The Huntington-born sailboat Perroquet lives on 90 years later

On a November day in 1956, a sleek wooden sailboat anchored in a cove south of Eaton’s Neck exploded.

Its owner, who was duck hunting nearby, tried in vain to put out the fire. The boat burned to the waterline.

Towed to a Huntington Harbor shipyard, the wreck settled into the mud. The next day, the owner’s son and 11-year-old grandson pried a model of a puffin, also called a sea parrot, off the stern, where it symbolized the boat’s name, Perroquet, the French word for parrot..

For almost any other boat, that would have been the end. But a new owner rebuilt her. It was Perroquet’s first crisis. It wouldn’t be the last.

The yacht — just shy of 47 feet long and 11 feet wide — has survived war, storms, epic cruises and races, government seizure and near-destruction by ship rot and shipworms.

How is it possible that a sailboat built in Huntington in 1939 is alive 87 years later, after six owners faced existential challenges and tragedies? Why is Perroquet — now in the Indian Ocean en route to the Caribbean — still sailing when others of its time only lasted a few decades?

That’s the mystery I set out to solve. 

The painting that sparked the mystery 

As a longtime Huntington resident, Ronald Prior, 84, often heard about Perroquet. "That boat was a big deal around here," he recalled.

So when he joined the Huntington Yacht Club six years ago, Prior said he was "horrified" to see a painting of Perroquet hanging in the men’s room, above the urinal. This year, he led a quiet but successful campaign to move it to the lobby.

The painting shows sailboats racing across a choppy sea, their spinnakers billowing. The green hull of one ship stands out.

A brass plaque nailed into the painting’s canvas identifies it as Perroquet and mentions Canada’s Arctic region, July 4, 1945, and a woman named Mabel Moore.

Nobody seemed to know the full story. That included me, even though I’d been a member of the club for years and on the board since 2025.

Why was the boat in Canada’s fog-shrouded, icebound Arctic region, roughly 1700 nautical miles from Huntington in 1945? Who was Mabel Moore?

The answers provided a glimpse of the world of amateur sailors who pour their sweat and money into restoring classic wooden vessels. The ships retain their allure, despite demanding constant maintenance and traveling at a fraction of the speed of powerboats.

Perroquet’s beginnings 

Perroquet’s story begins with Robert Hartwell Moore, who commissioned her with his insurance fortune.

In the late 1930s, Moore began making regular visits from his sprawling Halesite house down the hill to the shipyard owned by Norwegian immigrant Thomas Knutson. There, shipwrights from Knutson’s old country built Perroquet out of oak, spruce, teak and mahogany, under Moore’s supervision.

To design his 14th boat, Moore selected naval architect Olin Stephens. He had mentored Stephens and his brother Rod in sailing when they were teenagers. He towed their early design, Dorade, out to the starting point of a 1931 trans-Atlantic race.

With a crew that included Moore’s son Bucky, the young Americans won the race. On returning to New York, the winners got the same treatment accorded to the New York Knicks in June: a ticker-tape parade.

Two weeks after Perroquet glided down the Knutson shipyard rails, Moore raced her on a 65-mile overnight course from Target Rock off Lloyd Neck to the Townshend Ledge buoy off New Haven and back.

A rising northeast breeze set waves galloping southwestward along the full length of Long Island Sound. With the current flowing in the opposite direction, Everett Morris wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, it "kicked up a nasty slop for the smaller boats, some of which got discouraged" and dropped out.

Moore won by nearly 40 minutes.

A year later, Moore’s Perroquet completed a race from Bayside and around Block Island seven hours ahead of the closest competitor — "the biggest margin of victory in the history of the event," wrote The New York Times, describing Moore as "a notably keen sailor who knows how to play the tides and doesn’t mind driving his boat hard."

Moore learned boating in the waters off Massachusetts, circumnavigated Nova Scotia at age 15 in a 21-foot boat, worked on merchant ships and as an engineer on a World War I battleship.

"My whole life has been one of adventure, since I was 12," he later said.

Sailing the seas

I'm able to tell Moore’s part of the story because his grandson, Robert Hartwell Moore II of Charleston, South Carolina, responded to my inquiry with a trove of memorabilia — articles, books, family photos and his grandfather’s unpublished autobiographical note. I was also fortunate that archivist Karen Martin of the Huntington Historical Society discovered a 1974 oral history interview with Moore.

Five days after Moore won his first race on Perroquet, Germany invaded Poland. By the end of 1941, the United States was at war with Germany and Japan.

Like fellow private boat owners, Moore looked for ways to help the war effort.

Canada’s government had allowed the United States to build air bases to ferry planes to Britain and patrol the seas. One of the bases was on Baffin Island, at the head of Frobisher Bay, west of Greenland. The contours of the sea were poorly charted, posing a threat to navigation.

In the summer of 1945, as the war was nearing its end, Moore took Perroquet there on a weekslong journey — past Maine, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador — to help survey the water depths.

It was natural for his wife, Mabel, to be with him. She was Moore’s soulmate and an avid sailor who had retired after serving as chief clerk of the $7-billion AT&T pension fund for 14 years.

