Behold a 90-year-young boat!
Drool if you like. Click here for more info on the classic Elco cruisettes.
Click here for the specifics on KaRat!
Here’s another . . .
but
all I can say about Flox of Montreal is that she is la tres belle Flox of Montreal.
Ditto this beauty.
All photos by Will Van Dorp.
4 comments
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October 8, 2019 at 11:07 am
P& R Barker
Lovely could be the river Thames, England
Thanks for posting Paul
October 8, 2019 at 3:52 pm
Jim M
ELCO in Bayonne, NJ was also the builder of nearly 400 WW2 PT Boats, including PT-109.
About the only ELCO relic that remains is the davit style boat lift which has recently been relocated several miles north along Newark Bay into a new(er) park.
October 8, 2019 at 5:04 pm
eastriver
Great, great stuff – this and yesterday. FLOX sure looks like a repurposed sailboat.
October 8, 2019 at 6:40 pm
Jim Gallant
LOVE those Elcos! Back in 1965 my Dad had a 1921 Model 33 Cruisette, a boat that forever cemented my love for wooden boats. Unfortunately, she had been re-engined by a previous owner, and something was apparently amiss with her stability thereafter. The 1920’s Model 33’s and later Model 213’s were prone to rolling to begin with, but our Elco’s roll was extremely heavy under anything other than moderately calm conditions.
All of this came to a head that August, when Dad (alone, without the rest of the family aboard,) was making a short hop from Onset Island near the south end of the Cape Cod Canal, on down a few miles to Marion Harbor (part of Wareham, Mass.) at the mouth of the Weweantic River. There was a strong southwest wind that day, with heavy rolling swells . The swells became short and quite steep as they approached the end of the Stony Point Dike, which shields Wareham Harbor. Dad was running in tandem with my Uncle, who was aboard his converted Novi lobster boat, an early and well executed “lobsteryacht”‘.
As they rounded the point, the Elco took a heavy roll to starboard, then a snappy roll to port just as a breaking sea came in on the port quarter. The breaker flooded into the aft cockpit to the tune of several hundred gallons worth, immediately killing the engine and flooding the cabin below decks. Fortunately, my Uncle got a line to Dad, who after securing it to the samson post at the Elco’s bow, jumped aboard Uncle Elmer’s boat for the successful tow into Marion. The whole episode scared Dad so badly that even after they pumped the Elco dry, blew the engine out, and got it running, he NEVER AGAIN allowed the family aboard her when underway. He then promptly sold the boat, over the protests of my six year old broken heart!
On a much lighter note, one of KaRat’s 1929 Elco 38 Cruiser “sister ships” was purchased by aviator Charles Lindbergh and used as his “Honeymoon Yacht” with his bride, the former Anne Morrow, in the Spring of 1929.