It is a beautiful day for a boat ride. The calm water is only slightly ruffled by the hint of a breeze. Cottony clouds drift lazily in a blue sky that, even as the last tour of the day pushes off from the dock, still lacks the threatening gray undertones of an approaching summer-afternoon thunderstorm. Like scenes pictured on postcards of old, the boat’s passengers – some from as far away as England – are smiling in anticipation of touring the “Venice of America.”
“I’ll be your skipper, an announcer for the tour,” says Dan Lancaster, nattily attired in a broad-brim hat, white shirt and khaki pants with wide, school-bus-yellow, measuring-tape suspenders. “Never sit in the front sear of the tour oat,” he says with a smile to a photographer seated nearby. “They pick on you the whole trip.” And with those words to the wise and a hint of the wisecracks later to come. Lancaster nudges the boat forward and launches into a narration that has been ongoing on the Winter Park Chain of Lakes since 1938, when the Scenic Boat Tour first pulled away from shore. That was when the telephone numbers was listed as MI 4-4056 and children younger than 12 rode for .75 cents and adults for $1.50.
A Winter Park Institution nearly three-quarters of a century later, the tour has become something of a cultural icon for Winter Park. It was started by Walter Meloon of Pine Castle Boat Company, which would later become Correct Craft – something of an icon itself in the boat-building industry. Along to celebrate the maiden voyage of the 25-passenger cruise boat were city officials and business people. Since then, current owner Ron Hightower figures more than a million people have enjoyed this off – the beaten -avenue view of Winter Park finery – both natural and man made. What’s the cost of a ticket? Today, it’s $12 (or 20 cents a minute) for adults and $6 for ages 2-11 for the tours that leave every hour on the hour from 10am to 4pm, every day except Christmas. Aside from the beauty of a lakeside view of some of Winter Park’s priciest mansions, the cost is surely one of the reasons that locals return again and again with visiting friends and relatives in tow.
Hidden from view, sandwiched between a couple condominiums at the foot of a small hill, the establishment at the eastern most point on Winter Park’s Morse Boulevard offers visitors a different perspective from which to view the world. The vista is one of calm waters encircled by luscious lawns leading to grand estates; a little bit of paradise that seems worlds away from the daily grind. It is, states an old travel brochure, the “only way to see the real beauty of Winter Park.”
Sitting as it does, snug on the shores of Lake Osceola, the Scenic Boat Tour offers such an escape in the form of a 12-mile, one-hour excursion though the three largest of the six lakes in the Winter Park chain. It is a chance to sit back and relax and hear something of what makes Winter Park, well, Winter Park. (Don’t forget the sunscreen)
LANDMARKS AND LUMINARIES
Passengers gain a lakeside perspective on such “landmarks” as the Albin Polasek Museum and Sculpture Gardens, Rollins College, Dinky Dock, Kraft Azalea Gardens, the Alabama Hotel (now condominiums), the Isle of Sicily, and the sites where Casa Feliz (where another mansion-in-progress takes shape) and the Seminole Hotel once stood. Privacy is the policy when it comes to current homeowners, but the names of former owners linked to the word “estate” include Sinclair, Walgreen, Genius, McKean, Brewer, Nelson, Bush (Archibald and Edyth) and, more recently, Rogers (as Mister) and former Orlando Magic player Horace Grant.
Then a long list of luminaries to have lived or visited the shores of lakes Osceola, Virginia and Maitland share the boat-tour spotlight with some natural stars – birds of paradise, several varieties of bamboo, Egyptian papyrus, plumbago, shell ginger, peace lilies, Hawaiian ti plants, banana trees, Spanish moss draped live oaks, cypress trees and split-leaf philodendron, (which as Lancaster points out, means friend or lover of trees in Greek, which may explain the plant’s tree-hugging tendencies).
TOUR GUIDE TRADITIONS
Like all nine of the tour guides, Lancaster is retired. While his engineering background may be the furthest thing from gardens, flowers and animals, through a process of “osmosis” – and sometimes gentile, sometimes brutal, correction from a “plant person” – Lancaster can talk flora and fauna with the best of them. Some of his most memorable times, Lancaster says, have involved natural spectacles such as the fish fights be has witnessed on Lake Maitland between cormorants, ospreys and an eagle, of the time on Lake Virginia when a”bald eagle came out of nowhere, goes into the water and comes out with a bass.”
Along the way, Lancaster points out Alligator Cove, where alligators from all six of the lakes in the chain used to meet to mate. That was before 150 of them were removed and relocated to the Everglades, Lancaster says. “Ten years ago, you’d see a gator a month.” He tells passengers. Perhaps one of the more unusual sights on a recent outing was a paddleboarder executing a headstand on his board to the delight of the boat’s passengers. Along with the points of interest boat skippers are expected to cover, Lancaster takes advantage of the fact that they are free to, as Hightower says, “add their own corny jokes.” Consider these tidbits from a recent tour:
- Upon passing elephant ears in the Fern Canal: “This is where the green elephants get their ears from.”
- Advising passenger to watch their heads as the boat beads under the Palmer Avenue bridge: “This is why we don’t have tops on our boats.”
- Explaining the reason why the “sleeping hibiscus” along the Venetian Canal never opens: “It’s a no-wake zone.”
NO 2 TOURS ALIKE
It is this lightheartedness and the fact that no two boat rides are the same that has kept Dan Lancaster behind the wheel of one of the five 18-passenger pontoon boats for 10 years. “We’ve always hired seniors,” Hightower says. “The guys here are what really make the tour.” Some of the drivers “have been here maybe 15 years,” Hightower says. “Generally, once they start, they’re here.”
Even at the comparatively young age of 41, that’s how it has worked out for Hightower, who began helping out – “gassing up boats and stuff” – when he was 12 and his grandfather, Stan Smith, was driving boats and working in the store that sells tickets, water and snacks. At 26, the University of Central Florida business major bought the business with his grandfather, who is now 97, from Wanda and Frank Salerno, who, as luck would have it, happened to be living next door to the previous owner, Jim Houtenville, when he decided to sell.
The Salernos operated the boat tour for 15 years before selling to Hightower and Smith in 1995. “It really was my baby,” Wanda Salerno says. Though she spends most of her time involved with the Winter Park Chamber of Commerce promoting tourism, she can still be found at least one day a week – “and if Ron goes out of town” – taking phone calls and chatting with guests waiting for the next tour. The boat tour is “what got me involved with tourism. I love Winter Park, and I want everybody to come and see it.”
YOU CAN’T BEAT A BOAT RIDE
For some, it is simply the pure joy of a boat ride that brings them to the end of Morse Boulevard. “I’m a water person,” says Rich Pontynen, who came from Stuart specifically to go on the boat tour. A walk on Park Avenue with a stop for some French pastries is a bonus, but “whenever we go to visit various locations, if there’s a boat tour available, we’ll take it. For a different perspective, “there’s nothing like a boat ride,” his wife, Angie adds.
Whatever it is that draws visitors to the Scenic Boat tour, there is no doubt that a warm – weather and otherwise – welcome awaits them as they make their way down the steps, past the “Buoys” and “Gulls” restrooms, to the covered deck to eagerly await the pontoon boat that will soon appear, gliding effortlessly across the still waters of Lake Osceola.
By: Tesha Daniels – [email protected]
