This is part two covering the almost three-year voyage of our new resident topsail schooner, Sea Vessel (SV) Alvei.

What type of person hears a century-old steel schooner might be salvageable off Fiji and books a flight?

Captain Geoff Jones grew up a pebble's throw from Fishers Island Sound on Main Street and spent more time on water than land. He and classmates, Gary Maynard and David Thomas, who have also become captains, used to sail their solo sloops out to stay on Sandy Point when they were about 10.

Jones attended local schools and began working his way up as a crew member on Shenandoah out of Martha's Vineyard and then the Steamship Sabino before college. He graduated fourth in his class at Massachusetts Maritime Academy in 1985, winning the Chelsea Clock award for highest score on the USCG exam.

Since then he's been an officer or captain on a fleet worth of vessels - tall ships, ferries, tankers, roll on roll off cargo ships, and everything between - Mystic Clipper and Whaler, Cape Henlopen, H.M.S. Rose, tall ship Mystic, and Sea Cloud, to name a few.

Recently, he's captained tall ships everywhere from the Bahamas to the Cook Islands while managing Schooner Wharf Complex in downtown Mystic for over 20 years. Jones has multiple endorsements as a captain - master of ocean, steam, motor, and sailing vessels of up to 500 tons, master of Great Lakes and inland waters up to 1600 tons.

He's also a licensed private pilot with twin engine and seaplane ratings. If anyone would be up to the task of assessing, restoring, and sailing a ship halfway around the world, it's probably Jones.

But not according to him.

"I hadn't attempted anything like this before. None of this was possible without Jeff Thompson - he was indispensable. I wouldn't have even tried."

Thompson first met Jones when Maynard, his shipmate on Pilot, introduced them in Maine, sometime in September 1989. Jones took Maynard and Thompson as crew for his newly acquired 84-foot knockabout schooner, Sylvina W Beal, and they sailed her down to Mystic. Jones ran her as a weekend to weeklong charter boat until 1997. She was even in a Scorsese film.

So the old friends flew across the world to Fiji the second week of May 2019. Jones had told Thompson he'd only need him for two weeks or so. They both laugh about it now. Their first mission was determining whether the ship was salvageable.

Upon seeing Alvei anchored off Suva, Jones was first struck by the shape of her hull - the elegant angles of her bow and slope of her stern. He saw her potential immediately but didn't get his hopes up.

"The first thing I loved was her rigging. The next thing I noticed was water hitting my ankles in the galley," noted Thompson. "I got the bilge going and she was dry in no time."

Below decks they found thousands of books that were meant to be distributed to local islands before the previous captain had fallen ill. About 50 milk crates worth had to be loaded into dinghies and discarded on shore due to water and mold damage. They donated 800 or so to local Fijian organizations and hung onto about five hundred for the ship's library.

After agreeing she was worthy of the effort, Jones had to call the brother of the deceased captain, Evan Logan, his next of kin, and ask to be named captain of Alvei. Why? In maritime law, only the captain can haul and repair a vessel. And so he was named and the long, hard work of emptying and repairing her began.

They spent the first few months emptying her stores - dinghy load by dinghy load, chipping away at rust, and addressing years of neglect. Jones, Thompson, and Pierce Hirsh, a former Alvei crew member from Australia, stayed aboard for the refit. The work crews of Fijians returned home every night.

What was replaced? According to Thompson, "Every single piece of running rigging and Dacron line, shackles, blocks, bails, bushings, and pins. We brought all yards and topmasts down and replaced 14 of 16 sails. We put enough steel into her to build a 40-foot cruising yacht."

Once she was empty and clean and re-rigged, they spent a full month hauled out for the most nerve-wracking task - welding the hull shut in every place a rivet had been. Steel ships built before World War II were almost all riveted - after the war, welding became the preferred method.

Accordingly, Thompson had to push through the external holes into the interior which melted the paint and started little fires inside the hull. So while he welded, Fijian crew waited with spray bottles and buckets of water and a fire extinguisher inside to keep fires from spreading.

"By the time we were done with Alvei, we'd employed most of Suva in one way or another. We paid more than local businesses, so everyone was happy," Jones remembered with a smile.

The three core seamen and a local crew set out on the first phase of the voyage home in November 2019 - a weeklong passage to Alvei's home port in Vanuatu.

"It felt great to be underway," Jones recalled.

As we'll cover in our next article, Thompson didn't return to America until November 2021. Two long weeks, indeed.

Lacy and Ed Johnson live in Noank.