Show Boats : Encinitas Homes Draw Sea of Curious Landlubbers

Mark Baskin was on the telephone with his father in Santa Cruz, describing his swell new rental home in Encinitas.

“What do you mean you live on a boat?” his father asked. “You mean a boat floating in the water?”

“No, Dad.”

“So you mean you live on the beach?”

“Not exactly, Dad.”

Last year, Baskin and his wife, Donna, moved into the SS Encinitas, one of two identical boathouses that for more than 60 years have been dry-docked in the middle of an otherwise ordinary suburban block near downtown Encinitas.

Built by an eccentric, out-of-work marine engineer in 1929, the pair of nautical oddities have since become salty North County landmarks, captured on postcards, paintings, sketches and countless snapshots taken by gawking tourists from Miami to Maine.

Locals say the boathouses were never meant to sail, but were built on the site a few blocks from the beach, side by side, as landlubber quarters replete with two decks, a full living room, two bedrooms, 1 1/2 baths and an authentic galley.

Even with their sterns moored in a cement foundation, the boathouses have nonetheless provided residents with all the trappings of life at sea--down to the awkwardly low ceilings and slight starboard list.

On some stormy nights, or after a few bottles of good wine, the Baskins say they can actually feel the boats begin a gentle rocking motion.

“On rainy nights, you feel like you’re adrift on the high seas,” Mark Baskin said. “You can feel the boat moving just a tiny bit. You can even hear the wood creaking in spots.

“Sometimes, in severe rainstorms, I have to run out and collect the furniture from the outside deck. It makes me feel like I’m battening down the hatches or something.”

For the Baskins and three generations of previous residents, life inside the Encinitas boathouses has often been like living in a giant fishbowl.

On any weekend, literally dozens of curious passers-by will stop, look and then look again. Some will knock on the door and ask for a private tour. And those are the polite ones. Others will just peer inside any of the 19 portholes that line the wood and cement hull.

There have been accidents, boathouse residents say--minor fender benders that occur when the car of one rubber-necker slams into the back of another.

Once, years ago, a passing dentist tried to buy one of the boathouses for an office--because he believed his younger patients would no longer be afraid to come visit him.

The constant intrusions have taken their toll. The tenant living in the adjacent SS Moonlight is so weary of the questions that he declined to be interviewed.

But the Baskins take all the attention in stride.

“When we have barbecues up on the top deck or when I sunbathe on the bow, you won’t believe the reaction we get,” Donna Baskin said. “Just about everyone that passes who hasn’t seen the boats before wants the full history.

“And then there’s the people with the video cameras and zoom lenses. At first I was snappy about it and kind of irritable. But then I remembered--that’s how we were the first time we saw the boathouses.”

When he lived down the street from the boathouses in the 1970s, Mark Baskin recalls “snooping around,” taking a few curious peeks through the portholes himself--when no one was looking, of course.

Then last year, he spotted the owner placing a “For Rent” sign outside. “I saw my chance to finally walk around inside one of the boathouses,” he said.

“I was really impressed with how spacious it was inside. I told the owner that day that we wanted the place. I just had to run home and get my deposit.”

Now, even though they still never offer tours to perfect strangers, the couple continues to entertain inquiring minds. They’ve even indulged college students on scavenger hunts who just have to return with a picture taken from inside a boathouse.

For 43 years, Marie Baxley has lived across the street from the boathouses in a regular old stucco home. Sometimes, she says, the gawkers and their incessant questions drive her practically insane.

“If I had a nickel for every snapshot taken of those places, I’d be a rich woman today,” she said. “I can’t get any gardening done without the questions starting. ‘Do I know who lives there?’ ‘What do they look like inside?’ ‘Are they really boats that were moved here from the water?’

“Just once I’d like to tell someone that a high tide picked those boats up from the ocean and brought them right here.”

At first glance, though, the boathouses are actually a rare sight for any palm-studded suburban street, their pointy bows sticking out toward the street, their front lawns lined with heavy ropes and wooden pilings to give them a truly nautical flair.

Just ask Mel Burstein. As the tourist from Miami maneuvered his big rental car to the side of the street, his wife was ready with their trusty Instamatic camera.

“We did a double take, drove two blocks and decided to come back and take a picture,” Betty Burstein said.

Her husband said: “We don’t have anything like this in Miami. Only in California. I guess when the floods come, they’ll be ready. Who lives there anyway--Noah?”

Tom Voss, another curious passer-by, said he was surprised that the boats have survived in an era of strict city building codes. “They must have been put here a long time before people cared about such things,” he said.

When Miles M. Kellog built the boathouses just before the onset of the Depression, there weren’t many building codes to guide him--nor other houses, either.

Locals say Kellog built several houses in what is now the 700 block of 3rd Street before he constructed the first boathouse out of wood scraps from a recently demolished dance hall on nearby Moonlight Beach.

But the SS Encinitas looked awkward on the site. So he added a companion boat--the SS Moonlight--right next door.

Since then, the boats have passed through the hands of several owners--most of whom have rented them out to an assortment of tenants.

Some owners have taken good care of the structures. Others allowed them to lapse into disrepair.

“My mother always said she wished those boathouses would just burn down,” recalled Betty Jo Swaim, a longtime Encinitas resident. “She said they just stuck out like sore thumbs. And that they always attracted the wrong kind.”

Martha Engledow, who along with her husband, Clint, has owned the structures for more than 20 years, said the boathouses have been featured on old postcards, national magazines--even on the sketch boards of local artists.

“Nobody tells me they’re tacky,” said the 72-year-old Leucadia resident. “Over the years, they’ve become a curiosity around Encinitas. He built them like real boats with curved walls and real touches of workmanship.

“People around here are impressed when they say ‘You own the boathouses?’ They’re a historic monument, I’d say.”

By now, though, Donna and Mark Baskin can recite the drawbacks of living the ocean life on dry land.

They have to remember to duck their heads while scaling the stairway, and some furniture must be propped up on one side because of uneven floors caused by the structure’s pronounced list.

Still, it’s all worth it for that one night when they can admire the nearby city lights from the bow-front porch of their apartment, as though they were relaxing on a cruise whip with the engines off in perfectly calm seas.

“The place has lots of charm,” said Donna Baskin, a restaurant manager. “Sometimes when I come home from work in a bad mood, all I have to do is take one look at this place and I feel better. It’s like, ‘Hey, I actually live there.’ ”

Images of life inside one of the boathouses can last a lifetime.

In the 1930s, Betty Jo Swaim once played with friends who lived in the SS Encinitas, spilling hot chocolate all over their embroidered tablecloth as they pretended to be lost at sea in a ferocious storm.

More than a half-century later, she can’t drive by the boathouses without thinking of those days.

“Sometimes I make a conscious effort to look at those old boathouses when I drive by,” she said. “They just remind me of how much fun I had when I was a child.

“And while everything else is changing, they’re the one thing around here that’s stayed the same.”