Topic starter
03/09/2012 1:03 pm
As steamboat lovers we all love to see a bright red paddlewheel churning a white curtain of lace as it pushes a boat along, but is a paddlewheel really necessary in the 21st century. My guess is that 95% of the traveling public could care less. I know that on my two trips on European riverboats I never heard once from fellow passengers that they missed seeing a paddlewheel. Perhaps, as river lovers, we should get over our paddlewheel fixation and let someone build an effecient boat without condeming it to the scrap heap before it ever sails. To me no paddlewheel is much better than a fake one.
03/09/2012 3:40 pm
It is definitely a good question. We are mulling over the idea of a boat tour on a nearby lake. The practical thing to do is get a nice big boat with a prop and be done with it. Then I start thinking about the much needed publicity and how eye-catching a paddlewheel is. I'm pretty sure that those 95% that came and rode the Graceful Ghost repeatedly, and still are, were there at first because of all the free publicity we got by having a paddlewheel. The steam gave us another little extra bump. The rest was up to the first hand experience, and I know that all that steam and spray "from our old paddlewheel" and the Spanish moss worked its magic. We relied on that 95% who couldn't care less. The other 5% could not have kept us in business. We left the competition in our dust, er, spray. Could we have done it without all that cutsey stuff?
Ah, there's the rub.
03/09/2012 4:03 pm
And Furthermore...
Question: Do not the European riverboats look better than they did 30 years ago, because I remember them looking like the MQ with no paddlewheel and squished down to clear the bridges? They were first class ugly. Your opinion..... Are there any European riverboats that don't look that way?
By the way, I never cared for fakes. But those fake red paddlewheels are a little bump up in the publicity. That is their reason for being. So in an offhand way, they are necessary.
03/09/2012 4:30 pm
I'd put money that Dennis Trone asked himself the same question when he was pondering another boat. It appears some 25 plus years later that he came up with the right answer. The TWILIGHT is a beautiful, functional boat that still brings people down to the river and provides a quality experience. Sure I wish there was a boiler up forward and a fore and aft compound engine turning the screw, but there are more than just a few factors that kept that from happening; labor and money being two of them!
04/09/2012 3:08 pm
Deal With It
There's another little old thing that niggles at me. Guess I'm spoiled, but I just hate, hate, hate the noise of an IC engine. I guess it doesn't bother most people, but maybe they haven't had to carry on a conversation or do a tour with that noise in the background. It is almost impossible to get away from it on a smaller boat. The boats we are looking at (with one unlikely exception) are diesel. How well they have that engine noise muffled will be very important. Almost as important as having a COI. And a toilet.