It was a September Sunday, bright, sunshine, hot and windless. About 10 percent
of the spectators were Michigan millionaires or their families. The rest, assorted
sailboat enthusiasts.
They were gathered on Canadian waters in the middle of Lake St. Clair for the first
race of the 1978 series of matches for the Canada's Cup.
It was to an upstart Hamilton yacht called Evergreen versus a locall brilliant
performer from Detroit called Agape.
The Americans were anxious to see blood spilled, figuratively that is. The Canadians, reserved
as usual, revelled in their underdog role. Canadians had challenged before in good boats
and lost. Was this going to be different?
Starting time neared. Two cannon shots from the big race committee boat
signalled a delay. There was not enough wind to carry away the smoke.
It was going to be a long wait - a good opportunity for water fun,
sailor socializing, boat-watching, bikini-spotting, swimming, even a little lunching and drinking.
Sailboats of all shapes, sizes and vintages, run-a-bouts with throaty
exhausts, 50- and 60-foot gin palaces with white vested waiters serving canopied guests - all
milled within a mile of the starting buoy.
It was in this setting that Canada's latest (and probably most novel)
contribution to the powerboat field made its entrée.
It was the Mega Put Put - that should be Putt Putt, but there's
no law that says good yacht designers also have to be be good spellers.
The Put Put is a product of C&C Yachts Ltd., Oakville, Ontario, now one
of the world's largest international manufacturers of off-shore sailing yachts - with plants in
Canada, the United States and Germany.
It's not surprising, therefore, that the president off C&C, George H.
Cuthbertson, should want to be in his company's newest product in that milieu, that particular
September day. After all, the challenging yacht, Evergreen, was also a C&C product,
the most sophisticated sailing thing the firm had ever produced.
But was that really Big George in a power boat called Put Put, that went putt-putt-putt at about
five or seven knots, and which had a canopy with a fringe?
"Ye gods!"and laughter was the initial reaction from the hundreds present
who recognized Cuthbertson, his wife Helen and at the helm, Erik Bruckmann, the master builder
and director of custom operations for C&C.
Then curiosity too hold. Everyone wanted to look at the Put Put. "How
comfortable . . . Cute . . . Just the thing for sailboat watching . . . How much? . . . Great
for fishing on Lake St. Clair . . . Just 2 1/4 pints of gasoline an hour, you say?"
The questions. The wisecracks. The remarks in the yacht club dining room. The
shouts on the water. Put Put was becoming the scene stealer. It all added up to public interest.
"That funny little boat seemed to strike a responsive chord," Cuthbertson
said later. Ït caught people's fancy."
Actually the Put Put - Mega Put Put is its full name - is a mutation
of the Mega 30, the trailerable offshore one-design sailboat that C&C started produing in 1977. A striking
departure from other boats in the C&C offshore family, the Mega 30 was directed at a market the firm
felt had not yet reached. It was also an attempt to achieve major cost reductions. In both these aims
it seems to have been successful.
The powerboat development was somewhat more casual. Someone made an
idle remark about the hull being economical and well-proven on a trailer; and wouldn't a power
plant make it into a great low-powered Trent waterway or Rideau Canal type of boat.
"That was last spring. Then, with Canada's Cup coming along the question of viewing the
races was in my mind. So I went to the drafting board one morning and produced something that,
in time, became the Mega Put Put."Cuthbertson recalls.
"That one morning was about all I gave it. Then I went to Bruckman and said: "Does this tickle
your fancy?" He said it did and that it was kind of neat. After a scavenging of stock Mega
parts, the thing was put together in a corner of the custom shop."
A close look and you can see it's pure Mega. Hull - 29-foot-9; waterline - 27 feet;
beam - 7-foot-11. Two bunks have been removed making room for the cockpit, so it's left with
two berths, a head and a galley. Power is a 13-h.p. Volvo Saildrive, but there'll be
experiments with a bigger engine.
The name seemed to be the feature that caught the eye when the
boat first made its appearance. Rod Gerrard, a product designer at C&C, was credited with
that. He first doodled out some hotrod flavors and was told "No, no. This thing is only going to
go seven knots wide open, and it's going to have a canopy with a little fringe and tassles,
and perhaps a little whistle that goes toot toot."
"I've gotcha," he siad. "We're building a Put Put."
The frivolity of the name did little for Bruckmann. But if he was stuck
with it, he'd take it a stage further and give it aridiculous home port: Lowville, Ontario, the
Cuthbertson's rustic retreat.
Response to the factory plaything was such in Detroit, that Mega
Put Put returned to the plant for some serious attention.
"We put it back in the shop and got a little more formal about doing
some drawings after the fact - what we call 'as built' drawings - to record what really did
get built and to make costing practical," Cuthbertson says.
How successful she is will depend on what people think about the cost.
"That's when you learn if all this interest we experienced was a response
to the novelty - what we call the toy factory - or genuine demand . . . As she is, Put Put
is just one of perhaps four or five future Mega 30 variants."
Is there a Son of Put Put in the wings - a Mega Brrrum Brrrum?
Cuthbertson doesn't think so.
Note: Mega Put Put was eventually sold to a Detroit area doctor in the late 70's or early 80's.
Since that time, here life has been unrecorded.