F0R WHOM THE BOAT CALLS

A replica of Hemingway’s fishing boat Pilar has put to sea and will soon enter line production, bringing a legend back to life

- BRUNO CIANCI

‘Family means a lot to me and this boat brings back to life what my ancestors did.’ Wes Wheeler, New York born in 1956 and now a leading manager in the pharmaceutical industry is talking about the passion behind his latest entrepreneurial venture: to build and market a boat based on the Playmate 38, a very successful motorboat produced in the 1930s by the shipyard founded by Howard E Wheeler, one of Wes’ ancestors. Specifically, the boat in question is a modern reinterpretation of the legendary Pilar, the fishing boat bought in 1934 by Ernest Hemingway. The Pulitzer and Nobel Prize laureate was famously a great fishing enthusiast, and particularly active between Key West, the Bimini archipelago and Cuba.

A TRENDSETTER

Pilar was a particularly innovative boat. It is believed to have had the very first flybridge equipped with a wheelhouse and the first outriggers, features now standard on all such boats. Not only did Pilar outperform most of the peers, but in the 30 years the writer owned her, she survived four hurricanes, as much testimony to the solidity of build as to the courage and determination of her owner. Pilar was the first known boat capable of bringing a perfectly intact giant tuna to Bimini, thanks also to the fishing techniques introduced by the writer, which included the most rapid possible hoisting of fish on board, to stop predators eating the catch, a problem so tragically played out in Old Man and the Sea.