Does anybody know whatever happened to the "Pamela Deare."

[artemis]

What a shame to learn of her demise. I take it then that the owner installed an "antique" Atlas smelly long-chain hydrocarbon in her from the outset because somebody told him she was over 40' and couldn't operate under steam without a USCG licensed operator? What does 40' "over the sheer" mean, anyway? I would have expected "40'" would mean 40' between perpendiculars, correct?

The "Forty Foot Rule" determined the minimum length of a vessel which had to pass USCG inspection on the design and construction of the steam plant. The 40' was measured (based on an old admeasurement scheme) as being the distance from the inside of the stem to the centerline of the rudder shaft - less than 40' meant you were free of inspection requirements. This rule stopped many an early hobby steamboater. I got to participate in this "fun with the Coast Guard" game when I was adult engineering advisor aboard Oceanid in the 1970s. When Dick Fortier started construction of Pamela Deare, he thought he could get by with the "between perpendiculars" rule, but it had changed either just before, or during (not sure of the story at this point) the building. The modification made the "new" length measurement from the outside of the stem to the outside of the stern as measured at the sheer not including any "guards". Dick thought he could get fancy and slide by under the old rule. Got struck down by government bureaucracy. All this changed in the late 1980s when new changes were made and the code for power plant design/inspection to be required for boats carrying passengers for hire and/or over somewhere around 75 feet as measured at the sheer. If you need info, talk to George King III with Sabino in the New England area. He was instrumental in getting the change (Thanks a lot George ).

[Bob Cleek]

I've done a bit of "fun with the Coasties" myself back when I was documenting vessels in the yacht brokerage business years ago. What you're describing is even more confusing. So this fellow who built Pamela Deare actually built her longer than 40'. Darn, I kept scratching my head looking at the elevation drawing in "Modern Steam Launches..." and trying to figure out how they'd fit all that in 40'. Makes sense now, they didn't. Durham's magazine is a treasure, but this isn't the first time it's been dead wrong on a measurement. I loved the lines of the "Steam Launch No. 4" built at Mare Island, an Eckhart design, IIRC. I had a heck of a time trying to find a copy of the "1870 Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Naval Architects" or whatever it was but damned if it wasn't on line, scanned by some university or the like... except that they didn't fold out the back pages in the appendix before they scanned them, so the scan just shows folded pages... no lines! Nevertheless, the text of the report, which deals with propeller design theory more than anything else, lays out the measurements of the vessel and the spacing of the buttocks and waterlines, so it's possible to develop a table of offsets if one needed to. In the case of that vessel, Durham's text was off by several feet. The vessel was actually lengthened on the lofting floor and the published lines taken off after construction.

Anyway... I digress. It's late.