A piece of maritime history pulled from a Hilton Head creek. But can it still be saved?

After one salvage company tried and failed to lift the 100-plus-year-old O. A. Bloxom from the bottom of Skull Creek, the oyster buyboat, sunk by tides and a failed hull, is afloat again.

“She’s been docked (at Benny Hudson Seafood) for four years” and lost her ability to float about three months ago, “two weeks before Hurricane Florence,” said Peter Maddock, co-owner of Hilton Head Railway Marine. Maddock will inspect the old boat to determine if it’s safe to be put in dry dock and repaired.

Salvage business owner Mike Majer got the Bloxom to the surface on Tuesday.

Majer, owner of Majer’s Diving and Salvage on Hilton Head, and his divers first had to patch a gaping hole on her starboard stern.

Once the hole was patched, they waited for low tide and pumped out the water inside.

“We were pumping about 2,600 gallons a minute,” Majer said from the muddy deck of the Bloxom.

It took about three hours.

Slowly the returning tide lifted the boat.

But Majer was still being careful.

He knew the dangers the river’s mud posed. Just as it can pull the waders from your feet, it could also suck the 81-foot boat back down.

It didn’t.

The boat hails from a time when Chesapeake Bay oysters were all the rage and the 4,480-square mile body of brackish water was full of the delicate, bivalve mullosks. When ice and canning factories were introduced, demand for bay oysters skyrocketed, making competition fierce.

The introduction of oyster buyboats helped oystermen get their catch to market, and many of the boats were soon working the Chesapeake.

The Bloxom, built in 1901, was among them. After a 87-year career in the Virginia-Maryland area, she spent time on Amelia Island, Fla. before coming to Hilton Head, where, for the past three months, she rested beneath Skull Creek.

She showed the effects of having been under water.

The formerly bright, white paint of the hull is stained with a burned-brown from the mud, the mud-line port side stopping just short of the captain’s door of the pilot house. The walls are warped and gapped with missing boards. A layer of mud around the pilot house made the deck as slippery as an ice rink.

A layer of mud remained inside the hull after the pumps had removed the water.

Asked if they would attempt to refurbish the vessel, both Maddock and Majer said they’d pass. The cost, they said, would far outweigh her worth.

In 2006, Dave Wright, a member of the Chesapeake Bay Buyboat Association and restaurant owner in Virginia, had the then-floating boat surveyed, and estimated it needed about $120,000 worth of work.

But not everyone believes the boat is a lost cause.

Daphne Withrow, a nurse and legal partner with Olivetti, McCray & Withrow, LLC, is representing the owner, Mark Mineur.

Mineur believes the Maryland-built oyster buyboat is worth saving, Withrow said. Mineur is out of the country and unavailable for comment.

On Thursday Withrow said the boat’s owner has spent just under $50,000 to get the boat afloat again.

Mineur apparently has a special relationship with the boat, owning her for at least the past eight years.

Carol DeAnda, an Illinois-based wedding photographer, shot Mineur’s rehearsal and wedding in September 2014 aboard the boat. It was docked in the Harbour Town Yacht Basin — the signature lighthouse in many of the photos..

But the boat has had hard times as well.

On March 29, 2017, Barbara Hudson, owner of Benny Hudson Seafood, sent the buyboats association a message asking if it would try to find a new owner to remove it from her dock.

She wrote: “(The Bloxom) has been abandoned at my dock for almost two years. The owner owes in excess of $6,000 for dockage and electric (fees). He has not responded to any attempts I have made to contact him.”

Hudson filed a lawsuit against Mineur.

That suit was settled and included Mineur paying dockage charges and removing the boat

Mineur’s attorney said “The owner is loyal to this (boat)“ and where others ... would have pulled it up (and) said ‘the heck with it’, (he) believes it’s a piece of history worth preserving.”

“This (buyboat) was one of the larger ones,” Wright said Thursday. He said there are only about 25 smaller buyboats left.

Wright acknowledges it will take a lot of money to refurbish the Bloxom.

But, he said, “If you have a lot of money, everything is worth saving.”