Boat Fever!

I think perhaps the reason Zoe threw up last night was because she suffers from Boat Fever.

Boat Fever has been going around a lot lately.

I went with some friends to the Maine Boatbuilder's Show in Portland today. It was, as usual, awesome.

If a penny saved is a penny earned, I could have earned about $13,000 today by buying this boat, since it was on sale at $130,000, down from $143,000.



Here is an iteresting boat. It is a Coquina designed by a famous (maybe the most famous) boat designer named Nathaniel Herreshoff in 1890. Nat Herreshoff is to boats as John M. Browning is to guns.



I wondered, when I saw it, if it that this is the same boat I saw at Benjamin River in the late summer of 2004. We were visiting Robert and Jodee Baird and went for a ride on the water. Bob showed us the boat that Wooden Boat was photographing for an upcoming issue. So, imagine my surprise when today I get done looking at this boat and then turn around and see Robert Baird walk in the door. I live two hours away from the boat show, he lives 2000 miles away from the boat show, and yet we bump into each other in a crowd of a several thousand during the course of a 3 day event. Weird.

Here is another Herreshoff design called a Herreshoff 12 1/2. On my first ever trip to Maine, I got to sail in a Herreshoff 12 1/2 called the Chick-a-Dee in Pulpit Harbor on North Haven Island.



We ate at Norm's, then on the way home stopped to look at a boat my friend Perry is interested in. It is a 31' Ronald Rich wooden motor boat. Boat Fever Strikes Again!





We'll see if he winds up buying it. The seller and the potential buyer are far apart on the price, but when boat fever hits, sometimes that doesn't matter.