Monday, June 1, 2009

Riverboats in the stream of consciousness


I saw this story about a sunken riverboat in the Bee today--I am pretty sure that it is the same boat as one I photographed back in November while taking a cruise on the Hawaiian Chieftain. Apparently it has sunk, down to the top deck. The weird irony is that Sacramento will have a new river cruise operator, Hornblower Tours, starting next week. I wonder if they might be interested in a genuine Sacramento riverboat for their tour operations...

I have been reading a lot of old issues of Golden Notes lately, and there seem to be an awful lot of riverboat stories--no surprise for this old river town. Some are tragic, like the Washoe disaster (a boiler explosion) while some are funny, like the story of a steamboat that got stuck on a head of cabbage, and some are just weird--like the saga of the Delta King, stolen once and sunk twice. That last tidbit gives me some hope that this sad little riverboat might get back a bit of its glory someday, assuming the fates agree, and someone has the time and/or money to do it, and a bit of vision.

Speaking of riverboats and the Delta King, there will be a Riverboat Gambling event on board the Delta King this Friday night...it's not cheap but should be fun. I did a story on it for the May issue of Midtown Monthly, and plugged an edited version of the same story on Sacramento Press: http://sacramentopress.com/headline/8616/Riverboat_Gambling_on_the_Delta_King. Should be a good time.

2 comments:

Daniel Block said...

I've seen the sinking boat a few time in the last month, and was wondering about it. Thanks for this post.

Gretchen said...

I hope our the river tour operations for our city get ironed out. Thanks for the cool intel!