Oyster Bay sloop being relaunched

After a six-month restoration, Christeen, North America’s oldest oyster sloop, will be relaunched Saturday morning into Oyster Bay.

The 32-foot shellfish-harvesting craft, built in Glenwood Landing in 1883, is scheduled to slide off a trailer into Oyster Bay at Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Park at 10 a.m.

The restoration came 11 years after the sloop’s last major overhaul. A section of the keel -- the lowest timber running the length of the hull -- and the last original piece of its hull had rotted along with the white pine mast.

Dave Waldo, executive director of the WaterFront Center, the nonprofit maritime education organization that owns the craft, said workers “were able to accomplish some additional items that would have needed our attention five years from now because we had the opportunity and the time to do it.”

The additional work included removing some hull planks to refasten them more securely, stripping all of the paint to smooth the hull and then repainting it, replacing the marine toilet, repairing the engine, replacing the wheelhouse, overhauling the gearing for the rudder, and repairing the bowsprit.

The work was done by shipwright Josh Herman and several other paid workers aided by about 20 volunteers.

Waldo said the WaterFront Center is still trying to raise the final $10,000 of its $260,000 fundraising goal for the project and creation of an endowment to maintain the sloop.

“She shouldn’t have to get pulled out of the water for any major repairs for a long time, numerous decades,” he said.