Steve Orr

@SOrr1

When the sailboat Grace finally saw the light of day Saturday morning, the man who built it hardly knew what to say.

"It's been a long time," John Agostinelli said after a moment's thought. "It's an unbelievable feeling."

Agostinelli, who lives in Greece, built the 42-foot-long cutter rig boat in a small barn off Latta Road. On Saturday morning, with dozens of family members and friends cheering and taking pictures, Grace was carefully pulled from the barn and readied for transport to the waterfront.

A process that began 34 long years ago was finally over.

"I love sailing. I started when I was three years old. I always had a dream to build a boat and sail it. It's taken a lot longer than I thought — about 20,000 hours over 34 years," said Agostinelli, a retired Eastman Kodak Co. research scientist.

"At last the day has arrived."

On Friday, Agostinelli and others removed a wall in the barn — owned by a long-time friend, Dan Richardson — so there was room to pull the vessel out. Then around 7 a.m. Saturday, the vessel was lifted onto a trailer and hauled outside by a tractor. After the masts were loaded on a separate trailer, a caravan led by the trailered Grace departed for Shumway Marine near the mouth of the Genesee River in Irondequoit.

With three Greece police cars clearing the way, the caravan made its way ever so slowly down Latta, onto the Lake Ontario State Parkway and over the Colonel Patrick O'Rorke Memorial Bridge to Shumway. The 3 ½-mile journey took about a half-hour and was accomplished without mishap.

The boat, which carries three sails and is built for ocean cruising, will be placed in the water Monday.

The interior was off-limits Saturday, but friends said it features teak and mahogany and is as immaculate as it is handsome. It can sleep six comfortably, said Theresa Agostinelli, John's wife.

The fiberglass hull of the boat was manufactured in Rhode Island, and Agostinelli made or installed virtually everything else. He said Saturday he did not know how much the boat had cost, but Theresa said he saved money by buying second-hand teak and scavenging metal pieces from a scrap pile at Kodak Park.

Along the way, he had plenty of help from friends and family members. "So many people have been part of this for so many years," Theresa said Saturday.

"We grew up with this," added daughter Michele.

Jerry Kuper, who met Agostinelli when they were in graduate school at the University of Rochester, laughed about how it all started.

"It was always a dream of John's, to build a boat," he said. "At first he had a plan to build the boat in two years and to sail around the world. And then he met Theresa and it became a five-year plan.

As each of his three daughters was born, more years were added to the work schedule, Kuper said, "And now we are here, (almost) 35 years to the day, and the boat is coming out of the barn."

"Grace" was his mother's middle name, Agostinelli said, and he finds it a lovely word in its own right — a fitting name, perhaps, for a 34-year labor of love.

"It's a prayer of thanksgiving," he said. "It's beauty and elegance in motion."

SORR@Gannett.com