She was last seen in the early 1980's on the Miami River, Florida.
The last known photographs of the Pious Puffin appeared in
two Cayman Island tour brochures in 1979 and 1980.
If you know of the whereabouts of the Pious Puffin II, please contact
.
History of the Pious Puffin II
This history was begun by Ken and Lue Curtis in order to register the Puffin under the U.S. flag in 1976. Jon began this website in 2006 and since that time people have been sending more information and stories. The hope is not only to fill in more of the missing details of her past, but eventually to know what has become of her in the present. If you have more information or corrections, please let
know. (Unless specific permission has been granted to include these stories, the names have been edited out.)
The Pious Puffin II was a Lemsteraak yacht built in Amsterdam just after World War II by the Dutch shipbuilder, De Vries Lentsch. She was delivered near the end of that year to her new owners on the French Riviera.
The first owner was Captain Alec Stratford Cunningham-Reid of the British Royal Air Force and a Member of Parliament. However the purchase of the yacht was financed by his then mistress Doris Duke Cromwell, and was never completely paid for.
Russell Crenshaw, President of Walker & Crenshaw, International Public Relations, sailed the Pious Puffin to the new world and registered her in Panama. They were featured in Yachting Magazine's January 1957 issue.
While missing from the list of owners determined by the Curtises, a for-sale ad in 1959 gave a hint that there may have been another. Edwin Belcher of Belcher Oil Company was the first to bring the Puffin to Miami Florida.
In 1965 Josephine, widow of James V. Forrestal, Secretary of Defense and Navy, purchased the Pious Puffin sometime following this for sale ad which is a copy of the brochure created by the Belchers.
In 1967 Josephine Forrestal donated the Pious Puffin to Bob Jones College and it was featured in the dedication of the James V. Forrestal Library. But by August of 1968 the Puffin had been de-masted in an encounter with a bridge.
Mr. Siebert purchased the Pious Puffin II without masts, and began a major restoration. The U.S. did not permit boats with foreign built hulls to be used for charter, so Bill appealed to the U.S. Congress, since she had once been owned by the Secretary of the Navy.
The Curtises enjoyed having registered the Pious Puffin II in Dubuque Iowa. Technically, by lowering the hinged masts in St. Louis, she actually could have made it up the Mississippi to Dubuque. Unfortunately, they never got to sail her beyond Chesapeake Bay.
We still do not know who purchased the Puffin in 1978, except that it was a collection of individuals from Houston Texas. Reports of Puffin sightings anchored off the Holiday Inn on Grand Cayman filtered back for the next several years ... and then stopped.
Nothing further was known of the Puffin until this website went online in 2006. Since then we have learned that she was returned to the U.S. at the end of 1979, and may have been salvaged at a shipyard in Miami, Florida. But her final whereabouts are still not known.
