TOPIC: Glassic Spotlight: Cadillac Sea Lark

** This thread discusses the content article: Glassic Spotlight: Cadillac Sea Lark **

Nice article, Cool boat. Always my favorite!

BTW- The 'Lost' one is in my basement- And, I won't take a penny less than $350 for it. Sorry, Jamil..

That's pretty steep, Andrew.

Would you take $325 and a baseball signed by the 1927 Yankees? That's the best I can do.

Jamil,
Nice article. Love that boat. Also love my Wagemaker Clipper. It's nice having the fiberglass hull and Mahogany top. I guess you could say the best of both worlds.

Bob

Good article, however the Sea Lark was formally introduced at the New York Boat Show in January 1956; Brooks Stevens was contracted sometime in 1954 to design the 1956 Johnson Javelin and Evinrude Lark which were announced in September 1955. They needed something absolutely new for the New York Boat Show, thus the design and building of the Sea Lark. Check out the following period article from Sports Illustrated with a great write-up on the Sea Lark and its impact on the boating industry:

sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1132109/index.htm


The following image is from the aforementioned Sports Illustrated article.

Notice in the Evinrude advertisements the boat has the "Evinrude Lark" decal on the side and the Evinrude "E" on the front deck; the 1957 Cadillac brochure cover shows the boat as the "Sea Lark" with the "E" on the deck; the 1957 Cadillac Magazine ad calls the boat the "Javelin" and shows the boat with this decal. My guess is the boat was the "Evinrude Lark" for the '56 boat show, after which Cadillac secured the manufacturing rights and printed their brochures in late 1956 for the '57 boat show circuit. Probably used retouched publicity photos from Evinrude. Likely later on in 1957 they changed the name to "Javelin". But this is a just educated guessing, someone with expertise on the Lark can set this straight.

I stand corrected. I am humbled.

Great article on the boat show. That really was the dawn of Fiberglassics.

It'd be nice if we could get permission to post that article here as a foundation piece.

The Sea Lark is something to see - even in the rough as it is.

I believe this is the 1958 Design Stevens speaks of - so far nobody has come up with one although it's rumored they actually built two as with the Sea Lark. Although those look like 59's on the back.
I love this illustration...count the people on that thing and then try to imagine how big it'd have to be.

Having spent some time looking at the existing boat, I'm sure all of us who've seen it agree that it's fantastic. The private collector who owns it hopes to restore it and has had it inspected and an assesment for that at the Antique Boat Center. The hull is of course, wood. ( The original Evinrude Larks had wood plank Century hulls but when the design was licensed to Cadillac, they recreated the hull in plywood - which is what the only existing boat has ). The current owner plans to safely store the original hull and reproduce the hull in glass in order to have a functioning display boat. A plywood restoration would be more costly and limit the usage of the boat.

We shot a video about the gentleman who actually owned the other known boat (and tried to launch it) and a friend of his who has seriously tried to track it down for many years now.

The video is available on my Series DVD and on the Boats In The Belfry DVD.

Here's another great article from Sports Illustrated that really captures the 'Dawn of Fiberglass':

sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1131816/index.htm

I believe the timeline of Evinrude concept boats is:

1956- Evinrude Lark
1957- Flying Saucer
1958- Starflite or Famille(?) stationwagon
1959- Housefloat

I find the stationwagon interesting- this was introduced with the 1958 50 HP Starflite, these images are the few I have found and are from the Brooks Stevens website:

I guess I don't understand why we're doing this "The Private Collector Who Owns It" dance when it's common knowledge KevFin Mueller owns it. It's clearly highlighted on his site www.boatsinthebelfry.com

Don't plan to step on anyone's toes when they started the dance. If they called a 2-step then 2-step it is (or was). I commend this site for expanding the topic from Kevin's long established article in his ebook about the boats (at his site for free). Having permanent archives about these things here is very good and a proprietary article by the site is great because a lot of new visitors may not search further for info.

To be completely honest, I didn't mention KevFin because his private collection, while well known and well documented, is still a private collection.

I'm not sure it's my place to talk about his personal possessions without asking him first.

Still, Boats in the Belfry is an institution and arguably the best and rarest collection of fiberglassics on the planet, and I personally urge anyone who hasn't been there yet to go check it out.

With that out of the way, that station wagon is too cool! Put some wood paneling on the side, throw a couple surf boards on top and you've got "Frankie and Annette Go Boating"

I've never posted a video in the forums, so let's see if I can't screw this up.

This video is video of the New York Boat Show mentioned in the article and it features footage of the Sea Lark.

Credit goes to Geoff Hacker over at www.ForgottonFiberglass.com for digging it up and pointing it out to me. Thanks Geoff.

Alright, someone will have to explain to me how to do simple tasks like adding video... Until then here's a good old fashioned link.

www.forgottenfiberglass.com/?p=10847

The video is at the bottom of the page.

Lets see if this works-

On the video on forgottenfiberglass I clicked on the youtube icon which takes you to the video on the youtube website. Once there I used the "share" option, copied and pasted the link into the reply above.

Thank you aquatech, +1 Karma

I love that video...by golly.