Exclusive: Dismay after historic boat destroyed

An historic gem of Bermuda’s marine heritage has been lost during the development of the Pink Beach site.

The old cedar form of the Sweet Honey, which dates back more than 100 years, had been on stilts at the Tucker’s Town resort for several years.

But the vessel’s owners were in talks with the new owners of the Pink Beach Club to relocate and restore it. However, over the weekend the sloop was destroyed and parts of it were taken to the incinerator up in Devonshire.

A few, small remaining parts of the well-known boat, including the stern, have been salvaged.

The Bermuda Sun understands that the Sweet Honey could have been destroyed by accident, but it remains unclear exactly what happened.

Owner Harry Kromer told the Bermuda Sun: “I’m disgusted. The main reason we got that boat and saved it was so that we could restore it.

“We had been trying to find somewhere affordable to store it for some time and had just managed to find somewhere in Southampton.

“This is a tremendous loss for Bermuda’s maritime history. It’s a tragedy.

“Sure we may have taken our time trying to relocate it, but we made it very clear it was a historical boat that needed to be preserved.

“Sweet Honey was around at the start of Bermuda’s tourism boom.

She was a work boat that ferried tourists around.”

Cedar sloop

Sweet Honey was built in 1913 from Bermuda cedar and was a well-known and successful racing sloop.

She was previously owned by Charlie Loader, who ran the Red Hole Boatyard, before he passed it on to Eldon Trimingham.

Mr Trimingham told the Bermuda Sun: “This is very sad news. She was one of the very last working sloops from that era.

“I owned her during the 90s and earlier 2000’s for around seven to eight years and just loved everything about her. I would race her at all the classics, which was pretty impressive for a 100-year-old boat.

“She just glided through the water and I feel very privileged to have owned her. She took care of me many times when it got woolly out there.”

Maritime enthusiast Barry Brewer, who was also involved in trying to save Sweet Honey, added: “This seems like a very unfortunate accident.

“Everybody was trying to do the right thing including the owners of the property and the owners of the boat.

“There was work being done on site and whoever was responsible for creating the space did not know the value of what they were looking at.

“It is a big reminder to all of us as islanders that we need to identify and celebrate the few remaining Bermudian maritime artifacts and do everything we can to preserve them.” 

The Bermuda Sun tried to make contact with developers Sardis Developments Ltd, which recently bought the Pink Beach Club, to find out why the old boat had been destroyed. But we did not receive a comment by the time we went to press.