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Taking A Fiberglass Breather in February By Cole Louison A Soviet Scientist, once a political prisoner in Siberia, came to Ithaca in the wintertime because Cornell University offered him a job. He accepted, in part because the desolate landscape of Ithaca reminded him of his former home in Siberia. February in Ithaca is the tunnel you have to struggle through to see the dull light of March. While some days are brighter than others, the sun never seems to shine. There is something of a living-on-Pluto vibe one can pick up from Ithaca students. The idea that summer is only 545 more light years away. Some say Valentine's Day is a savior in these cold months, and while that may be true for some, it is just another iceball in the ear for many others. A more universal, accessible festivity is needed in these times of darkness and coldness. Enter the Syracuse Boat Show. Three open rooms the size of your middle school, packed wall to wall with the shinning status symbols of summer. The Boat Show took place on Saturday, March 20 at the State Fair grounds in Syracuse. Rows of pick-up trucks line the way to the first building. After paying six dollars for admission and doing a few laps, the boats start to look a lot alike and you start to notice certain consistencies. The keys of each boat being left in the ignition was one of these consistencies and it is curious to think what might happen if, by some Fox's-most-upsetting-home-video of a chance, a wacko got behind the wheel and started gunning the double-propellored, coffin-sized, 360 horse power engine of a 27-foot Mariah luxury boat that hangs six feet from the ground, suspended by its $3000 trailor. These thoughts might seem odd now, but after four hours at the boat show, tags like "custom fit, tubular steel trailer," or "complete, fully-rigged package," don't glimmer with the promise they once did, and the mind begins to search for something a little less ordinary. One of the displays that fit perfectly into this category was put together by the Fast Foreward Fiberglass Repair Company and displayed photo albums and enlarged prints of boats damaged in various fashions. The topper was an 18x24-inch color photo of a boat, still in it's trailer, that had been cut in half by a fallen tree. Not nearly as interesting but equally bizarre was what might be considered a piece of installation art used to sell the services of a fiberglass company. All alone on the far left Fast Foreward table was a small color television/vcr, playing a video shot with a camera that had been mounted on the front of a speedboat. The water and land bounced up and down on the little screen and now and then another boat came into the camera's field of view (maybe this was a race), but otherwise, the pattern went uninterrupted. We left the table and walked by half an hour later on our way out and nothing seemed to have changed. Of course, even someone who knows nothing of boats can not only enjoy the experience of the show as a whole, but appreciate some of the vessels themselves. The beautiful, 1931 Gadfly 336, for example, is a treat for the senses that makes the whole trip worthwhile. A fully restored mahogany river boat that once rode the waters of the St. Lawrence river, the chestnut-colored wooden masterpiece features a fully enclosed sitting room with green leather-padded benches and giant windows. The deck feels like a basketball court and smells like a saddle. On the other side of the rat-race, the 1999 Compac Sailing Yacht's 30 foot mast shot into the air. One of only two sailboats in the entire show, the 23-foot-three inch boat has teakwood interior and bronze portholes and costs just under $27,000 dollars with the trailer. Unique, it seems, to sailboats, is the vast body of jargon used in explaining the make-up of these ships. A Compac Yachts information sheet the salesman gave me states: "With a two-cabin layout for privacy, a standard equipment hide-A-way galley and shoal draft keel developed from NASA low-drag, high lift wing sections, the Com-Pac 23 is ready for extended cruising and gunkholing." The polar opposite of an efficient, compact and complete yacht sits in the dead center of the main room of the show and is built by Velocity Powerboats. A big crayfish could opperate what looks to be the hi-tech control pannel of the 390 Velocity, $196,350, power boat. There are 10 invidual gauges, all marked "velocity." To the right of the bucket, leather seat are two levers, one for foreward and for reverse. Nearly 70 feet long and powered by twin 500 horse power engines, this powerboat, and others like it, are infamous for doing cartwheels when they reach high speeds (98 mph). Another powerboat company, in a confusing advertising stategy, had a video of these high-speed accidents running in front of their display. In the same league, deep in the second building, next to a butane-colored above ground pool, a 28-foot, fork-fronted boat called "The Ultimate Warlock," runs on a 560 horsepower engine and cost $82,000. It was worth going over there just to see the rhinosaurus-sized salesman watching people take off their shoes and disappear into the bowles of the Warlock. The boat show offers a wonderful array of catalogs and images to hold onto during the next few months of this cold season. Summer is far away, and trying to recreate that atmosphere in the dead of winter yields something having nothing to do with the honest certainty of the weather. Reality doesn't belong at the boat show. It is place where beer is sold at 11:30 in the morning and you can play in a quater-million dollar power boat like it was a jungle gym. Yes, the ground is still hard and the lake is the color of freezerburnt blueberrries, but these things don't matter at a place where the boats don't touch the ground. Cole Louison has not been able to swim since he watched a watersnake swallow his new pony "Sugars." |
