Gondola Guys

Gazing out at his fleet of sleek Venetian vessels, Mike O’Toole speaks with rapture of life at the helm of a gondola.

“It is an art form,” the unlikely gondolier says. “I’m possessed by it.”

O’Toole, a Californian whose ancestors ate more potatoes than pasta, was a USC business student when he got the notion of starting a gondola company. Today his employees not only navigate the slender canals of Naples Island in Long Beach, they also have reigned triumphant in the original Venice--the one in Italy--where they have rowed to victory in a portion of the legendary, centuries-old Vogalonga regatta.

Since opening his business here in 1982, O’Toole has taken dozens of his best gondoliers to Venice each spring. He has been there 25 times to study boats and food.

“We’ve learned all the traditions--what it actually feels like to be a Venetian gondolier,” the 37-year-old entrepreneur says. “Venice is our second home. When we go, we stay with families. We’ve worked in the boatyards in Venice. I have this burning desire to bring it all back to this country.”

O’Toole and his band of gondoliers may be the only oarsmen to have ever plied their craft below the Bridge of Sighs on the Grand Canal with California’s bear flag fluttering from the prow.

Back here, the fraternity of 20 gondoliers who earn money maneuvering the labyrinthine canals of Naples say the job has become a way of life.

“I can’t imagine not doing this,” says Eric Sjoberg, a 29-year-old surfer who is a Naples Island native and one of the oldest and most senior rowers at Gondola Getaway, the company founded by O’Toole and his partner, David Black.

Sjoberg is among the Long Beach gondoliers to have taken part over the years in the Vogalonga, a May festival he and other crew members have come to view as their annual tradition too.

Like his boss, Sjoberg speaks a little Italian. He’s developed a taste for pizza de cavallo (horse meat), and for the wine bars and piazzas of Venice. In the service of his craft, he can sing an anniversary song in German, or belt out “O Sole Mio” with the best of them.

He’s working on a master’s degree in international relations at Cal State Long Beach, and has some historical knowledge of Naples and Venice. Similarly, his counterparts in Venice are expected to know as much about art and architecture as canals and currents.

Most importantly, he can slice a turn in a 25-foot gondola with surgical precision. Sjoberg and his colleagues alternate between using the narrow gondolas designed for couples, and the one-ton, 30-foot long wooden boats that can accommodate as many as 14 passengers and require the skills of two gondoliers.

Most began rowing in high school and college, many go on to graduate school and a few have been budding opera singers who want to flex their voices as well as their pectorals.

In nine years on the water, Sjoberg says, he’s witnessed countless marriage proposals and several weddings. “I get people on their first dates. I get Harley couples dressed in leather. I get actresses and actors. It’s amazing to be part of people’s romantic encounters.”

And in his own years on the water and in business, O’Toole’s boating reputation has spread even to the high-and-dry desert, where a Scottsdale, Ariz., hotel hired him to design boats and train gondoliers for its man-made lagoon.

The first gondola O’Toole ever refurbished was actually an aging Pakistani fishing boat, an abandoned vessel that had been converted into a rose garden and planted in a neighbor’s yard on Naples Island. Once he got custody, he replanted the roses, dug out the boat and got it afloat.

“We started serving wine and cheese and the response was fantastic,” O’Toole said. “We knew it would work.”