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Saga of a 1961 Larson Sea Lion

By Jerry McRorie

You think "Finally!" is a strange name for a boat? Read on and learn, as radio commentator Paul Harvey says, the rest of the story.

It was 2005 when my son, Steven, acquired an 18-foot Larson Sea Lion cruiser. It was a 1961 model. As I recall, he bought it for the trailer under it. Anyway, he took it to his home in Oregon and left it in his yard trailerless.

He emailed pictures of his "new" boat. My wife, Becky, laughed when she saw it. The boat was two-tone pink! I was immediately taken by the lines. I'd never seen anything like it. Steve was very busy with his job and other projects and the boat just sat for a year. I admired the boat and suggested, since he lived about 10 miles from, and a thousand feet above, the Columbia River, that he might bring the boat up to where we live on Lummi Island, Washington. We are about 75 feet from, and maybe 40 feet above, depending on the tide, the saltchuck of the San Juan Islands some 15 miles south of the Canadian border.

I suggested he bring it up and store it at our house so he'd have a boat to use when they came to visit. At first, Becky reacted negatively. "We aren't going to have a pink boat sitting in front of our house!" she said. I assured her that Steven would never part with that boat so she needn't worry.

Then, in the summer of 2006, it happened. Steven didn't have a job and didn't have the finances to fix the boat. He offered it to us free if we would buy a trailer and come and get it. I promised Becky that I’d paint the boat first thing and, seeing how much I wanted it, she gave in.

In searching for a trailer, I quickly learned that there are a lot of free trailers out there. The catch was, you had to take the boat that was sitting on them. Finally, I found a decent looking trailer on the Portland Craigslist.
It seemed like a reasonable thing to get the trailer and then go get the boat. The deal was made--cash for a trailer with no boat on it.
Then there was the 600-mile round trip down to pick up the trailer, get the boat and bring them both to Lummi Island. The trailer owner wasn't going to be home when I came to pick it up but he assured me it would be ready to go.

We found his house and the trailer was sitting there. However, it didn't seem to fit my 2-inch trailer ball. I gave up and drove several miles to the nearest hardware store where I got a 1-7/8th-inch ball. The trailer went on that one way too easy. I put the 2 inch ball back on and managed to hitch the trailer to the truck. (We learned later that the trailer tongue had been twisted so that connecting and disconnecting was a tough, two person job.)

Anyway, we headed home with our prize after a stop at a car wash to blast most of a winter's crud off the hull. I thought it was a thing of beauty and could see a quick paint job, a good motor and lots of fun on the water.

As most of you probably know, it wasn't quite that simple.
First, I found that just because it was a fiberglass boat it didn't mean it couldn't have rot in it. There were what could best be described as a V berth in the cabin. The vinyl covers were shot and the plywood they were attached to was shot and the fiberglass-covered plywood that supported them was shot.

Then there was the matter of the toilet. It was out in the cockpit in plain sight of God and most any boaters that came along. Since you can no longer pump waste over the side, it had to be
removed. (It turned out that it had never been used but we'll get to that later.) There was the remains of a fold-together "outhouse" that allowed the user of the toilet to get into the area and swing various sheets of plywood around him to put him out of sight of the boating public.

Now I had once built a 17-foot sailboat out of fiberglass so I had a bit of know-how and a strong dislike for that kind of work. But I yanked out the toilet and removed the through-hull fittings and glassed in the holes.

Then there was a gas tank to deal with. I removed the filter and put a bucket at the end of the pipe that once went to an outboard. I took my shop vacuum, worrying just a little about the possibility of a spark from the motor igniting the gasoline still in the tank, and put it over the fill pipe. Now, using the blower end of the vacuum, I pushed out several gallons of what smelled like a mixture of rotten gas and who knows what else. I figured a bit of cleaner and that tank would work fine. I measured it and decided it would hold 23 gallons of fuel.

