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Sunshots by Michael Hall — Al Olsen talks about work he has put into a 1929 Chris Craft Triple he is restoring.
Al Olsen’s hobby doesn’t take shape overnight. It takes a year or more to see the end result of his labor of love, but when each classic, wooden boat is restored, Olsen can mark off another work of art completed.
“I can’t just sit around and not do anything, or play golf every single day,” Olsen said on a recent Friday standing inside the garage/workshop at his home in the Reed Creek community.
He may not play golf everyday, but he had just finished a round that afternoon and needed little coaxing to talk about the 24-foot, 1929 Chris Craft Triple slowly transforming from a deteriorating wooden shape into a fully functioning and meticulously restored antique boat.
“All the skin is new on this one,” Olsen said as he ran his hand on the smooth, varnished wooden surface of the boat.
The exterior of the vessel looked as though the boat was ready for the water. The interior was empty, exposing the frame that Olsen had spent months reworking and restoring so the boat could once again be lake worthy. A Chrysler 440 cubic-inch engine rested in the middle, a hulking motor Olsen said is sure to make the boat a blast to drive.
“That will move it along pretty well,” he said.
Olsen’s background as a home builder in the Atlanta area and later in Northeast Georgia with Olsen Crafted Homes gave him some basic woodworking and construction skills that he applies to his hobby of restoring antique boats.
He came to Georgia in 1978 after working in California at a nuclear power plant. Olsen visited the Atlanta area and said he never looked back.
“I really was smitten by it,” he said.
After working with a construction company building homes in metro Atlanta, he left the hustle and bustle for quieter living in Hart County and continued building through his own company and eventually retired.
In those days building houses around the lake, Olsen fell in love with the craftsmanship, artistic touches, and history of the boats. Modern boats just aren’t the same, Olsen said.
“The big interest for me is to preserve the history,” he said.
Part of that is the experience of riding in a wooden boat originally built nearly 100 years ago.
“I really enjoy giving people rides,” Olsen said. “I liken it to riding on a Harley. You have a sound and a sensation you just don’t get in a fiberglass boat.”
The hull and bow shapes and the placement of the engines create a unique experience that Olsen said is immediately noticeable.
“You see one of these coming on the lake, you know it’s a wooden boat,” he said.
Olsen has restored more than a dozen boats and owns five. He shows them annually at the Hart County Chamber of Commerce’s Antique Boat Show on Lake Hartwell, which Olsen organizes with the Blue Ridge Chapter of the Antique Classic Boat Society. This year’s event, scheduled for April, was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Olsen said when he retired, he was faced with filling his time with something other than work. Restoring the boats keeps him feeling young, he said.
“I get a sense of accomplishment from it,” Olsen said. “Plus it keeps me from just watching TV or Netflix all day long.”
The Chris Craft currently in the garage will be replaced immediately when it is completed by a Hacker Craft, which at the moment looks like it was built from the wood of an old deck torn from a house. The vessel has no engine, no electrics, no seats and no upholstery or anything else. It is literally an old wooden shell into which Olsen plans to breathe new life.
“This is what we start with,” he said, looking at the Hacker Craft under a carport beside the workshop. “It looks like roadkill.”
For most boats, like the Hacker Craft that he bought from a man in Michigan from whom he has purchased boats before, Olsen has to have a trailer custom built.
He then painstakingly takes the boat a part, stripping it down to its frame, taking pictures of each piece so he can remember how it was removed and therefore how it should be installed or rebuilt.
“I’d never remember in a year how that all came a part, to put it back together,” Olsen said.
At older than 70 years old, Olsen said he has no plans to quit restoring boats anytime soon. Once it is a part of your life, he said, it always will be.
“I started doing the antique boats as a hobby and just kind of got hooked on it,” Olsen said.