Deana Mitchell/Staff Art Wolfe and Marilee Ives stand in the galley of the Iva W., a Chesapeake Bay buyboat that they have spent six years renovating. Deana Mitchell/Staff Marilee Ives, left, chats with a group of passersby outside the Iva W., which is docked in Everglades City. She and Art Wolfe renovated the flat-bottomed, spruce heart pine freighter; it now is a charter boat with three air-conditioned staterooms for guests. Submitted photo The original owner of the Iva W. was Captain Johnny Ward, who named the boat after his wife. He purchased the boat in 1929 in Deltavilla, Va. Deana Mitchell/Staff The newly rennovated Iva W. at its seasonal home base in Everglades City. The Iva W. is now available for charter. Deana Mitchell/Staff This is a picture of the Iva W. before Art Wolfe purchased her and he and his companion, Marilee Ives, began their six-year renovation project.

The Iva W. became the answer to a couple's dreams

By ELIZABETH WENDT-KELLAR, ehwendt@naplesnews.com
March 31, 2005

People say it all the time.

They say it when they've just whittled their way through paying a stack of bills. They say it after a long work week.

They're going to scrap it all, they say. They'll buy some big old boat, fix it up nice and live aboard it, escape from the world and all its daily demands. In the afternoons, they'll sit in the sunshine on the deck, watching the smaller boats buzz by. In the evenings, they'll light a lantern and listen to the fish splash in the dark water off the bow.

Art Wolfe said it. Then, he did it.

He and his companion, Marilee Ives, took an old boat, the Iva W., and overhauled it to live on it, full-time. The couple has recently begun to offer charters aboard the boat, too, from their seasonal home base in Everglades City. Laid-back, easy-going charters, Wolfe said, where guests can "go out and be quiet in the Everglades."

This is not the work that the Iva W. was intended to do. When the couple found the boat and decided to buy it, she was not a pleasure craft. The Iva W. had probably never known a single day of what most people regard as relaxation in her long life.

She was, and still is, a 60-foot "tank," Wolfe said. "One tough beast."

She's a Chesapeake Bay buyboat, a flat-bottomed, spruce heart pine freighter that carried crabs and oysters from the lower Chesapeake to market in Maryland. When she was working, the Iva W. could haul 60 tons — much more than she weighs — to market, her decks awash as she plowed heavily through the water.

"This boat then ran six days a week, 24 hours a day," Wolfe said.

Johnny Ward was always her captain on these trips. The boat had been built for him in 1929 in Deltaville, Va., when he was just 26 years old. He named his new buyboat after his young wife, Iva, and paid $2,800 for it, minus an engine. In October 1998, Wolfe paid the Ward family $25,000 for the boat — including an engine, the boat's 8,000-pound, 1930's-era Caterpillar D13000 diesel.

He also got a project that would absorb the next six years of his and Ives' life.

"Everybody has a dream, everybody has a path," Ives said of Wolfe and the Iva W. "And he was just so driven."

When he bought the Iva W., Wolfe was far past merely muttering about tossing in the towel on the workaday world. In 1996, he quit his 25-year teaching career as a business law professor; the job had simply stopped making sense, he explained. He thought about joining the Peace Corps, but ended up sailing from West Michigan to Guatemala with Ives aboard his 26-foot sailboat "Georgia." It was a great trip, but it was exhausting, Wolfe said. Georgia was too small, too light, to face some of the conditions they met. They were going to have to trade up.

Money was a concern. Whatever he spent to buy and refurbish the boat would be funneled from his retirement nest egg. He and Ives began combing the market for wooden boats — he wanted wooden for sure — and paid special attention to work boats.

"If your task is to get the most boat for your money," he said, "you've got to look at the commercial market."

Wolfe found the Iva W. in Deltaville, Va., the town where she had been made decades before. Johnny Ward had captained and worked the boat into his 80s, but now the Iva W. was docked behind his house. Sometimes, the aging captain would still go out to her and take a nap onboard.

Wolfe fell in love with the Iva W., and he fell in love with the Ward family. But he didn't want to be rash, either. He knew she was an old boat. He had grim visions of the Iva W. falling to pieces just as he and Ives got underway.

Wolfe took some time to entertain his second thoughts in a Deltaville bar, over a beer. There, he started talking to a stranger that had lived aboard a wooden ketch for 26 years. The coincidence struck Wolfe, he said, because "there aren't that many people that live on great big old wooden boats."

The stranger told Wolfe that he wouldn't have it any other way, and Wolfe took those words as a sign. He would buy the Iva W and convert it to a pleasure boat. He figured it would take six months.

"I said, you're absolutely crazy," Ives recalled. "This is a 10-year project."

Ives describes herself as a simple, practical person. How could she sign on to something as complicated and impractical as the Iva W. project? She had plenty of questions, she said, but remembers Wolfe's boundless passion for the Iva W. He put his future, time and money into it, and she was drawn in, too.

First, there was Noah and his ark. The Iva W. project is Art and his, she said.

"So many times in life you say you wish you do something," she said, "and you don't really do what you want to do."

By the time the renovation to the Iva W. was complete, Wolfe and Ives — who did all the work themselves, with a handful of help — had removed Capt. Johnny Ward's old wheelhouse and built a completely new, spacious saloon with galley where it once was. The wheelhouse was eventually returned to the boat, on top of the saloon; it is now their private quarters. There are three guest staterooms on the boat and five heads, or bathrooms.

It wasn't always easy or fun. Wolfe learned to ignore this inevitable question from strangers, friends and family members: "When are you going to be done with this thing?" He trained himself to answer: "Hopefully, never!" Ives, for her part, said she refused to be rushed.

"I really don't like to be stressed out," she said. "So I just said, I'll be done when I get it done."

It's done, officially. The Iva W. is a fully-functioning charter boat, for up to six guests. But everywhere, there are hints of her history.

On the boat's interior wooden walls are drawings of the old-styled Iva W., all done by the same Chesapeake Bay artist who had a particular affection for her. When she was buyboating, the Iva W. was loved and legendary, Wolfe said — she has an entire chapter devoted to her in a historical book about Chesapeake Bay buyboating.

Docked in Everglades City with fishing and crabbing boats as her nearest neighbors, the Iva W. is "real comfortable," Wolfe said. But she is still hungry for tough work, Ives said of the boat, something they learned when they rode out Hurricane Frances for 30 hours aboard the Iva W. on Florida's east coast last summer. The fiercer the storm grew, the harder the Iva W. battled it, Ives said.

The Iva W., like her owner, is still determined to go and do. That hasn't changed.

"It's like having another family member," Ives said of the boat. "They do have a life, and it becomes your life."