VAYU ex-DORIS

There’s not much of this yacht that’s salvageable, but that’s not unusual among many restorations. Besides very deep pockets, one would need vision to imagine what she could become—or to visualize what she was originally. Brian Amble of California had the vision, but not the wealth. But he did acquire her and make a start. As the largest all-wood sailing yacht ever built by Herreshoff, and as a genuine, topsail-carrying sloop (or cutter, if you will), VAYU (or more properly, DORIS, the yacht’s original name), fully restored, would be a show-stopper. And we think she’d be a race-winner as well. Maynard remembers going aboard back in the 1950s when Jim Mercanti owned her as a liveaboard in Groton, Connecticut. On going below, the joinery struck him as simply spectacular—and it could be again, by using the same Herreshoff drawings that built her, now housed at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech­nology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.