How to Build an Ark

Sonny Bishop with his handmade pontoon boat, on the Beaufort River. Circa 1973.

When it comes to wild hairs and grand ideas, my father was king. He could get away with this because, truly, he could do just about anything. He called it Frogmore Engineering (“it doesn’t have to be pretty…it just has to work”).

At any rate, in my formative years it was not unheard of for him to be sitting at the breakfast table, get “that look” on his face, and announce: “I think I’ll knock that wall down today”.

And by suppertime it would be gone.

This (as well as many other Wild Hairs) happened several times throughout my childhood, in spite of my very wise teenage warnings (which my parents, inexplicably, never listened to) that a house without walls was just a big box and is that what we wanted to live in? It didn’t matter. We were living in Jericho; walls tumbling down all over the place.

So no one in our family was very surprised when he started making noises about building a boat. This Wild Hair germinated in the early 1970s when money was somewhat scarce at our house but grand ideas were not. At that time, catamaran pontoon deck boats were very popular. He watched them putt-putting along in the Beaufort River and thought it would be great to own one until one day, while waiting on the Woods Bridge, he watched one cross the wake from a shrimp boat. The wave crashed over the deck, taking several objects with it, including an ice chest. While the basic design seemed functional enough, they obviously didn’t take rough water well because of the tube shaped pontoons. Plus, they were a little on the slow side. And what fun is that?

But he decided that these drawbacks were nothing a little Frogmore Engineering couldn’t correct. So he went to work.

Using wood, he created a frame for the pontoon that was more boat-shaped instead of making the pontoons the traditional tube shape. He felt that this would make the boat more stable and would allow for more speed so the boat could plane. The frame was then covered with an aluminum alloy called Duralumin which was a product used in the construction of freight hauling semi-trailers. He found a factory in Savannah that manufactured the metal in large, 8-foot wide rolls. They were very accommodating and cut off a 40 foot section for him. Using tin shears, he cut the metal and shaped it around the wooden frame, then used pop rivets to secure the joints.

The next step was the fun part. He purchased 10 gallons of foam and poured it into the hollow pontoon to firm it up and, in his words, “make it sink-proof”. We had a lot of fun squirting that foam all over the place.

Once the pontoons were built, he moved on to the deck which was made of 3/4 marine plywood, then added a cabin that, by design, resembled a shrimp boat cabin. A 2x12 oak board on the rear of the pontoons held the 100 horsepower Evinrude motor. My mother joined in the fun by making cushions for the benches inside the cabin.

While Yard Farm has a boat landing, it wasn’t nearly big enough to launch a house boat so he re-designed an old farm trailer and installed a hand-operated winch in order to move the boat to the boat landing on Lady's Island where she had her maiden voyage. 

And how did it work out? Well, I’ll let him tell you:

“The boat handled better than I hoped for. It would plane with the throttle about 2/3 and had a speed of about 25 mph. I tried it going across a boat wake and it crossed it fine with no water coming on the deck.”
Mission accomplished.

Unfortunately, life got in the way and we didn’t use the boat that much. It wasn’t the easiest thing to maneuver into the water, so that was somewhat of a deterrent to Saturday outings on the boat. It took two people to load the boat on the trailer since any breeze would mis-align it and, given that his only helper was my brother – all 100 pounds of him, it's pretty evident why it didn't get out on the water much. 

The irony is that 20 years later the commercial sports boat manufacturers started selling a similar design with boat shaped twin hulls and a flat area in between to enhance its ability to plane. Too bad he didn't patent that design......

So while we teased my dad sometimes about his Wild Hairs, I’m glad he got them. Every one he’s ever had has produced some kind of adventure, memory, experience, or education for us. He taught us the fine science of Frogmore Engineering and, relying on that and my mother’s promise that we can accomplish anything if we have a book, my brother and I have successfully pursued some Wild Hairs of our own.

But that’s a blog post for another day.