Partying with the Boat People
The annual Three Rivers Regatta is for people who play and live on the water.
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form, men's division shorts, gym shoes and bare chest.
"My Girl" blared over 3WS and the Marker-Maloney party was well into polishing off its second half-barrel of Budweiser. Twenty people had slept on the boat Friday night, Marker said, and he was expecting the same number last night. But there was still plenty of regatta food burgers, dogs, chicken, baked beans, potato salad, pretzels, chips. And they'd never run out of pickles.
When they were buying their $300 worth of provisions, Marker said, somebody bought six 64-ounce jars of Clausen kosher dill pickle spears. The regatta the boat people's equivalent of Super Bowl weekend is great, said Marker. You can stay on your boat for almost a week 'if you want. He came for the laughs, the good times and, of course, the beer running out of which was the only disaster he could imagine.
His wife, Bernice, isn't a drinker, so she stays home, Marker said, adding that his two adult children would be coming down later for the fireworks show and to keep an eye on him.
Less than a mile upstream, on the same side of the boat-jammed Allegheny River, Don and Cindy Fennell of Pittsburgh's Lincoln Park section were tying their 29-foot SeaRay 290 Sundancer to the dock at the Boardwalk.
He's a remodeling contractor and she owns a beauty salon in Baldwin called Cindy's Curl-up &Dye. But they've been living on their boat and partying till late at Donzi's on the Strip and elsewhere Downtown since Monday. "
We have a shower, don't worry," said Don Fennell, who complained that he smelled like cole slaw and French fries after having eaten at Primanti Brothers for three nights in a row.
The Fennells often sleep aboard their boat on summer Saturday nights at their home marina, up the Mon River in New Eagle, Washington County. But in order to take full advantage of the regatta, they rented a berth for a week at the marina next to Donzi's.
For last night's fireworks display, the Fennells were expecting 15 friends and family members to join them for a boat party that wouldn't end until 2 or 3 a.m.
"The regatta is the big time of the year us," he said.
The regatta doesn't just attract local boat people. They come from as far away as Cincinnati and St. Louis. But when it comes time to give out the award for most distance traveled by water to attend this year's regatta, the boat to beat is a beautiful stern-wheeler, the Jean Mary.
She steamed 4,000 miles from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., via a bunch of meandering rivers and shipping canals in a half-dozen states, not to mention a few Florida swamps and a 160-mile stretch of the Gulf of Mexico. And she took a year to get here.
The 87-by-25-foot, $2 million Jean Mary, which is docked on the Mon side of the Point, may or may not be the most expensive boat in town this weekend. But it's got to be the homiest.
Built in 1982 to resemble a Mark Twain-era paddle-wheeler, it's got six bedrooms and baths, a mahogany-paneled living room, a formal dining room, a kitchen that Julia Child could enjoy and a full-time crew of two.
Along with radar and an elevator, the Jean Mary has a 43-note calliope, which its captain, Dick Walczykowski, says can be heard three miles away. When he comes upon a small river town on the Tennessee or Ohio or the Kanawha, he cranks up the calliope, and when the locals come to check out the Jean Mary, he often invites them aboard.
Walczykowski said his diesel-powered boat cost $11,000 a month to operate and got one mile per gallon of fuel. It is owned by George Douglass, the founder of a computer software company based in Indianapolis called Computer Business Services.
Douglass was not around yesterday afternoon, but his wife, Jeanie, was in the kitchen baking cookies. "If you want to see the Jean Mary, I am the admiral," she said, adding thatr she had been the one doing the cooking, washing and ironing.