She pointed out that Moore had flown the flags of the Royal Nova Scotia Yacht Squadron, where he was an honorary member, and of the Cruising Club, where he would be elected a life member — but not Huntington Yacht Club, the only club the two shared.

On Independence Day, she wanted him to fly the Huntington club’s triangular flag, known as a burgee. And so he did.

Perfection and heartbreak  

Then came the 1956 explosion, a heartbreaking moment for Moore. He had fitted out Perroquet just the way he wanted.

"With every safety precaution his years of experience and skill in design could provide," wrote Alfred Stanford in Boats magazine, it was "a crushing one for Perroquet to end this way." Investigators never found the cause. Perroquet had a backup gasoline engine and any leaking fumes could have ignited from a spark — a common cause of boat explosions.

"Yeah, I remember going down there and it was unbelievable," recalled Moore’s grandson. "We expected to have Perroquet in the family forever and all of a sudden that happened."

A second, third and fourth life 

In telling the boat’s story, I expected it to begin and end with the Moores. But it is a richer tale.

Perroquet’s rescuer was Arthur Knutson, the son of the shipyard owner who originally built her. Knutson made changes and renamed her Black Fox.

In 1958, he sailed her in the Newport-to-Bermuda Race, with Robert H. Moore’s son, Robert S. Moore, at the helm.

One of Arthur’s 12 children is Peter Knutson, who operates Knutson Marine in Halesite. He recalls boarding the boat in Huntington for trips to Antigua and nearby Caribbean islands. "I grew up on that boat, not seeing land for 10 days, my mom cooking fish that had jumped onto the deck overnight for breakfast."

In the 1970s, Arthur Knutson donated Black Fox to a maritime school in Florida, Peter said, and the boat’s trail went dark. A Huntington sailor, Steve O’Reilly, pointed me to a 13-year-old listing on woodenboat.com that identified Perroquet’s  owners as Antonio and Diane Salguero, of Port Townsend, Washington. I emailed Salguero's  boat design company, and the rest of the boat’s story tumbled out.

Antonio Salguero told me he combed the Seattle waterfront in 1995 looking for a boat to rebuild when he spotted a sailboat’s bow jutting out of a boathouse in Seattle’s Lake Union neighborhood. The 28-year-old wanted to take on a challenge.

"I knew right away," he said in an interview. "Whoa, that's a classic boat."

Salguero soon learned that the boat’s owner was Luther "Bud" Foley, a Navy diver in his early 50s. He had replaced the name Black Fox with Hooyaa, after the Navy battle cry.

Part of Foley’s military service involved helping enforce laws against drug trafficking. Salguero didn’t know it, but the boat’s ownership had taken a sudden twist in the 1980s. Black Fox had been seized by the U.S. government on May 28, 1986, on suspicion of drug running, per Coast Guard records. The boat was forfeited to the government and later sold to Foley.

Salguero wanted the boat but couldn’t meet Foley’s $30,000 asking price. A year later, he said, Foley was willing to take $14,000.

On April 1, 1996, Salguero motored Hooyaa up to Port Townsend, at the northeast tip of the Olympic Peninsula.

After he hauled the yacht out of the water, "much of the oak backbone just cracked up when it dried out."

Over the next six years, Salguero rebuilt the boat under a shed at the "Funky Boatyard" in Port Townsend. He replaced the frame, timbers, beams and planking — and then gave up. He was recently divorced, had two sons and wanted to invest in buying land.

Rechristened as Perroquet  

The next owner, Franz Gusenbauer, an Austrian construction worker and motorcycle mechanic, saw the boat listed on eBay and bought her in 2003. 

In 2 1/2 years, Perroquet was floating again. Gusenbauer had the original name painted on the vessel — with Vienna listed as the home port — and began sailing her, Salguero recalled.

Gusenbauer explored the Atlantic coast with his wife and their son, but he was forced to sell Perroquet when he developed stomach cancer.

A young Italian radiographer happened to see the sale flyer at a wooden boat festival in Port Townsend. Andrea Gabrielli bought Perroquet in 2016 for 35,000 euros. 

After replacing planks and pumps and restoring the engine, Gabrielli took her down the West Coast to Baja California. Then he embarked on a 22-day, single-handed Pacific Ocean voyage to French Polynesia, running into a big storm and almost running out of water.

Gabrielli left Perroquet on a mooring in New Zealand and traveled home to Italy for a break, only to get stranded there during the COVID-19 pandemic. When Gabrielli got back to the boat nearly four years later, he found a worm boring a hole in the hull. "If I had gotten there one month later, I wouldn’t have had a boat."

After repairs, he headed first to Southeast Asia and then across the Indian Ocean.

In May, he had reached Rodrigues Island, a territory of the Republic of Mauritius.

He’s thinking of entering the boat in the annual Antigua Classic Yacht Regatta in April. It would be a return to Perroquet’s early days as a racer in Atlantic waters.

"It would be nice if the boat goes back home."