That means that as much as possible, the boat will be restored using 1939 methods. Although Lyman eventually simplified its boat designs, prewar Lymans were custom built and the process of restoring the Gull will be a lot of work. The boat has 22 wooden planks per side, for example, and they are held together by thousands of copper fasteners, each of which has to be put in by hand. Although Davis, 60, has decades of expertise working on wooden boats, some of the work on the Gull is specialized and must be done by others. For example, the engines for the Gull are being rebuilt in New Jersey. Davis, who grew up in Huron and had Grimm as one of his teachers, began working on wooden boats in the 1970s, when Davis' father finally agreed to buy a boat after pleas from Davis and his brother. The boat was a Lyman. "It needed a lot of work. We started working on it," said Davis, who discovered in the process that he loves wooden boats. Other projects Grimm's wooden boat adventures include restoring a wreck he found behind one of Davis' barns. "This boat was really destined for the burn pile," Grimm said. Declaring, "My wife hates the boat," Davis gave it to Cindy, Grimm's wife, who in turn gave it to Grimm on his 66th birthday with the understanding it would be restored. The boat, now named the Miss Cindy Lynn after Grimm's wife, won a gold award last summer at the Antique Classic Boat Show in Bay Harbor, Michigan. "We were so surprised, but very pleased, that the judges at that level recognized the craftsmanship that went into the restoration," Grimm said. A search for "Miss Cindy Lynn Lyman" at YouTube can be used to pull up a video, about six minutes long, on the restoration of the boat, a 1954 18-foot Lyman Islander. As wooden boats have been replaced by fiberglass over the years, Classic Marine has continued to provide restoration of the area's remaining wooden boats, Davis said. "Fifty years ago, almost every marina had a boat carpenter," Davis said. "It gradually went away." The remaining wooden boats require plenty of love. "Fiberglass doesn't rot," Davis observed. "Wood is a biodegradable product. Wood boats have always been high maintenance." But despite the work they need, wood boats have advantages, he said. "A wooden boat is a floating sculpture. It's very functional art," he said. A boat made of wood also provides a "Cadillac ride," because the flexible materials absorb motion, providing a smoother ride, Davis said. "A glass boat is stiff and it pounds," he said.