UPDATE!!! – Check out this drone video of the boat show – Incredible!
Well, I’m back from a BIG adventure picking up two MAJOR loads of E-type spares. I’m working on the blog entry for that already, but there is alot to say about all of that, and the text and captions take time, so just hold tight for that one – you’ll love it!
The parts that I purchased were near Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and so I used our Summer cottage on the St. Lawrence river as a “staging area” for those trips. In the midst of all of that, I took a few hours last Saturday AM to visit the annual Antique Boat Show at the Antique Boat Museum in Clayton, NY – which is in the heart of the “Thousand Islands” in upstate, NY.
My father has always been into antique wood boats. His parents had one when he was a kid, and then so did we in the years leading up to and during the time I was building the Jag (age 14-16…). Ours was a 31-foot 1970 Ventor cabin cruiser that he had restored and we had in a slip on the Sassafras River on the Upper Chesapeake Bay. We also had an 18-foot Chris Craft Riviera “project boat” that never really got off the ground.
After I graduated from college, my parents moved down to SOuth Carolina on a TVA lake, and he finally went “all out” on the wood boats and completely restored a 1940 57-foot Elco yacht which he and my mother did excursion tours on for several years. He now owns and operates “Nautilus Restorations” – which is kind of like Monocoque Metalworks for antique runabouts…
So, suffice to say that I am “into” wood boats – or can at least appreciate them. Because even though I now have a house on the water, AND usually follow in my father’s footsteps on things like this, I did manage to stay away from these “holes in the water that you throw money into…”
But they sure do look incredible – and I just can’t resist throwing these phgotos up on the blog for you guys to enjoy. It was a beautiful morning, and our timig was perfect – we arrived just after all of the owners opened up the baots and wiped the dew off for the judging, but before the spectators started arriving in force… Enjoy!
