Boats Facts

Built in 1914, the Belle of Louisville was two days from the scrapyard in 1962. A Cincinnati reporter talked a judge into an auction. Jefferson County bought her and rebuilt her from the hull up. She is now the oldest operating Mississippi River-style steamboat on Earth. This April, at 112 years old, she out-distanced the Belle of Cincinnati to win the Great Steamboat Race. She still churns down the Ohio every week.

Four Coast Guardsmen took a 36-foot lifeboat into a 70-knot snowstorm off Cape Cod, out to a tanker snapped in two. A wave knocked their compass loose. Then 32 sailors came down a rope ladder into a boat built for about half that many, and one small red buoy light guided them in. That boat still floats at Rock Harbor every summer, cared for by volunteers.

A 7-year-old boy went over Niagara Falls with only a life jacket, and lived. In 1960, Roger Woodward, his 17-year-old sister and a family friend were in a small boat that lost power and flipped above the falls. Two tourists pulled his sister out 20 feet from the edge, but Roger and the friend went over, and the friend drowned. Below the falls, the Maid of the Mist crew got a life ring to Roger and hauled him aboard.

When the towers fell on September 11, the Coast Guard put out one call on marine radio: all available boats. Ferry captains turned mid-route. Tugboat operators dropped everything. Fishing boats, private yachts, dinner cruises - hundreds showed up. In nine hours, they evacuated nearly 500,000 people by water. The largest maritime evacuation in history. Larger than Dunkirk, which took nine days.

Grady-White has built offshore fishing boats in Greenville, North Carolina since 1959. Eddie Smith was 26 when he bought the near-bankrupt shop in 1968. Buyers later offered him more than $400 million. He turned them down and gave the company away: voting control to a trust, the profits to a charity. Then he paid every worker a bonus scaled to years of service. The hulls are still laid up by hand.