SAVING SEQUOIA The Yacht of Presidents

Boat/US Magazine, May, 1999 by Ryck Lydecker

Despite the exceptionally dark night, the channel ahead Looked clear to Capt. Giles Kelly but the radar scope didn't agree. A line showed on the screen, moving right across Clear Creek channel from Galveston Bay, about 100 yards ahead of the presidential yacht Sequoia.

In unfamiliar waters, with 104 feet of yachting elegance and years of presidential history under his command, Kelly would take no chances, especially with a candlelight dinner party of visiting Houston area dignitaries and supporters on board in the main saloon.

Even with binoculars, Kelly could make out nothing so he finally gave the order to switch on the searchlight. And there, dead ahead and on a collision course with Sequoia, was -- a mother duck and six ducklings, paddling double-time to get across the channel.

"Fortunately, our passengers back aft were never aware of the danger that night," says Kelly, tongue firmly in cheek. "We got a good laugh out of it later but there really were some tense moments in the pilothouse."

This anecdote and others collected from former Navy commanders and crew will appear in a book in the not-too-distant future. That's because Kelly is in the process of writing a history of the 1925 Trumpy that served as a floating White House for presidents for 44 years before Jimmy Carter had her auctioned off in 1977.

Kelly, a BOAT/U.S. member, knows his subject well. He commanded Sequoia on an eight-month, 6,000-mile "comeback" tour of the eastern U.S. in 1984. And while the then-owners, the Presidential Yacht Trust, failed to raise the money to return her to presidential duty, Sequoia has been in and out of Kelly's life ever since. Today he is embarked on a second "voyage" -- this time in corporate boardrooms as well as in the wheel house -- to save the yacht that served eight presidents, entertained visiting heads of state and witnessed history in the making.

"Sequoia is such an important piece of American history that she deserves to be saved," says Kelly who is on the board of the Sequoia Presidential Yacht Foundation, formed in January to preserve the vessel as Washington, DC's next national monument.

Sequoia currently is being leased to the foundation which hopes to write a successful chapter in her long and complicated history since sailing into private hands 22 years ago.

SET ADRIFT

Sequoia fetched a mere $270,000 at auction in 1977, For the next seven years she floated through private hands in Rhode Island, South Carolina and Florida. Each owner hoped to turn her into a money-maker as a prestigious charter yacht or a floating museum piece. But each failed to realize the financial commitment a vessel like this requires, according to Ben J. Brown, president of the new foundation which hopes to raise up to $8 million to endow Sequoia.

"Everybody thought they could make tons of money with her," says Brown, a retired Air Force officer who sailed aboard Sequoia as a military aide during the Johnson presidency. "But there is no earthly way she could pay for herself.

"Sequoia does need to be used on a limited basis to stretch her wood and keep her machinery functional," Brown says. "But the charter market alone can't support the amount of maintenance and care a 74-year-old wooden vessel like this requires."

Private attempts to exploit Sequoia ended in 1981 when a group of influential Washingtonians formed the nonprofit Presidential Yacht Trust. The trust embarked on a large-scale fund-raising effort with the aim of restoring Sequoia -- almost a derelict by then, said Kelly -- and donating her back to the federal government for presidential service once again.

Then-president Reagan wasn't interested in a presidential yacht, though, and the Navy wanted no part of it. So to generate public support as well as some of the $10 million it pledged to raise, the Trust sent Sequoia on tour.

On April 1, 1984 -- seven years to the day after the Carter White House announced its intention to dispose of her -- "America's Yacht" left on her 100-city cruise. In command was Kelly, then an adjunct professor of nautical science at American University in Washington, DC.

A U.S. Merchant Marine Academy graduate, World War II Navy veteran and retired Naval Reserve officer, Kelly held himself and his eight-member crew to military standards and operated Sequoia just as Navy crews would have when she was in the service of a president.

"The ship was open for free public tours at every stop and the people loved her," Kelly reports. "Visitors came aboard in awe, speaking in hushed tones almost as if they were visiting a famous shrine or historic chapel. The most common question we got was, 'Why would the government want to get rid of her?'"

Heartened by the public response during the tour, the Trust sent Sequoia to a shipyard for a total restoration, but it eventually defaulted on the $3.2 million bill. In 1990, a federal judge ordered Sequoia to be auctioned off to pay the debt hut when no one else bid, the yard, Norshipco, bought her for $50,000.

In the years since, Kelly visited his "old girl" periodically at her Norfolk, VA, berth and in early 1999, he and Brown, along with Washington business executives William R. Codus and James R. Teele, formed the Sequoia Presidential Yacht Foundation. There is a big difference between the foundation's goal and the former effort, according to Teele who is development director.