By Alan & Liz Wardsworth, Inland Empire Chapter If you have been following the saga of our 1963 Belmont, you probably won’t believe it ended up being a successful summer of boating! Belmont produced luxury runabouts from 1956 to 1966 before they converted to fiberglass flat bottom racers. Most Belmonts have Cadillac power but founder,…
From the Inland Empire Chapter The 2023 Coeur d’ Alene Antique and Classic Boat Festival (Aug. 12-13), sponsored by the Inland Empire chapter, is in the books. Two weeks before the event, the show got off to a slow start with only 15 boats registered. By show date, we had 54 boats and skippers signed…
By Brian & Kathy Fair, Inland Empire Chapter Members After 2 years off, this year’s Priest Lake Dry Rot was back in full swing. 40 boats with lots of smiling, eager faces to get back to normal with a full 4-day boat show weekend. Brian and I put a spin with our own touches and…
By Nevin Bryant member of Inland Empire chapter Perhaps twenty years ago I was looking into buying a wooden boat to have at our cabin at Priest Lake, and decided I should check with my mother about the kind my father owned when they had a cabin on Murray Isle in the Thousand Islands just…
by James Rand, Inland Empire Chapter My childhood in the 50s and early 60s was spent on Long Island sound where we belonged to a yacht club. My father had Chris-Craft cruisers beginning with wooden ones and later fiberglass. I bought my first boat at age 14. I loved fishing, water skiing, and scuba diving.…
by Rex Lytle, Inland Empire chapter My love of wood boats started when I was a child and my dad owned a small Wolverine wood fishing boat that was probably 14 feet long. In the early 2000 my wife and I purchased a 1961 Chris-Craft Continental wood boat at an estate auction. Every time we…
by Tom & Kris Bassett, Inland Empire chapter Our love of wooden boats started off by going to area wooden boat shows where we photographed every boat! Little did we know then that we had photos of a boat we would come to own. Growing up, summers were spent at Coeur d’Alene and Kris’ family…
by Mitch & Tracy Johnson, Inland Empire chapter My father was born on August 1st, 1926 on Whidbey Island, Washington. Growing up on the island, fishing and boating in Puget Sound was his love since childhood. On my Dad’s birthday in 1967 he factory ordered his new 20’ Thompson Offshore that we still have today.…
By Ken Gimble, Inland Empire chapter ROBUSTO – Name is a series of Cigar shape related boat names owned by a group of us here in North Idaho. 1960 Chris Craft 23-foot Sea Skiff Ranger – One of 51 Sea Skiff Hulls for 1960 and a fewer number of Ranger finished craft. This option included…
by James Rand, Inland Empire Chapter My childhood in the 50s and early 60s was spent on Long Island sound where we belonged to a yacht club. My father had Chris-Craft cruisers beginning with wooden ones and later fiberglass. I bought my first boat at age 14. I loved fishing, water skiing, and scuba diving.…
by Ron Green member of the Inland Empire chapter Our 1970 Olympic Dinghy was restored in 2010 and she has seen only 2 seasons with me so I don’t really have a lot of info to share. She was purchased from a retired international sailor and, tender to his vintage schooner! She saw the Mediterranean!…
by Jim McGrath member of Inland Empire & Big Sky chapters In the much-fabled “summer of 69” and at 14 years old, I first saw her and fell in love. It was in a neighbor’s barn near our family’s summer home on Swan Lake in northwest Montana. She was beautiful, stunning, and a lot older…