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William
Garden of Seattle designed a speedy express cruiser in 1949 for Donald
Ericsson, also of Seattle. The
boat measuring 39' 11" inches overall, with a 9' 10"
beam and 2' 10" draft was built by the Monson Brothers boat yard in
Seattle. Power came from a
600 horsepower Hall Scott for a service speed of about 32 knots.
Built to Lloyd's of London specifications, the 40 ft. hull was beefy and
heavy with steam bent oak ribs on nine inch centers and 1 1/8"
bottom and hull side planking of yellow cedar.
The boat's lines show a tuck at the keel reminiscent of Lindsay
Lloyd's development in vee bottomed boats. On
the Garden design, it allowed a deep, sharp, easy running forefoot,
adding to fore and aft rigidity and giving enhanced directional
stability. An additional
advantage with this form and deep keel is that the boat is not prone to
sag between keel blocks when hauled.
With its tall davit and open aft deck, the new design would have made an
excellent fishing boat for its Seattle owner.
Yet it doesn't appear to have been finished that way.
This was to be Dr. Erikson's 23rd boat, yet he never took
delivery.
Instead, the new boat completed in the spring of 1950 was shipped to
Tahoe Boat Company, where E.B. Scott took delivery.
Scott ran an excursion business and wanted, in a small way, to
reactivate around the Lake commercial service following the route of the
famous 169' steamer, the S. S. Tahoe, that was scuttled in 1940
after some 40 years of service.
According
to Ed Scott, E.B.'s son, his father had all the resorts under contract
for his boat concessions. During
the 1950s, the only people who had boats were families and summer
residents of the Lake.
E. B. Scott had the idea that all these people who came up to the
resorts had nothing to do and wanted to be out on the water.
He had boat ride concessions at the resorts of Glenbrook, Tahoe
Tavern, Homewood, Brockway and Meeks Bay.
At these locations, college students with Coast Guard licenses
would come up to the Lake in the summer to give guests rides in
Chris-Craft Racing Runabouts and Capris.
Tahoe Tavern was the base of operation where E. B. Scott had his office
at the end of the pier. This
was Tahoe's homeport, and E. B. its primary captain.
The Tahoe's standard daily run was at 2:30 p.m. from the Tavern
to Emerald Bay, with a stop at Meeks Bay, and back to the Tavern by 5
p.m. The boat was also available for charters and made runs from the
West shore to the casinos on Nevada's side of South Lake Tahoe.
The
sleek cruiser carried up to 25 passengers at speeds of 22 to 25 knots
and operated commercially on the Lake for 15 years.
In the mid sixties, E. B. Scott got out of the boat ride
concession.
None of his children were old enough to take the business over,
so Scott closed it.
Shortly after, the boat reportedly sank at its winter mooring. Out
of commission during the 1965 and 1966 seasons, Tahoe was sold by
Scott as documented vessel # 264-068 to Dick Clark of Sierra Boat
Company for $2,500 on July 25, 1967.
Dick repowered the express cruiser with a 427 Ford Interceptor
with reduction drive so he could continue to swing the big propeller.
He used the repowered craft as his private boat and for community
functions.
"People
would call Dick and say I, ' I got this ceremony,' " says Pat Began,
Vice President of Operations at Sierra, who ran the boat in the '60s.
" I took the whole chamber of Commerce to
Emerald Bay to dedicate
the Vikingsholm."
With its
spacious aft deck, the boat became popular for weddings.
Pat would run the party off Dollar Point, turn the boat, the
preacher and the bridal couple would stand in the back, and the guests
would stand facing aft.
Tahoe Boat Company had time to do these functions in the late
sixties and early seventies.
Around 1972 or '73, boating activity picked up on the Lake and the
yard became very busy.
A local
friend of Dick Clark came in and started to restore the vessel during
the summers, but that fell by the wayside.
