The purse seiner St. Teresa recently left Snow & Co. with a new mast, boom and A-frame after being in the Seattle, Wash., boatyard for a relatively short period of time for this type of modification.

“The boat was here four weeks,” said Snow & Co’s owner Brett Snow. “Normally it would be two and a half to three months.”

The work started when Snow & Co. met the boat earlier in the year in Bellingham, Wash., scanned the St. Teresa and using Point Cloud software, designed the mast, boom and A-frame.   When the St. Teresa finished squid fishing in Oregon and arrived in Seattle, work was ready to commence.

Once the renovation was completed, the owner spent a week and a half putting wire rigging on the boat before the St. Teresa left in mid-July to go purse seining in southeast Alaska.

“What we like about doing the scan is it allows us to do a lot of work on site without the boat being here,” said Snow. Scanning doesn’t reduce much of the overall time, but it does save shipyard time for the vessel.

This is the first time Snow & Co. has scanned for a mast, boom and A-frame, “but we’ve done it a lot for wheelhouses and large conversion projects,” said Snow.

It’s the same process for a wheelhouse conversion. The boat is scanned, and then Snow & Co. designs and builds a wheelhouse.

“We design it to fit perfectly, so it doesn’t have to be in the shipyard a long time,” said Snow.

Wheelhouse windows are notoriously difficult to obtain, but Snow’s method allows the windows to be designed into the wheelhouse and ordered before work even starts on building the wheelhouse.

Currently, Snow & Co. is outfitting the Western Flyer, built in 1937 as a sardine carrier.   The ship became an icon of American literature when author John Steinbeck was aboard her in the Sea of Cortez in 1940 and wrote “The Log From The Sea of Cortez,” published in 1951.

The Western Flyer sank a couple of times - one time she was down for six months - and later was restored by the Port Townsend Shipwrights Co-op in Port Townsend, Wash.  Snow & Co. will be installing a new engine, generators, tank, mast, rig,  and electrical systems.

“It will be here until the end of the year,” said Snow.