For Martha Stewart, Jimmy Buffett, and Geraldo Rivera, there’s only one boat.

by Amy Louise Barnett

Geraldo Rivera and daughter Sol frolic on his private island in Puerto Rico with their Picnic Boat moored offshore.

On any given day, New Yorkers stuck during their commute on the George Washington Bridge can glance down to see Geraldo Rivera in a Hinckley Picnic Boat on his commute to the 79th Street Boat Basin. “I have a permanent slip there,” the reporter says. “I make the trip by boat at least 50 days a year from the other side of the bridge,” from his home in Edgewater, New Jersey.

“It’s less than 15 minutes. I love going down the West Side Highway and racing the traffic.” Asked about gas mileage, Rivera says, “I get a mile and a half per gallon in the Hinckley—you’re pushing a lot of boat.” Then he adds, “If you own a Hinckley, the difference between $4 and $5 per gallon for diesel…” Good point.

Rivera has taken Belle—named for his 15-year-old daughter—as far as Puerto Rico from Maine. “I have a little island a few miles off the coast of Puerto Rico—it has no name, yet. I may have the only Hinckley in Puerto Rico. All winter I went between the island and St. Thomas. The tradewinds were a little too much for the boat.”

He figures he’s got “more miles in rough seas than any other Hinckley owner. I’ve driven it everywhere. I have the only soft-top Hinckley ever made.”

Rivera bought the two-year-old yacht in 2000 in the Carolinas. “I think a pilot had owned it—it was in disrepair. I shipped it to Maine.” He made several visits to Southwest Harbor to monitor repairs and upgrades. “It had a 350 [hp] engine in it—I had a 425 put in.”

Who’s been on his Hinckley? “I give everybody my New York Harbor tour.” Guests run the gamut from Cheech Marin to Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, the foreign minister of Afghanistan…as well as the camera crew from his television show. “There was a major Staten Island crash. I just jumped on my boat with the camera crew, and we were the first ones on the scene.”

Hinckleys crowd the Kennebunk River.

The Hinckley serves Rivera well navigating New York Harbor. “The draft is only 18 inches—there’s so much flotsam and jetsam in the harbor, the jet drive is ideal. The New Jersey side of the Hudson is very shoaly. And that Kevlar hull—I’ve run into telephone poles!”

From the start, a Hinckley yacht has been designed to be something special. “Founder Henry Hinckley built them very much like working lobster boats…but they took to the high end of the market,” says Phil Bennett from the Southwest Harbor showroom. “He was a thinker, an inventor, a tinkerer—one of the first to put a diesel engine in a motorboat. The watershed moment came in the mid-fifties, when they started building fiberglass hulls with a wooden boat inside. You didn’t have to stuff caulking in the seams each year; painted, the hull looked like beautiful, shiny wood.”

Geraldo Rivera often crosses the Hudson River in his Hinckley, Belle, from his New Jersey home on his commute to Manhattan.

The 36-foot Picnic Boat debuted in 1989. “It turned the boating world upside down,” Bennett says. “The patented resonant fusion process gave us the ability to build a boat lighter, stronger, stiffer, and more impact-resistant.” There’s another big advantage: “It was one of the first small power boats to successfully utilize the waterjet propulsion system; it has no propellers and no rudder under the water to become tangled in fishing nets. The diesel engine sucks up water through the bottom of the boat and shoots it out through a transom—it works a lot like a giant squid, in that you shoot water in the opposite direction of where you want to go. Because you don’t have these things sticking down under the boat, you can go in shallower waters.”

Rivera can’t say enough about Hinckley performance. “We own the night. My sons and I brought the boat down from Marion, Massachusetts, to New Jersey. We had no visibility until Throgs Neck Bridge, but between the radar and the GPS, we navigated with confidence. That’s 210 miles. I don’t think a lot of people are confident enough in their equipment…in nighttime fog, it really is extremely versatile. It’s a value even at a half a million.”

We thought you bought it used…?