"The shops were so busy we did not have time to do the
boat" says Pat, whose boss encouraged owners to maintain their old
wooden hulls instead of acquiring new fiberglass models. "We were
too busy with customers' projects to take care of our own toys".
From the
late seventies, Tahoe sat deteriorating, occupying slip space through the
eighties and most of the nineties.
Pat called his former manager, now retired, and told him they had two options.
He could take the boat to Dick's storage yard in Truckee and
put it on blocks. Had they done that, the tremendous alpine winter snow load would have crushed it
to pieces within a year and a half.
Or they could donate it at no cost to someone who could restore and
use it. Pat gave Dick a
July 1, 1997, decision date and Dick told him to do what he had to do,
preferring that it would be restored.
Both Pat
and Dick knew Steve Dunham, who had been on the lake a long time running
charters and daily cruises. Pat
told Steve, "I got an offer that you can't refuse."
Steve
chuckled as he replied, "Oh, really.
What's that?" Pat
proceeded to tell them about the 40' express cruiser.
At first Steve turned him down.
He didn't even want to look at it.
Steve had restored other wooden boats and that wasn't anything he wanted to get
into. "I've done more than my share of boat work," he says,
vividly recalling his dad's first boat, a really old 1904 Monterey
fishing boat. "When Pat said, ' I've got an old wooden boat,' I just
said, ' no, no, no'."
The
"mistake" Steve made was going to look at the boat.
He'd seen it here for years and got to thinking that it was a
pretty big boat and maybe he ought to go look at it.
He did, talked to his friends about it, came back and looked
again.
Pat, knowing that Steve runs commercial passenger boats for a livelihood, told him,
"I know you can't tell from what it looks like now, but it's a great
boat. You're gonna love
it."
Pat kept talking to Steve about the boat for a year. The more Steve looked at it, the more potential it had. Sensing Steve was getting hooked, Pat said with a grin like he
was hauling in a fish, "Believe me, it's going to be a great
boat."
That was
all the salesmanship Pat needed. Steve and a 3 man crew with two
intermittent workers put their own time into the project.
Everyone seemed to think the boat would take two years to
completely renovate. The
ability to recertify the vessel to carry passengers was paramount.
With the
original plan available from Mystic Seaport and Ed Scott, Jim Atrims, a naval architect in San Francisco
specializing in planked boats, calculated the specifications and the
strengths, determining that the boat would pass.
A call to William Garden, now in his eighty's in Toronto, verified
that the boat was built to Lloyd's of London specs and should
pass even today's regulations.
The
recalculated drawings were submitted to the back logged Washington D.C.
office of the Coast Guard. The
origin of the boat was determined to be American made and that there was never any foreign ownership. Both
criteria were necessary to carry passengers for hire on inland waters.
About
three months later, the plans came back approved. Next, the Coast Guard from the 12th District in San Francisco
came up to inspect the structure and the initial work. As the project progressed, two more inspections would follow.
All of the boat's wiring had to be gutted and 2,400 feet of new wire complying to
Coast Guard specifications were laid in.
With its
steam bent oak frames, the cruiser was built more like a sailboat than a
powerboat. A number of frames showed cracks at the sharp turn of the
chine.
Steve and
his crew got real friendly with the bandsaw as they cut out
reinforcements to sister the broken frames.
To make patterns, they took a piece of quarter inch square lead
strip and bent it to the shape of each frame. The lead retained its shape, which was transferred to a piece of
white oak. Some 6000 brass
screws were used in the project.
The crew
worked full-time the last three months of the project, seven days a
week. Starting at 7:30 in
the morning and working until 8 or 9 at night, they handily beat all
educated guesses
with a ten month turn around.
The
redocumented Tahoe, 50 years later and finished in a warm
awlgrip moon
dust that brings out the richness of the cabin bright work,
is back and
in service at this time.
Article by Jim
Wangard
Published in
Classic Boating Issue 93
January-February 2000
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