Then I began to be concerned about registering the boat. I couldn't find a hull number anywhere. I had no bill of sale. My son just had a bill of sale from the previous owner. I called the county office that registers boats and told them my story. I was amazed to learn that it wasn't going to be any big deal to register it.

First, I gave them a bunch of money and they gave me a bunch of numbers to put on the hull. Then, after three years, if no one said "Hey, that's the boat that was stolen from me 10 years ago", I would be able to get a title for it.

Now the next dilemma: Do I put those numbers on before I paint the boat? As you might have noticed, I didn't paint the boat first thing as I had promised Becky I would do. My son, Steven, who knows how to paint, said he would come up and paint it for me but he had found a job so it wasn't going to be any time soon.

"Okay," Becky said, "I'm getting used to the pink boat. Go ahead and get the cushions and the canvas top made." So, I towed the pink boat to an upholstery shop owned by my friend Rick, who does marvelous work for a very reasonable price. Rick appreciates true beauty. Instead of laughing at the boat, he admired it and started making great suggestions. One I particularly liked was that he could give me free white vinyl that he had on hand. To set it off, he used a gray welt on it.

By this time I had located, through Fiberglassics, two other Sea Lions. One was maroon and white, the other a two-tone gray/green. Becky and I decided we'd like to copy the gray green one and chose a gray canvas to cover the boat.

Once that was installed, the Sea Lion began to look like a real boat. It was time to look for a motor! Norm Boddy of AOMC Puget Sounders, said he'd see if he could find a decent motor for the boat. Soon he was calling. David Wilson, Puget Sounders, had a line on a Merc 65 hp outboard that was in Eastern Washington and had never been in saltwater. I talked with David and arranged to have him pick up a motor for me if it checked out good.

The motor did start and pump water, and he would put it on the transom if I brought the boat down to Norm's.

It was all coming together. I had a motor and had replaced the cable steering with new Teleflex steering and, of course, a new steering wheel. Better check the gasoline in the tank and see if it was clean. Oops. It was as dirty as the rotten stuff I blew out before. Out came the galvanized tank. I would use a couple of six-gallon tanks and carry four five gallon cans of gas to replenish them.

I hauled boat and motor to Clearwater Marine in Bellingham and asked them to test compression and generally go over the motor. If it checked out, we would haul the boat over the mountains to Rufus Woods Reservoir, a 50-mile long lake between Grand Coulee Dam and Chief Joseph Dam on the Columbia River.

It was now November and the weather could be bad in the passes and on the reservoir. I thought of the story of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Didn't the storms of November come early? We drove over in 4wd for about 50 miles on snow and icy roads. Steven and his wife, Kelley, arrived shortly after us at the motel and next morning we launched the still unnamed boat. Miracle of miracles: I had remembered to put the drain plug in and the motor cranked and fired up.

We went fishing. It was a great three days!
Okay, you might be saying. What is this about naming the boat "Finally!" Lots of boat restorers have spent more than a few months getting their boats to the water.

Well, it wasn't just a few months. Steven had sent pictures of the boat to the son of the original boat owner. He wrote and said there was an interesting story connected with that boat and, if I were to call him, he'd tell it to me.

I called and here's what I learned. Norman Fieldstadt, now deceased, had bought the boat just as a shell new in 1961. He had taken it home and left for a job in Guam. When he returned, he started putting together the boat. The windows had to be cut out and the interior finished. The helm was built and the gas tank foamed in. He even designed the folding shelter and installed the toilet. In 1982 he bought a trailer for it. He later bought a motor, but never got it to run. Then he passed away and his son, Tedd, brought the boat to his house and put it up for sale. He reported people came and looked at it and laughed, but no one bought. He finally gave the whole works to a nephew who worked on the motor (to no avail) and then my son Steven got the boat, motor and trailer.

In it's 45-year life, the boat had never been licensed and never been put in the water. And that is how we came to name it "Finally!"