“Yeah, but by the time you get done with everything, they’re all half a million.”

Even Jimmy Buffett has a Hinckley sloop, Chill, moored in Margaritaville.

Has he been to Maine, besides supervising the rebuilding of the Hinckley? “Many times. I love the Maine coast. It’s one of the classic cruising grounds. For two months a year it’s the nicest place on earth. I learned how to drive in the fog there.” He remembers “the cold water. You tend to swim very fast.” A favorite local eatery of his is Amigo’s Mexican restaurant in Portland. “Fantastico.” Asked about cocktails aboard Belle, Rivera says, “I’ve been very rum-oriented lately. It’s a transition from Tanqueray gin. I went to gin from tequila: Navigation and tequila are not [good shipmates].”

Rivera also owns a sailboat, a Sparkman & Stephens 70-foot ketch, Voyager. “I always bring the Hinckley to where Voyager is. Belle is the commuter, the vehicle to come and go—it’s so handy, so maneuverable, you can park it on a dime. I think it’s the best-handling small boat anywhere. You pay for that, but you get a superb vessel that even a dork like me can maintain. It’s so resilient and forgiving.”

And made to each owner’s specifications. Hinckley exec Phil Bennett recalls, “We had a fellow come in who always wanted to learn to play a keyboard instrument. We built one into his dining table—you open up some leaves, and there’s a beautiful keyboard, wired into the sound system. By the time he got back to the Pacific Northwest, he was a pretty accomplished musician.”

Speaking of musicians, “We had quite a time picking the name of Jimmy Buffett’s boat. It was about the time License to Chill came out—so the boat ended up being called Chill. We positioned his berth so he can look up at the stars at night.”

Martha Stewart

Another high-profile Picnic Boat owner is Martha Stewart, who enjoys the waters off her Seal Harbor property (see entry from her blog).

“The exterior hull of Martha Stewart’s boat was matched exactly to an eggshell from a particular kind of chicken that lays a beautiful beige egg. She is the doyenne of color,” Bennett says.

Then, too, there’s word of mouth, especially among those who don’t shy away from speaking up. “Gerald Shargel—he’s the attorney who defended John Gotti—just got one,” Rivera says. “Jerry fell in love with mine. He lives in Sag Harbor, Long Island.”

“It’s a very interactive process,” Bennett says of customizing vessels to personalities. “It’s more fun for us to build boats for people we know are going to get so much enjoyment out of them.

“You can spend anywhere from $350,000 to $6 million. The Picnic Boats are around $700,000. Each boat is built to reflect the owner’s wishes—it takes six months to two years, and you can come up here and see everything taking shape just for you. We’ve delivered them as far away as Japan and Germany. It’s not unusual for us to get a postcard from an owner that says, ‘I’m in Bali right now,’ or ‘I’ve just finished touring the entire Mediterranean.’ They’re all part of our family—we who build them have an interest in how they’re being looked after, where they’re going.”

About these very special requests…

“We’ve built a special head [lavatory] for a cat who was going to live onboard. And we’ve created a special mounting for a Picasso pottery plate, on a bulkhead in an alcove, with lighting.

“We’ve built special wine lockers, special racks and lockers for golf clubs. We’ve reproportioned parts of our boats so they were more user-friendly for people with disabilities or ‘outside the normal range of human dimension.’ We had quite a tall fellow once—we lowered the sole of the boat about two inches.”

Rivera’s most memorable encounter with the strange—aside from Al Capone’s vault—occurred when he was in Florida visiting his mom. “We stayed in this one spot where a manatee came and adopted us. When we got on board, he’d stick his head up and open his mouth and expect you to run the hose in his mouth.” Fortunately, because of the waterjet propulsion system, “God forbid you run into one, there are no scars on a manatee from the Hinckley.”

Sounds like a good time for a Picnic.

© 2008 Portland Magazine Colin Sargent, Editor & Publisher editor@portlandmonthly.com Click here to subscribe