Restoration of my fathers old runabout.
October 2021
This is what I saw when I first saw the boat again after at least ten years. This is a 1969 MFG(Molded Fiberglass) Edinboro. My father had bought this boat back in the late 90’s and we had a blast with it back then. What’s funny is that at the time he was dealing with tax issues, so in order to keep the boat from being one of his assets, he titled and registered it in my name. More on that later.
In October of 2021, after moving back to New England the previous year, I took a ride to the families Cape house. After visiting with some relatives I asked my uncle if the boat still happened to be out back. He said it was, so I took a walk out back. after a little bit of searching I found it, full of water, plants, and all kinds of other things. The center window was broken, and the engine that was on it was obviously junk.
When my father had bought a bigger boat he had no need for the little runabout. So he gave it to my uncle who just put it out back and never got around to doing anything with it. So for over two decades the boat just got pushed further back into the woods and forgotten more and more.
When I found that it was still there, and knew that my uncle had never got around to registering it I made a plan to restore it. That plan was foiled by my wife who refused to let me drag the old, rotting carcass back to our house in Rhode Island.
Fast forward to 2024, I’m now divorced, and after a couple years of renting apartments, I’ve finally bought myself a house. It’s an older house, and it needs some work, but it has a driveway that will definitely fit an old boat. And since I no longer have anyone to tell me I can’t, I pick up an old jet ski trailer off Facebook marketplace, grease the axles, install lights, and head to the Cape on a Friday after work, determined to get my boat.
June 2024
Once all the plants and water was out I could see the floor was still intact. I also tossed the old motor into the woods.
Since the title was long gone, having the old registration numbers on the side was key.
It barely fit on the Jet ski trailer, which I didn’t know was a jet ski trailer when I bought it. The guy told me he carried a 14 foot flat bottom on it, so I figured I’d be fine.
The reason the water drained out was due to this hole punched in the hull during the move from one trailer to the next. the old trailer was rotted halfway into the ground at that point.
I brought it the shop I worked at to pressure wash it on the way home.
It cleaned up decently, and I took this picture after stopping at a liquor store, I figured I had earned a celebration for when I got home. Little did I know that just after I took this picture I would get stopped for having an expired tag. (I used one from work, and it was expired) Luckily the cop was cool, took the plate, gave me a ticket, and told me not to get caught again. I was in the next town over from home, and I had already driven two hours to get there. He may have actually been impressed that I had made it that far on expired tags, or maybe he wanted the raggedy old boat on the tiny trailer out of his town as quickly as possible.
Everything had to be cleaned out, very little was salvageable after all that time, but I had to know how far I really had to go.
The back section had to be removed so that I could access the transom, and I didn’t want to cut into the outer shell, so I opted to repair it from the inside.
It took a lot of wedging to break the glue between the cap and the shell.
I removed the back section of the floor, partly to access the transom, and also to see if I needed to replace the stringers.
What I didn’t know, that you can read in the brochure from earlier in this post, is that this boat has fiberglass stringers. So no need to rip the floor up any further.