August 3, 2005
Wooden boats pleasure crafts
Annual Boats on the Boardwalk scheduled for Saturday along the Boardman River
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
Stretched along the Boardman, with gleaming wood and shining chrome, classic boats will be the star of the 17th Annual Boats on the Boardwalk.
Held this coming Saturday along the river by the Traverse City Chamber of Commerce building, the show will feature classic watercraft, including Chris Craft, Century and Peterborough. Proudly displayed by their owners, who hail from around Michigan and the Midwest, these pleasure boats have been restored to their glory days.
Revitalizing a decades old boat takes patience and dedication for a craft built with years, not decades, in mind.
"A lot of the boats weren't meant to last more than six or seven years at the most," said Bill Woodrow of Traverse City.
Woodrow and his wife, Barbara, are members of the Water Wonderland Chapter of the Antique Classic Boat Society. Local members of the society have hosted Boats on the Boardwalk every year since 1987, except in 2003 when low water levels scrubbed it.
While a smaller show, usually drawing around 50 boats, Boats on the Boardwalk is a fixture on the classic boat circuit. It is strategically scheduled for the week before a large classic boat show in Hessel, in the Upper Peninsula, called the Les Chenaux Islands Antique Wooden Boat Show.
"Quite often they come to our show and then go up there," said Barbara Woodrow, the chair of this year's Boats on the Boardwalk. "They have 150 boats for the show in Hessel."
Bill Woodrow plans this year to show his "station wagon" classic boat: a 1947, 22-foot Chris Craft Utility he has owned for six years. Although he will be busy Saturday putting in and taking out boats that are participating in the show, this year he cleaned and polished Whizzer to display.
"This boat was actually made in Cadillac, Chris Craft had a large plant there that made most of their small boats," he said. "I'm also restoring a 15-foot Century, those were made in Manistee."
Like Bob Woodrow, Hal Muenchow relishes both the process and results of bringing a classic boat back to life. A Traverse City resident and retired engineer, Muenchow can list more than a dozen boats that he has restored now enjoyed by owners around the country and even in Paris. He has worked on one Century, a couple of Thompsons and numerous Chris Crafts, dating form 1927 to the newest one from 1956.
"I guess the attraction is just to preserve something from a bygone era," said Muenchow, who owns three boats he has restored. "Also to exhibit them and hopefully to get younger people interested in the hobby."
"They ride much, much nicer, they're not as harsh," he added.
After seven or eight years of regularly showing boats he restored, Muenchow grew tired of the process and rarely shows them anymore. Nevertheless, he still helps every year at the annual Boats on the Boardwalk as well as the show in Hessel.
Muenchow, who has been restoring classic boats for 25 years, still vividly recalls how these wooden boats captivated him.
"We had a place on Portage Lake downstate and about six cottages down was a woody and I would take the rowboat down and sit and look at it," he said. "I'd go down there most every day and spend 15 or 20 minutes."
Boats on the Boardwalk will be held Saturday, from 10 a.m. until 3 p.m. downtown along the Boardman River near at the Traverse City Chamber of Commerce Building. In addition to kids' activities, the event will also include a display of wooden canoes and rowboats; from noon until 2 p.m., the jazz duo "The Turtlenecks" will play. Boats on the Boardwalk is free and open to the public.