America’s premier yacht builder and designer John Trumpy combined elegance and technology in a career that spanned six decades, custom building yachts for E.F. Hutton, F.F. Christie and James L. Knight..
Less than a 60 of the 448 Trumpy yachts built from 1910 to 1973 remain. One South Florida company has devoted the last 25 years dedicated to preservation and restoration of these maritime treasures. Since 1986, Moores Marine of Riviera Beach, FL., has restored more than 20 Trumpy yachts that remain.
To celebrate its 25th year in a unique business - not only specializing in wooden boats but antique and classic ones at that - Moores Marine will be racing two Trumpy yachts from different periods, the 1939 Washingtonian against the 1947 Aurora II.
"I always wanted to know which of these designs would prevail, the pre-War Trumpy or the more modern design. I hate to bet against myself, but I think Washingtonian is faster," said Jim Moores, owner of Aurora II and founder of Moores Marine.
At 4 p.m. Sunday, March 27, the two wooden yachts will compete in the Intracoastal Waterway off Peanut Island.
The race may be viewed at the Blue Heron bridge in Riviera Beach or at Kelsey Park in Lake Park. These yachts only go 9 to 11 knots, about 11 to 14 miles an hour, so it will be hard to miss them going past.
The most famous Trumpy yacht of all is the 102’ presidential yacht Sequoia. Trumpy yachts were custom built for the most notable families of the gilded age such as duPonts, Cadwalders and Cudahys.
In 1916 James Deering commissioned a Trumpy yacht for his winter estate, Vizcaya, in Miami. The 80-foot Nepenthe, which means forgetfulness of sorrow, included a mahogany dining table for 12, and monogrammed French crystal, and silver-rimmed English china specially commissioned for the yacht.
Both Washingtonian and Aurora II are in the houseboat style, 61 feet and have 471 GM diesel engines.
But they have as many differences. The prewar "Washingtonian was" built as "Halaia" for A.J. Drexel Paul, a member of the banking family that owned Drexel Burnham Lambert, once the fifth largest investment bank in the U.S.
She was built to pierce through the water, with a plumb bow and narrow hull. The Aurora II was changed to more modern styling and uses combination of both piercing and displacement through the water.
The Aurora II was the second of John Trumpy’s "showboats" that he built for himself to demonstrate his skill as a yacht designer and builder.
Trumpy named all of his personal boats Aurora, after the Greek goddess of the dawn. There were six in all before the great yacht designer decided to shutter his yacht yard in Annapolis, Md. in 1972.
Legend has it that John Trumpy gathered all of his yacht plans, took them to the center of his boatyard, and lit them on fire. He was determined no one else would build Trumpy yachts from his plans.
The race committee boat is the 75-foot Trumpy yacht, America, built in 1965 for James L. Knight, founder of the former Knight Ridder Corporation, which owned the Miami Herald among other newspaper holdings.
Moores Marine was founded in 1986 by Jim Moores, who built wooden boats in Maine before moving to South Florida.
"I found a lot people down here knew how to take apart a wooden boat but had trouble putting them back together," Moores said. "There was more work down here repairing wooden boats than building them in Maine so I moved. The weather helped, too."
Moores Marine currently is reconstructing the complete 93’ hull of the Honey Fitz, the eighth presidential yacht.
The yacht built in 1931 served five presidents from Truman to Nixon. She isn't a Trumpy but by another great American yacht builder, Defoe Shipbuilding in Bay City, Michigan.
In 2007, Moores Marine opened a second location in Beaufort, N.C. in 2007, the 18-acre Moores Marine Yacht Center, where the crew is currently restoring two Trumpy yachts, the Discovery and Chesapeake. 
The race, held last weekend, involved two laps for a total of six miles on the Intracoastal Waterway off Riviera Beach, Fla.
