Treasure Coast Sailing Adventures

The flagship is on the hard. Captain Fred and Jamie Newhart laid the schooner Lily up in the summer of 2022 for a major rebuild, hold Coast Guard-approved plans to build a new Lily under the same official number, and as of September 2026 are seeking the financing to do it.

She is worth the wait. Lily is a wooden scow schooner, a flat-bottomed, blunt-bowed sailing barge of the kind that carried hay and lumber into shallow Northeastern rivers before the 1930s, drawing two and a half feet and certified for thirteen tons of cargo. Rick Brown built her in the 1970s in answer to the oil embargo, and as Lily of Tisbury she hauled lumber, vehicles and even other boats between Martha’s Vineyard, Boston and Maine from 1978 to 1985, a working cargo boat under sail in the United States within living memory. Fred Newhart found her in 1999 after ten years on the hard, helped restore her, and has been chartering her from Stuart since 2010.

What sails now are two smaller classics. Resolute is a Friendship sloop, 42 feet overall and launched in 1976, one of at least four fiberglass boats Jarvis Newman took from the mould of the famous Dictator, restored by Captain Fred and fitted with a diesel; she carries twelve from Sunset Bay Marina and does the daily seat sails, a morning sail, an afternoon sail and a sunset sail of a little under two hours on the St. Lucie estuary among the river dolphins. Margot is a Marshall 22 catboat that draws a foot and a half with the board up, takes six on private charters from Shepard Park and sometimes Sunset Bay Marina, and is the boat whose tiller guests most often get handed. Both together take eighteen.