Just a few steps away from the Subaru Legacy with a backpack that I posted yesterday was this Toyota Previa towing a smallish boat with a vintage outboard. At first I thought it might be a Chrysler Marine outboard motor, but it looks to be an Evinrude. Too bad; that would be a great curbside find.
It’s still a bit odd to see this boat with a ladder in it. But then it was an exceptionally wet late spring this year. Let’s take a look inside.
There’s quite a variety of things there, including a kids bike and the beginnings of a garden. Aquaculture?
My guess is that they were still asleep at this hour on a cool, wet morning.
Looks like a early 1960s Johnson, made by the same company (OMC) as Evinrude.
And many times a customer would bring me a boat to repair looking like this. Most people are slobs. And I have found everything from used condoms to rotten crabs in the bilge of peoples boats.
I made up a story in my head where the owner of the Previa is a scrap metal hustler, and he found someone who said “get all this junk out of my backyard and you can have it.”
That required me to make the assumption that boat trailers in Oregon should have license plates. Since this one doesn’t, I assumed that this used to be a boat, but it hasn’t been used as such for so long of a period that it’s become scrap.
The title sounds like a masterpiece of art:
Girl with a Pearl Earring
Boy with Apple
Toyota Previa with Boat
Despite our high regard for art I think this mobile installation will be mobile for some time yet.
You reminded me of an actual artwork I saw at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art a few years ago — a photorealistic painting of a Ford Gran Torino station wagon in a suburban driveway. A quick Google search reveals it was “Alameda Gran Torino” by Robert Bechtle.
https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/74.87/
It, and his other works, are pretty amazing, really. They’re very nearly indistinguishable from photographs unless you look really closely.
It’s a 1960 Johnson Sea Horse 18, same as Evinrude but for color and hood design.
I worked as an outboard mechanic during summers off from teaching. Both were made by OMC, which was later bought out by Bombardier due to the Ficht fuel injection (a German design flawed by lack of development) debacle. Johnson was eliminated first due to cost cutting and the general decline of 2-stroke outboard sales, and 2 yrs ago Evinrude was also dropped (RIP) when Bombadier decided to shed outboard production and closed their Evinrude Wisconsin plant for good just before outboard sales went through the roof due to Covid and boating being the perfect social-distancing recreation. As the inventor of the mass produced outboard, Ole Evinrude must have been spinning in his grave. I’ve had Evinrudes for 50 years and every one was great (I avoided the Ficht models lol).
Trivia: In this period, Consumer Reports recommended Johnson over the otherwise identical Evinrudes because the cowl design allowed easier access to the spark plugs. According to them; I wouldn’t know.
It does have a certain “get all of this stuff out of here, now” vibe to it.
So, technically it’s not an Evinrude…but I did run across this 1913 Evinrude ad just this morning on another site. That’s kind of a 50% CC effect, right?
Lileks has tons of interesting stuff, doesn’t he?
This person is no doubt living in anticipation of the second-happiest day of his life. Which, I have been told, is the day a boat-owner sells his boat.
S.S. Floatsam calling! The amount of “stuff” on top of the dashboard roughly matches the other “stuff” in the boat. I hope the owner straps that ladder to the roof rack and throws a tarp over the boat with tie downs.
It’s not just small, it’s “smallish”.