It took a heroic effort and a passionate group of people to save and restore the Kit Jones from certain demise. Time and the ravages of Hurricane Katrina left her dilapidated in a Biloxi, Mississippi shipyard. Her glory days as a pleasure craft, a tugboat, a ferry, a wartime fire boat, and a marine research vessel were claimed by the past, not the future.

As of July 25, 2023, the Kit Jones--named for Katharine Talbott Jones, matriarch of the Jones family who operated The Cloister on Sea Island for decades-rests next to the Old Jail and has reclaimed her relevance as a landmark monument to the rich maritime history of Darien and McIntosh County.