ESCAPE HIGH SEAS
The Return of PILAR
Ernest Hemingway’s LEGENDARY fishing boat has been reborn in the new Wheeler 38 By Howard Walker
W
es Wheeler remembers the call. It was Andy Garcia on the phone. The Untouchables star was making a movie about Ernest Hemingway and his longtime fishing captain, Gregorio Fuentes. Garcia needed to find a replica of Papa Hemingway’s beloved boat, Pilar, and was looking for suggestions. Wheeler is the great-grandson of the Wheeler Shipyard founder. Back in 1934, Hemingway took delivery of a fresh Wheeler 38 Playmate from the Brooklyn yard, paying the then-princely sum of $7,495 for the black-hulled beauty. Christening it Pilar, the nickname of his second wife, Pauline, Hemingway owned the boat for 30 years, chasing big-game fish around the Caribbean and writing most of The Old Man and the Sea from its cockpit while docked in Havana. Alas, nothing came of the movie, which was to have starred Anthony Hopkins as
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Hemingway, with Garcia playing Fuentes. But it did rekindle a dream for Wes Wheeler. “I decided I wanted to bring Pilar back to life and build a brand-new version using the newest technologies,” he tells me during this year’s Palm Beach International Boat Show. Doing so would be a challenge. His greatgrandfather’s company had shuttered in 1965 after building more than 3,500 boats. But Wheeler knew every inch of Pilar after a visit to Havana with Hemingway’s niece, Hilary Hemingway, in 2012. She had co-written the Hemingway & Fuentes movie script with Garcia and had asked Wheeler to fly down and measure the original Pilar in case a movie replica had to be built. Fast-forward to March of this year and Wheeler is giving me a tour of his brand-new Wheeler 38, which is rocking gently at the dock. It’s hull #1, but he hopes to build more for any classic-
boat enthusiasts with around $1.3 million to spare. Legend, as the new boat is called, is a body-double of Hemingway’s beloved fishing boat; everything above the waterline is a perfect copy, based on Wheeler’s exacting measurements from the Cuba trip and historic documents kept by his great-grandfather. Below the waterline, however, her hull has been modified to run fast, at speeds up to 34 mph—more than twice what Pilar could achieve—and include the kind of features Papa Hemingway could only dream about. In place of a single 70-horsepower Chrysler gas motor, Legend features twin 370-hp Yanmar diesels, with a super-quiet Cummins Onan generator to run the air conditioning and a SeaKeeper gyro stabilizer to tame any rock and roll. Rather than investing in a new boatyard, Wheeler turned to the wooden boat artisans at
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