Virtual Museum Tour Of Small Watercraft At The Antique Boat Museum

Years ago, my son Floyd R Turbo, Jr. and I checked out a skiff from the Dr. Fred Thomas Skiff Livery for a spin on the bay. It was a beautiful sunny day with a little chop on the water, nothing you couldn’t overcome with a few strokes from your oars. My son was about 12 at the time and he wanted to do the rowing which he did messing about the docks nearby and checking out the waterfront. We had driven up from Atlanta headed to Canada probably to pick up or deliver a boat and we had stopped here as I was a member of the museum. He’s 27 now and still remembers that day. Serendipitously, we ran into mutual friends Bob and Ann Lindley who were on their 50 ft? Hatteras tied up at the cruiser pier right by the museum in the midst of doing the “Loop”. What a treat, they invited my son and I for a steak dinner on the fantail while overlooking the museum grounds. We reminisced about Dr Fred Thomas, a mutual friend who was a well known plastic surgeon who died suddenly while out jogging in his Gainesville, Ga. neighborhood. Dr Fred owned a 1959 vintage 23′ Lyman which he took on the St John’s River cruise many times. One year he brought Brian Redman, a British race car driver from Burnley Lancashire England whom he operated on reconstructing his face. A side note about Redman, 0n the first day of practice for the first race of the 1977? season, at St.Jovite, Canada his new car took off at 160 mph went 40 feet in the air and turned over, landing upside down. Redman suffered a broken neck (C1), fractured shoulder and sternum, plus bruising of the brain. The ambulance blew a tire on the way to hospital. Redman was declared dead. It took him 9 months to recover.
Another mutual friend of Dr Fred, Martin Zonnenberg, was instrumental in developing a “chicken mcnugget” process donated the skiff livery building in Dr Fred’s name. They created the “Chicken Pluckers Yacht Club” in Gainesville, the chicken processing capital of Georgia. Some of the St John’s river cruisers were accepted as members of the “yacht club” not knowing this was just a means of getting them to buy the round of drinks when the new member was presented a burgee with a rooster on it, lol.

But I digress, it was well worth the membership to travel 1000 miles from Atlanta to row the beautiful blue waters of the St Lawrence River and the Thousand Islands. I do hope my son will take his son someday, if he can ever find the right woman (“they’re all crazy” so he says) or even take his dear old dad.