About This Website

This website has been online since 2002. It has not changed much. That is intentional.

When Seaton Gras first put it online, the goal was simple: gather everything worth preserving about the Merry Maiden — her design history, her racing record, her voyages, the letters written home during those voyages, the people who sailed her — and make it available to anyone who wanted to find it. That goal has not changed either.

What's Here

The site covers eight decades in the life of a single boat. It begins before Seaton owned her — with Irving Pratt racing on Long Island Sound in the late 1940s, with Mr. Maguire sailing the Great Lakes through the 1960s, with Ranulf Gras's family circumnavigation (1969–1975) — and continues forward through Seaton's own seven-year cruise from Salem to Seattle by way of Australia, through restoration, and into the sailing seasons of the 2020s.

Some of what's here is rare. The letters home are primary-source documents written at sea or in port during the Pacific crossing years — 1977, 1979, 1980. They were written to family, not for publication, and they read that way. The research pages draw on the Mystic Seaport Rosenfeld Collection and the Detroit Yacht Club's archives. The Palmer Scott Boat Yard page documents a New Bedford yard that no longer exists.

Some of it is personal. Crew members, family photos, plans that were made and sometimes carried out and sometimes not. The planning pages — future cruises, itineraries, a proposal for auxiliary power — are included because they are part of the story too. A boat's history is not only where she went but where she almost went.

A Note on the Archive

Merry Maiden was built in 1946. Philip Rhodes designed her; the Palmer Scott yard in New Bedford built her. She has been sailed hard, cruised far, and restored more than once. She is still sailing.

The website is older than most people assume a personal sailing website can be. The earliest version went up in August 2002 — over 37 pages, including photo galleries, the letters, the design pages, and the crew history — and the Internet Archive has been capturing snapshots of it ever since. The core of what you read here today was written then, and the core of what was written then came from decades of logbooks, photographs, and memory.

The site was updated in 2026 — new layout, mobile-friendly, a proper photo album — but the content is the same content. The stories are the same stories. The boat is the same boat.

Finding Things

The navigation covers the main sections. If you are looking for something specific:

To get in touch: Contact.