Truly Resurgent
Lauren Tolla was having trouble processing what she was seeing. And feeling. And smelling.
It was October 2021, and her husband, Tom, had persuaded her to go check out a boat that he had seen advertised for sale on Facebook Marketplace. They’d driven from their home in Guilford, Connecticut, up to New London, where it had rained the day before. The name of the 1984 Nauset 35 Downeast was Seahorse. Clearly, it had been ridden hard and put away wet.
“It was dripping,” says Tom, who was in his late 50s at the time. “I was looking at it and trying to stay positive.” Lauren, who was in her early 60s, looked all around the boat’s interior. She then looked at Tom and said, “Do you think we can do this?”
Tom assured her, “We can do this.”
“What are you going to do?” the owner of Seahorse asked.
Tom replied, “We’re going to make this new again.”
So began the three-year rebuild of the boat that’s now rechristened Resurgence, which the husband-and-wife team managed to make like new with their own hands, and without destroying their marriage. They relaunched her this past July—just in time for their 30-year wedding anniversary—and expect to enjoy years of cruising with their four adult children and eight grandchildren.
“We have a long channel to get out to Long Island Sound. They all want to steer and look for the birds and the fish. That was the goal, to create a family bonding experience,” Tom says. “We couldn’t financially have a boat like this, with this much space and that looks like it does, if it was new. We couldn’t buy a boat like that, so we had to make it.”
When the couple bought the Nauset it was in rough condition.
Courtesy of the Tolla's
Finding the Positive
The Tollas had three main things going for them. First, Tom is a homebuilder and contractor with an enclosed shop, a ton of tools and a lot of know-how. Second, Lauren is a nurse who’s not afraid of dirt or blood. Third is their shared love of boating, which they’ve been doing together, and with their family, for the past quarter century.
“We always had center console Grady-White boats,” Tom says. “We started with a 19-footer, then we had a 27. After that we had a 30-foot Grady. But just prior to 2019 we sold that, and suddenly we were boatless.”
“I was depressed,” Lauren adds. “I love the water.”
Some friends had Downeast boats, and the couple had always loved the styling of those vessels. That’s what sent Tom into a hunt for an affordable fixer-upper. How much of a fixer-upper this boat would become, however, surprised the couple after they got it home. It just barely squeezed through the overhead door in Tom’s shop, by about 3 inches. Then, they started taking it apart.
“We were like, Oh my God, this thing is worse than we thought,” Tom says.
Originally, the boat was built in Orleans, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. Its fiberglass hull is a Bruno Stillman design. “It was built for a fishing charter in 1984,” Tom says. “Sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s, it sold to the owner we bought it from. He then repowered it.”
The couple bought the boat for $25,000, sold the engine and components for $10,000, and figured they had a $15,000 investment they could put money into, little by little, until it was like-new. “It was dirty and moldy. The wood on the backside was all just washed out,” Lauren says. “I called it a tub. We had bought a tub.”
Everywhere they turned, they found more saturation and mold. They eventually realized they had to remove all the coring, and that’s when the project became stimulating.
“For me, it was like doing a project for a client who bought a late 19th-century house and wanted it restored,” Tom says. “After we bought it, someone told us how to work with products that were unfamiliar to us—fiberglass and coring and Divinycell and Coosa and all these cool composites that we can make really amazing things with. It got to be really interesting. We rebuilt the entire roof. We extended the sides of the deckhouse to reconfigure the windows and give it a little style.”
A source that provided tremendous help, Tom says, was the online Downeast Boat Forum. No matter what the couple needed to learn, they could find friendly people there to tap for advice. “Some people are retired Downeast Maine boatbuilders,” he says. “You get a ton of information from them. If you have a creative ability and can work with your hands, you can make this type of project happen. And it helps to have the space to do it all in.”
Tom spent many long days and nights working on the boat.
Courtesy of the Tolla's
Making It Happen
There were days that tested their abilities, to be sure. For starters, Tom and Lauren had never done any fiberglass work. “But we had a gentleman we found who told us what to do,” Tom says. “We bought 100 gallons of resin, and rolls of cloth.”
Some nights, they would be out in the workshop until midnight. Their friends who were enjoying retirement thought they were nuts. And yes, some days tried their patience with each other.
“I started calling myself the boat bitch,” Lauren says with a laugh. “But that was only at the tail end of the project. For the most part, we were really hand-in-hand. I’d say, ‘What can I do to help, Tom? Show me how to do it. I can do it.’”
Their biggest challenge, the Tollas say, was putting in the new engine—a 480-hp Cummins QSB5.9 diesel—along with the new gear, propeller shaft and propeller.
“Thank God, someone I met—again, a person from that Downeast Boat Forum—lives two towns over from me,” Tom says. “He’s a mechanical engineer. I would always bounce things off of him.”
The first time the couple cranked up the Cummins, even they were surprised to hear the big iron roar. “I was like, oh my God, it works!” Tom says.
They also used The Hull Truth online forum to find a marine electrician who lived within 15 miles of their shop. “He said he could offer some assistance if we had a problem with wiring the boat.” Tom says “He’s a great guy. He came to our shop and checked it out.”
Prepping the hull for new paint.
Courtesy of the Tolla's
One of the ways this electrician helped the couple was by teaching them how to design their electrical system to comply with American Boat & Yacht Council standards. Tom and Lauren followed the electrician’s written instructions for the installation.
“And if Tom couldn’t figure it out, he’d go on YouTube,” Lauren says. “I learned a lot that way too, including how to patch a hole in the hull.”
When they look back on the refit project, the couple is amazed that they figured out how to fabricate the stainless-steel railings, handle the fairing and painting, and more.
“Lauren and I have touched every single one of the tens of thousands of miscellaneous parts that are in this boat,” Tom says. “We have screwed them in or fastened them or bolted them down or done something with them. Not in my wildest dreams did I think there were that many parts in a boat.”
They no longer call Resurgence a Nauset. They’ve renamed the “brand” a T&L Boatworks Custom 35. With the boat now happily in the water, there’s a photo hanging in their shop of the night before it got taken to the marina. Resurgent is in the picture, on a trailer they built, just outside the shop door, with the inside of the shop empty.
“After the boat was finished, driving away from the shop gave me tears,” Lauren says. “It was so much of our life for three years.”
She remembers turning to Tom in that moment and saying, “So, what are we going to do now?”
He assured her, “We’re going to use it.”
This article was originally published in the November 2024 issue.
