MAKEOVER MAGIC

When Sycara IV slid down the ways at Burger Boat Company in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, it might have been during the era before America learned to number its wars, when flappers were doing the Lindy Hop and Charles Lindbergh hadn’t done his hop across the Atlantic. The yacht might, in fact, have been the latest in J.P. Morgan’s fabled fleet of Corsairs.

But this was 2009, and she was the culmination of the original owners’ requirements as imagined by designers Bruce King and Ken Freivokh. At 151 feet (46 was an aesthetic reflection of yachts from the 1920s and 1930s, albeit with modern systems and almost no wake at cruising speed. She also was capable of doing the Great Loop circumnavigation of eastern America with bridge clearance of no more than 19 feet, 6 inches; her mast and funnel could be lowered to clear (barely) the bridges on the Erie Canal.