Long Beach man replicates family history with winning model boat

Over the past eight years, Bob Daley painstakingly built a fishing boat replica from scratch. Although it was on a much smaller scale this go around, it wasn’t the first time Bob constructed the vessel, affectionately dubbed the Mary Anne II.

During the 1950s, Bob and his two brothers worked as fishermen to put themselves through college. Unable to afford a boat large enough to sustain their business, they built their own and named it the Mary Anne II — after their youngest sister.

From April 1950 to May 1951, the Daley family’s driveway in Long Beach served as a makeshift shipyard. Bob and his brothers worked on the Mary Anne II nearly every day as their mother watched from the kitchen window, wringing her hands.

“She was kind of a worrier, always wondering what was going to go wrong,” Bob said.

But she always brought the boys sandwiches for lunch. And Mary Anne, the boat’s namesake, tagged along with lemonade and fresh cookies.

If Bob’s mother was the project’s supervisor, then his father was the architect. An insurance salesman by day, he left most of the handiwork to his sons, but he was never short on ideas.

At the time Bob and his brothers were gathering parts for the Mary Anne II, surplus engines from WWII landing barges were going cheap. Bob’s father, Arthur, picked one up and invited his friend’s Los Angeles Harbor College woodshop class over to reconstruct it for the boat.

After they were done with it, “the engine was in excellent shape,” Bob said. As was the 41-foot plywood exterior the Daley brothers had manufactured with little to no prior woodworking experience.

The brothers spent so much time with the boat that it began to feel like an extension of their home.

“I slept in it one night when it was in the driveway because I came home too late and was afraid to go in the house,” Bob said.

Even the neighbors saw the ship as more of a community emblem than a disturbance. An engineer who lived across the street from the Daley family regularly offered his help; the kids who played in the street just loved looking at it.

And when the Daley brothers finally flipped the boat over, the whole neighborhood came to watch.

Once they launched the Mary Anne II at Wilmington Harbor, Bob and his brothers spent the next four years at the kelp beds near San Pedro or off the coast of Catalina.

“We’d go over around three or four in the afternoon and stay all night,” Bob recalled. Then they’d sell their mackerel at the local cannery.

Soon, though, the brothers graduated and had other commitments beyond their fishing boat. Bill joined the Navy. Art started a family.

And Bob met the love of his life.

Edith “Edy” Desmond was the youngest of nine children. Her father was a judge in the appellate court, and nearly all her brothers were on track to be lawyers. The Desmonds, considered to be a prominent family in the Long Beach community, often hosted community mass in their home.

Though they both lived in Long Beach all their lives, Bob and Edy didn’t cross paths until they took the same overnight trip to Catalina in 1953. They took their sleeping bags and slept side-by-side on the deck.

“That was my first [love], and I never looked back,” Bob said.

Bob and Edy had eight children, all of whom waited eagerly at the door when Bob came home from work every day. Bob was in the Air Force for 30 years, most of the time stationed at training command posts. He flew F-4 planes in Vietnam, and Edy held down the fort at home.

“We all thought of him as our hero,” Monica said. “Then, as we got older, we recognized Mom’s contribution to moving her family of eight kids every year, or two years, or three years.”

Before she died in 2017, Edy would watch as Bob sat at their kitchen table, putting together his model of the Daleys’ beloved fishing boat.

The Mary Anne II stuck with the Daley brothers. In 1970, a decade after their father finally sold the boat, Art spotted it not far from where they’d boarded it. Another 20 years later, Mary Anne’s daughter saw it in a stranger’s yard.

The Daley family had publicly registered the boat, but no tracking information has been made available in years. Bob doesn’t know where it is today; all he has now are his replica and the few yellowed photographs he studied to create it.

“As I look at the model now, I’m amazed how it looks like the other boat,” Bob said. Everything, down to the exact shade of muted blue paint, is exact.

When Bob began creating his 39-inch model of the Mary Anne II in 2014, it was purely for fun. He enjoyed repurposing the methods he and his brothers had used on the original vessel, including building it upside-down at first – to be flipped over later.

“It was never built for a competition,” he said. “I just thought it’d be neat to have.”

But as his eldest daughter, Monica Daley, watched Bob’s model progress, she thought others should see it. In March 2020, Monica set a phone reminder to “look into fair competitions,” and this year, she saw that plan through.

“The model boat itself is quite amazing,” she said, eyeing Bob’s “Staff Pick” ribbon. “But it’s the story behind the model that makes it compelling.”

Bob found out he placed first in scratch models at the OC Fair while at the Daley family reunion this summer.

“We were all there together and excited at the same time,” daughter Susie Thomas said.

If Monica hadn’t encouraged him to enter the competition, Bob said he might’ve left the project unfinished. They’re both grateful things turned out this way.

When the fair ends, Bob plans to display the model in his kitchen window, a beacon of the past.

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