Wooden wonderland

• By GEORGE MORRIS
• Advocate News Features staff
• Published: Oct 9, 2009

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When choosing a boat to feature, organizers of this weekend’s Madisonville Wooden Boat Festival thought small. But participants seem to be thinking big.

So many large boats have been signed up that the available waterfront filled up two weeks early, which will give the 20th anniversary show a different look when it runs from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday on the Tchefuncte River in downtown Madisonville. Cutting off entries that early is unprecedented, said Jay Martin, executive director of the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Maritime Museum, which runs the show.

“We have so many boats that are trying to come this year, and so many of them are very, very large,” Martin said. “Our average size of a boat is usually around 40 feet or under, and this time they’re substantially larger than that. So, for people who really love boats, this is going to be quite a show.”

In addition to about 100 wooden watercraft, nine bands will perform on two stages. There will be a classic car cruise-in, arts and crafts, a children’s village and an always-amusing “Quick ’n’ Dirty Boat-Building Contest.” Contestants have 14 hours to build a boat out of materials that are provided, then compete in a race that requires both rowing and sailing.

The boat featured on the 20th anniversary poster is the Atchafalaya Basin lake skiff, a small, maneuverable boat whose shallow draft allows it in to small bayous. The lake skiff is a popular product of the Maritime Museum’s wooden boat-building program.

“Trinity Marine, our local shipbuilder, is at least temporarily suspending business, so the Maritime Museum is the only boatbuilder left here in Madisonville, which traditionally has 200 years of ship and boat building here,” Martin said. “So, we chose our own boats to celebrate what the museum does best, which is educate about the state’s maritime history.”

Of course, every boat has its own history. Take the Tchefuncte Queen, the 65-footer owned by Kenny McWilliams of Madisonville. It was built in 1941 for Louisiana Land Exploration to perform seismographic work. After the United State entered World War II at the end of that year, the Navy took it to search for German submarines off Biloxi, McWilliams said.

McWilliams’ father bought the boat in the early 1960s. Except for a paint job and canvas top being replaced by a wooden one, the Tchefuncte Queen looks just like it did in the 1940s.

So do the two original diesel engines. Because parts are no longer available, McWilliams had to get a local machine shop to rebuild a clutch, which is the only change he has made to the engines.

The Tchefuncte Queen was built by the Covacevich Shipyard in Biloxi, which built boats from 1896 until 1982.

“They’re tremendously constructed, most of them, out of tidewater red cypress, which is a commodity that’s just about impossible to get nowadays,” McWilliams said. “About the only way you can get that is to pull up a sinker log out of the lake.”

Dr. Hypolite Landry of Baton Rouge is bringing his 45-foot yacht fisherman, named Moon River, to the show. It was custom made in 1947 for a New Orleanian, Richard Foster, and Landry bought it in 1974 and thoroughly renovated it.

“He obviously must have been pretty wealthy at that time. This was a top-of-line boat in 1947,” Landry said. “He kept it down at Lafitte. The front state room, the captain stayed in there, and he and his wife would stay in the middle state room. He would fish every Friday, Saturday and Sunday.