The future we are building depends on restoring Shearwater, a 1929 schooner of national historic significance and a rare surviving vessel from New York Harbor’s maritime past.
Her 100-year restoration will make it possible for future generations to experience history directly. This is a major undertaking that will require time, craftsmanship, and significant financial investment.
While restoration moves forward, public programming begins aboard our sister ship, Clipper City, creating opportunities to share our mission, welcome new audiences, and build the community that will carry this work.
Shearwater: An American Legend.
Launched in 1929, Shearwater is a rare surviving wooden schooner from an American shipbuilding tradition that married beauty, speed, and seaworthiness. Designed by Theodore D. Wells and built by Rice Brothers in Boothbay, Maine, she was part of a lineage inspired by the great North Atlantic fishing craft, a tradition admired for performance in hard weather as much as for elegance. Her construction reflects a level of material skill and handwork that is increasingly difficult to sustain.
Shearwater has moved through the most consequential chapters of modern American life. Renamed Tamarit before World War II, she was requisitioned for US Coast Guard service and patrolled the Atlantic coast during the U-Boat threat, taking fire while on patrol in the North Atlantic. Later, she served the University of Pennsylvania as a research vessel equipped for physiological and underwater medicine studies, and in the late 1970s she completed a nearly 3-year circumnavigation. On September 11, 2001, while berthed roughly 200 yards from the World Trade Center, she sustained damage from falling debris and was taken safely across the Hudson by her captain and crew. In the years since, she has sailed from lower Manhattan as a passenger carrying schooner, carrying this layered history into public life.
Shearwater is more than a hull. She carries American craft and working harbor life, along with a history shaped by wartime service, scientific use, and public memory. Her rig and structure, and the care they require, preserve forms of seamanship and shipwright knowledge that survive only through practice, teaching, and person-to-person transmission.
Buoyant’s goal is to revitalize Shearwater through a phased, historically accurate restoration culminating in her 2029 Centennial. This is not a one-time repair project. It is the renewal of a working cultural asset with long term public purpose.