Das Boot (that's German for 'Boat', ya know.)




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Das Boot (that's German for 'Boat', ya know.)

Actually, the deck is nothing but a giant Jewelry Box. And I had plenty of experience with Jewelry Boxes. Here's how I got started.

1988....I'm 51 years old and never pounded a nail into a board in my life. Mike takes me down to the marina to do some work on his boat, right? And I spot this old Chris Craft, lying in ruins. The same boat that Henry Fonda smashed against the rocks in "Golden Pond". Well, I couldn't stand the thought of them burning it, so I bought it.

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Slowly but surely, I solved one problem after another, re-built the transom and re-finished the bow. It began to look rather sharp, considering what I had to work with.

Once a week, the Chris Craft purists would come around and 'gee' and 'golly as they looked it over. They came up short though when they saw this transom. "Well, that's not the way Chris designed it, that's for sure." Well, I'm not sure if they realized it or not, but Chris is dead and I'm not putting this thing together for him, anyway.

I'd been getting some interesting offers for the damned thing, so.....I get it all finished and I decided I needed the money more than I need the boat, right?

Guy comes along and presents me with a cashiers check, then proceeds to start laughing.

"What's so funny" I ask him?

"Man, I woulda given you two grand more....ha ha ha"

I just looked at him and said "that's all right....I woulda taken two grand less." His jaw dropped and I just walked away.

(My mom didn't raise no fools.)

Anyway, at that point, I had invested in power tools galore, so it was time to learn how to use them. Go to the next page and I'll show you my next adventure in woodworking.

(If you would like to see more examples of my woodworking skill, click here, or....

Naturally, everyone thought I'd lost my mind...this thing had no gunwales (pronounced gunnels) no transom (pronounced transom) and needed more work than Joan Rivers.

As you can see, the inside was a disaster.....43 mildewed life vests and looked more like a rats nest than the inside of a boat. But.....after spending two and a half years bringing it back to life, we had the beginnings of a boat.

Just finding the right mahogony was a chore. Back then, they used wood that grew in the wild, as opposed to today's plantation grown wood, so finding the matching grain was a real pain in the butt. (This was a 1947 22' Sportsman and they had been using plywood since the war started, so matching the wood was a chore.) I finally found the first distributor ever set up by Mr. Craft up in Sissel, MI, and the guy sold me a station wagon full of it for $250.00. (I had to replace the springs on the damned wagon by the time I got back, but it was worth it.) It was beginning to look like a boat.

Even did the upholstry myself....luckily, I used to sell sewing machines for JC Penney back in School, so I didn't need too many lessons in its' use.