Antique boat show makes waves in Lakeside

By ALEX STRICKLAND / Bigfork Eagle

The rumble of boat engines did little to silence the "oohs" and "ahhs" at this year's Antique and Classic Boat Show in Lakeside over the weekend.

Thirty five gleaming wooden powerboats, canoes and kayaks were spread between the docks at the Waterside Condominiums and The Docks restaurant in Lakeside for most of Saturday and Sunday for everyone to oogle and a few to get a ride in.

Jim Valeo of Missoula was showing off his 24' 1990 Hacker Runabout, Obsession, at the Waterside docks on Sunday afternoon, fielding questions from interested onlookers.

"This is my first wooden powerboat," he said. "This is more than a hobby. It's a passion for the beauty of these boats."

The beauty is undeniable. In the late summer sun the highly polished wooden watercraft fairly gleam. But some owners also had pictures with them of the restoration process in which they brought dilapidated hulls from the first half of the last century back to their former glory.

Happily for Valeo, his 18-year-old Hacker hasn't needed the kind of work many people associate with beautiful wooden boats.

"The design is pretty much the original design," he said. "But this has a 350 Chevy motor in there and the hull is epoxied."

Valeo explained that many old wood boats would leak for the first week or so they were in the water as the wood swelled and created tighter joints. Modern wood boats are as convenient as fiberglass hulls, he said.

It wasn't just powerboats on display in Lakeside, however, as canoe, kayak and rowing shell builders from around the valley were on hand as well.

Ben Louden had a pair of rowing shells and a small, solo canoe on display Sunday behind the Waterside Condos. As the proprietor of Aeneis Originals on Lower Valley Road, Louden has been building boats for 10 years and now sells not only his boats, but also his plans.

"I'd been living on the river for 58 years and never had a boat," he said of his reasons for starting.

His daughter started rowing while attending college at Gonzaga and took Louden out in one of the school's plastic rowing shells.

"We took a double out and I just had to," he said. "And once I built a faster one, I had to build a faster and prettier one."

Louden's craft all feature intricate inlay work and sleek designs, but building and finishing the boats is nothing compared to the amount of work it took him to compile the plans to do it.

"I thought, 'It'll be easy, just give me a couple of weeks,' or seven or eight years."

Now Louden sells his nearly 300-page plan book for $90 each and they've been so popular he was selling his last one at the show.

In the next edition, Louden said he might even include plans for a varnish machine that he built. The device rotates the boat, not unlike a rotisserie, so that varnish can be applied evenly. A photo of the machine and the solo canoe he was working on in his shop was featured in the last issue of Wooden Boat magazine.