Sauna Boat
Having grown up around and in the waters of Cayuga Lake, whose long finger touched the shores of my childhood stomping grounds, it is no wonder that my dreams often turn to things nautical. When my friends and I first started taking saunas at Podunk in our early teens, the fantasy topic of floating saunas came up frequently. We loved swimming in the lake, but its waters are only warm enough for swimming from the beginning of July to about mid-September. What better way to extend that season than with a sauna? A sauna on a boat! Sweating not just near the water, but on the water. (Oh, but we did enjoy running naked to the creek!)
I’ve had an ongoing affair with boats. Especially a love of canoes that goes back to my discovery of the Adirondack waterways that form an almost continuous route from civilization into the deep wilderness and back (the caveat being that short carries are required).
I started making a boat years ago: a strip canoe affair. Not strip, as in naked, but strip as in thin bands of cedar, all joined and sandwiched between two epoxy and fiberglass layers. I never finished that boat; its progress was aborted midstream after I broke my collar bone in three during a trail running race. The unfinished shell still looms over my shop as a reminder, high up in a loft space. So, suffice it to say, that when a client approached me about building a much bigger boat, I had my hesitations.
Mark initially wanted a beachfront sauna. Then zoning and other issues steered us to thinking of a floating sauna. My childhood fantasy! Granted it is not a new idea; in fact, there are several in Norway and other places. But on Cayuga Lake? This was to be a first. It made sense, in a fantastical way. He had ample dockage but limited beach. He was willing to invest in the idea and take the risk, and he was a nice guy, with just enough chutzpah to make it happen.
The design phase took over a year. It was a real challenge because it entailed not just carpentry but nautical engineering. Precision was required, and my hand-drawn methodology needed some sharper pencils. Some thirty pages of drawings later and we were ready to build. We had a great fabricator for the frame, ladder-stair, and railing (Service Machine Tool in Elmira, NY) and some other great help along the way, but the whole thing—all twenty-six feet of it—was assembled in the shop. It was a predicament as the beast took over, floor to ceiling, and there were threads of self-doubt along the way to trip over.
I am not a boat builder, so there was as much learning as doing, but we pulled it off—including the challenging assembly of four round cedar windows trimmed with authentic ship-salvage portholes.
There were a lot of other finicky details. (I’ve come to understand that boat building is all finicky details.) The biggest challenge was loading and transporting the beast on an oversize low-boy flatbed truck. At one point, we had the 10,000-pound hulk levitating on three forklifts as the low-boy flatbed backed under it. The guys at Lansing Harbor Marina gave us confidence, especially after it passed its initial float test. After a few months of tweaking, we took the maiden voyage, complete with a champagne toast.
A unique feature of Mark’s sauna is that it is a fully navigational boat with twin electric motors. The sauna is heated with a gas-fired heater and has 12-volt electric lights powered by a solar-electric system. Ideally, it will be used on calm days when friends and family can drift out to the middle of the lake, experience sauna, jump into the clear waters, cool off on the roof deck, and repeat until the fantasy has been fulfilled. Maybe even under the stars or northern lights.
Thanks to everyone who helped make this possible. Thanks especially to Scarlet, who believed in the dream, and Mark and Karie, who supported it.
