About Us
The Boat
Here she be; peacefully at anchor, standing tall, awaiting your command. It's been a long, on-going saga .... getting this far .... worth every drop of sweat.
The construction of "Mass Transit 105" began in 1983 in Wall Street, of all places, on an unlikely landfill created by excavation for the foundation of the World Trade Center under whose shadows we worked in awe and gained motivation with each day’s progress. The actual site was just inside the seawall at the southwest corner of "South Cove" in Battery Park City Authority. There is no plaque. We were fortunate indeed to have been granted the temporary usage of such a unique, high profile and expensive chunk of real estate, (temporarily awaiting the ensuing development of BPCA), and not only for its convenience in close proximity to our dock and headquarters at the very souther tip of the island from which we sailed “Petrel,” our one boat at the time.all of which, under the eyes of so many, led us onward and helped to showcase the success of our humble beginnings ten years earlier and well received efforts for having effectively ntroduced public sailing a few short steps away from the Battery Park subway stop at the very southern tip of Manhattan.
Bring Sailing Back, Inc., was the name of our company back then, determined to to the City and their happily surprised, pavement trodding, subway riding citizenry at large. (We still like to think and brag we were the “start“ of the Green New Deal, where raw capitalism and increasingly monopolistic, economic growth was forced to make room for ecological sanity.) Back then, nobody in their right mind sailed recreationally in the harbor. Nobody wanted to. Least of all people with fine yachts. And "Petrel" was thatOur one boat at the time, a classic, 1938, 70 ft S&S ex-ocean racing yawl ,named after a sea bird known to fly farthest from land, with authentic What juxtapositioning. What a paradox.
as a franchise with the NYC Dept.of Parks and Recreation), to the subway riding, pavement trodding masses of NYC back in 1972. Her uncommon name was inspired by and befitting to a city permit which allowed us at the time, as sailing ferry boat, to carry passengers aboard our other boat, the 70 foot yawl, "Petrel," between Staten Island, Statue of Liberty and Manhattan. After nearly 30 years of sailing in NY Harbor and having sailed literally hundreds of thousands of passengers, we were finally outbid by a competitor and lost our franchise, one that we had created, with the city. 9/11/2001 brought further restrictions that ultimately brought us to Martha's Vineyard for another opportunity to finish what was started long before. In Massachusetts, home to long-time childhood memories,with planned sails around the Vineyard and the Elizabeth Islands, the boat and here name would stick.
She was custom designed by the late, renowned naval architect, Alan Gurney, to stringent American Bureau of Shipping standards and US Coast Guard rules and regulations demanded of vessels that would be used to carry passengers for hire in "exposed" waters of all oceans.
With such successful ocean racers as "Great Britain l and ll, consecutive winners of the earlier Whitbread Round the World yacht races, and then later with the maxi, "Windward Passage" (that continued to set records and remained competitive for an unprecedented 15 years), Gurney helped pioneer the current trend of larger, planing, surfing hulls, with revolutionary thinking of lighter but beamier boats with lower freeboard and shallower draft, canoe bodies with skeg keels and rudders and minimum wetted surface area. "Mass Transit 105" was Gurney's last and largest sailboat to be built.