Sylph (pilot boat)
Pilot schooner Sylph No. 8., photograph by Nathaniel Stebbins. | |
| History | |
|---|---|
| United States | |
| Name | Sylph |
| Owner | A. Nash & Co., Joseph W. Colby |
| Operator | Joseph W. Colby |
| Builder | Nathaniel Porter Keen shipyard, North Weymouth, Massachusetts |
| Launched | September 14, 1878 |
| Out of service | June 01, 1901 |
| Fate | Sold |
| General characteristics | |
| Class & type | schooner |
| Tonnage | 61-tons TM |
| Length | 71 ft 5 in (21.77 m) |
| Beam | 21 ft 0 in (6.40 m) |
| Depth | 7 ft 8 in (2.34 m) |
| Propulsion | Sail |
The Sylph was a 19th-century pilot boat first built in 1834, by Whitmore & Holbrook for John Perkins Cushing as a Boston yacht and pilot-boat for merchant and ship owner Robert Bennet Forbes. She won the first recorded American yacht race in 1835. She was a pilot boat in the Boston Harbor in 1836 and 1837 and sold to the New York and Sandy Hook Pilots in October 1837. She was lost in winter of 1857 with all hands during a blizzard off Barnegat, New Jersey. The second Sylph was built in 1865 from a half-model by Dennison J. Lawlor. The third Sylph was built in 1878 at Nathaniel Porter Keen Shipyard on the Fore River in North Weymouth, Massachusetts for Boston Pilots. She was sold out of service in 1901, after 23 years of Boston pilot service.