SV Adventuress is a 133’ topsail schooner designed by Crowninshield and built by Rice Brothers in 1913.  She had a varied career, originally built to hunt (unsuccessfully) a bowhead whale for museum use, then sold to the San Francisco Bay Pilots.  After they retired her from commercial service, she wound up in the Pacific Northwest and became a sail training vessel, becoming registered as a National Historic Landmark along the way.   

Years of hard sailing took  their toll on her structure, and after much deliberation Haven Boatworks was selected to be the yard to undertake her restoration.  Over the course of the past decade we have replaced almost every piece of wood in her, timing the repairs such that she was Coast Guard cleared for sailing every summer.   

During those winters of work we replaced her stem, transom, forekeel, horn timber, rudder, every frame, every plank, and the deck and deck frame in its entirety, adding bronze diagonal strapping to better withstand the wracking strains of sailing.    The extent of the rebuild let us correct her sheer back to her original sweet lines.  We repowered her with a John Deere 6068, with a wet exhaust to get the old stack off the deck.  All masts, gaffs, and booms we made new from selected Douglas Fir.   Last winter we literally topped her off with new hollow Sitka Spruce topmasts, made from a tree we selected in Southeast Alaska.   

The combination of upgraded structure with weight reduction aloft allowed the Coast Guard to grant Adventuress the license to carry topsails with passengers, something she had been denied for decades.   We are extremely proud to have had a hand in taking a historic landmark nearing the end of its service life and setting her up for the next half century.  Adventuress, now 111 years old, looks just as she did back in 1913.