Dr. Keith Van Meter’s love for the Gulf of Mexico and the waterways of Louisiana is intertwined in both his professional career as an emergency medicine physician with a subspecialty in hyperbarics medicine and personal hobby of more than 30 years: refurbishing a boat used to intercept “rum runners.”
With the money that he got from selling a renovated house, he started a hobby that he has been working on for the past 30 or more years of his life: an 80-foot boat called the Seafarer built in 1937.
Only six of its kind were built in Jacksonville, Fla. The boat was used to intercept “rum runners” from Puerto Rico thatf were shipping goods to the Atlantic seaboard. The boat was a casualty of Hurricane Katrina when it was lifted out of the water and deposited on a beach.
