A wooden cruiser, still earning her keep on the water.
Minnow is a 1964 Chris-Craft Sea Skiff — the Sea Hawk Sedan Cruiser, thirty-eight feet of lapstrake-planked Philippine mahogany and marine fir plywood over steam-bent white-oak frames. Chris-Craft marketed her as "a great fishing boat, a generous six-sleeper, a luxury cruiser loaded with extras" — and sixty years on, that's still a fair description.
She rides on a round, deep-bilge Sea Skiff hull: keel-built, copper-riveted, with silicon-bronze and brass fastenings throughout, freeboard carried high forward to throw spray clear, and broad teakwood covering boards along the sheer. Below, a private forward stateroom, an all-electric galley, an enclosed head with shower, and a convertible dinette in the deckhouse — the layout Chris-Craft's own brochure called "everything you need for relaxed cruising and entertaining."
Twin Chris-Craft 283-cubic-inch V8s sit amidships under the cockpit sole, hydraulic clutches on Morse controls. She's a displacement-era cruiser: unhurried, sea-kindly, and built to a standard the fiberglass age mostly forgot. Today she lives on the Columbia River out of Portland, Oregon — running, loved, and steadily being put back to original.
