As you all have probably learned by now, I love discovering what historic, weird, wild, or wacky RVs are out there in the world. Recently, I stumbled upon a seemingly good idea that didn’t succeed. Have you ever looked at your boat and wished it could be an RV? Maybe you want your travel trailer to be a boat? In the 1970s, a small Indiana company wanted to give you both with the Combo Cruiser – a houseboat also designed to be a camper. And the factory that built it was staffed full of women.
The concept of a boat that’s also a camper actually dates back more than half of a century. In 1955, Englishman Ronald Sams made the Otter Amphibious Caravan, a camper that could be used on dry land or on water. In the 1960s, an English company produced the Caraboat, a vehicle built around the same idea. There’s also the Nomad, a fiberglass boat that did double duty as a pop-up camper of sorts. Here in America, we had something a little different with the early 1950s era Kom-Pak Sportsman, a camper with a small boat for its roof.
It’s hard to pinpoint who thought of this idea first. The 20th Century is chock-full of people trying their own things with recreational vehicles, and some of them have been lost to time. But what’s amazing is that enterprising individuals and companies never stopped trying to combine boats and campers. Even today you’ll find plenty of concepts, including a massive Class A motorhome that is simultaneously a yacht.
The Ship-A-Shore Combo Cruiser is another attempt at a travel trailer that’s also a boat. And this one brought some interesting ideas to the table. But relatively few of them were ever made.
History on these has been hard to find. I was able to locate a blurb about them in a September 1970 issue of Popular Mechanics, and that was about it. Amusingly, that issue also talked about a pop-up camper that turned into a pontoon boat.
That’s when I did some digging around sites set up by owners of the boats. A person identifying themselves as Mike DeMeyer, the son of Ship-A-Shore President Roger DeMeyer, frequently popped up in forums. In each post he told the story of the company, and in some he directed people to a magazine feature about the company. DeMeyer states in one comment on a Combo Cruiser owner’s site:
There was a feature story on the craft in Business Week in July of 1971. You can check the archives. I believe the title of the article was “Ship-a-Shore, Where Women Man the Boats”. The reason being that a full 80% of the employees were women, quite progressive for that era.
I have found not only that article, but brochures to back up his claims. DeMeyer was a little off. The article is actually titled Where Women Man The Ship and it was from the July 25 1970 issue of Business Week magazine. Here is the story of the absolutely adorable Ship-A-Shore Combo Cruiser.
DeMeyer says that his father, Roger DeMeyer, ran a food brokerage firm in the 1960s. Sensing troubled waters ahead, he sold the business and began looking for something else. As Business Week wrote, Roger teamed up with three neighbors and launched Ship-A-Shore Company in Mishawaka, Indiana. The team decided that they wanted to build a boat, but not just any boat.
Their boat would be built out of alternative materials and would serve a dual purpose as a camper for the land and water.
Business Week noted that the newly-formed company published an ad looking for employees. The magazine notes that at the time, the South Bend suburb enjoyed an unemployment rate of just 2.8 percent. For whatever reason, only four men answered the call. There were 280 other applications and all of them were from women. Rolling with it, Ship-A-Shore brought the four men onboard as well as 30 of the women. Later, the company would grow to 58 women and three men and continue to hire even more women.
The magazine notes that one of the men served a role that was legally-required. Indiana law didn’t allow women workers to lift more than 35 pounds, so one guy was there just to lift the Combo Cruiser’s engines. The other two were foremen, and the company had three forewomen as well. But, as Business Week notes, aside from lifting those engines, Ship-A-Shore’s assembly line was entirely female. Speaking to Business Week, Roger said:
“We’re so damned happy with women, we wouldn’t think of going to men.” “Women are more conscientious, and their workmanship is superb.”
So what were the assembly line workers of Ship-A-Shore putting together?
The Combo Cruiser was at its heart, a houseboat. It is built with the facilities that you’d expect in a houseboat or camper. An archived brochure talks of standard features like air-conditioning, a furnace, a radio with a bunch of speakers, a kitchen, plumbing, beds, and more. The cabin is 18-feet-long and you even got a sundeck for getting a tan on or off water.
But the Ship-A-Shore decided to depart from a typical houseboat in a number of ways. One was in the method of construction. While the typical boat of the era might have had fiberglass, wood, or metal construction, the Combo Cruiser was built out of two pieces of Uniroyal Royalex (yes, that’s the tire company that used to be called United States Rubber Company — maker of all sorts of rubber-related items).
Royalex is a composite consisting of a vinyl and ABS thermoplastic outer layer with an inner layer of ABS foam. The multi-layer composite is vacuum-formed and bonded through heat. The end result is not unlike a fiberglass camper, where you get just one large piece. Ship-A-Shore’s idea was two-fold: The material would not only save on weight, but be cheaper to manufacture than more traditional boat-building methods. A brochure for the Combo cruiser claims that Royalex is “practically indestructible” and wouldn’t shatter or crack. And of course, it can’t rust.
The brochure says that the benefits go even further. If someone bumps the Combo Cruiser into something, the hull won’t break like fiberglass. Instead, it’ll dent in, then you can remove the dent using heat.
And with a low weight, the boat-camper could be towed by a car, rather than a truck. Advertised dry weight was 3,500 pounds and the boat could apparently be loaded down to 9,000 pounds and still float. The boat came on a custom, low-riding trailer. Combined with the boat’s shallow 9-inch draft, it was supposed to be easy to launch and load, too. Ship-A-Shore said that so long as the boat’s rear was in the water, it could power itself off of or back onto the trailer.
Business Week notes that the two pieces (an upper and lower half) of Royalex were produced by Uniroyal, then shipped to Ship-A-Shore. The two halves would then be bonded together and the women built out the boats. Business Week wrote further about what the work environment was like. One woman would be driving screws into a countertop held down by another woman sitting on it. Johnny Cash blared in the shop and the pay actually sounds pretty decent. The workers made $2.75 an hour, which translates to about $21.55 in today’s money.
In water, the Combo Cruiser was propelled by a choice of engines with outputs ranging from an unnamed 90 HP to a Chrysler engine providing 130 HP and an OMC engine putting out 225 HP.
The Business Week article noted that the boat’s price was $10,800, or $84,650 in today’s money. I went digging for other houseboats for a price comparison and came up empty. It seems that new prices for boats this old aren’t often recorded. Still, this seemed like a good idea. It’s a boat that is light enough to be towed by many vehicles and small enough to do double-duty as a camper on the road. Ship-A-Shore was even considering upping the workforce and building a second, cheaper craft called the Speedster. So what happened?
I couldn’t find any articles detailing the company’s demise. In fact, it seemed to have just closed up shop and disappeared. The only explanation seems to come from Mike DeMeyer, and it goes back to how the boats were built.
In a story given to a Combo Cruiser owner, DeMeyer claimed that the issue came down to molding the Royalex. He said that the material often had defects where it would be way too thin in some areas and way too thick in others. And the top and bottom pieces often weren’t aligned. Tens of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours of engineering efforts allegedly couldn’t fix the issue. Ship-A-Shore intended on mass production, but is said to have missed the boat because the Royalex molds rarely came out in spec. Business Week reported that the factory churned out just one boat a day.
DeMeyer attributes the failure of Ship-A-Shore to the company never figuring out how to get the Royalex molds to come out right. A death date isn’t given for the company, but the latest model year that I could find is 1973. As for Royalex, the material enjoyed a long production life being used for much smaller watercraft. You could find the material making up the construction of canoes all of the way until 2014 when it was phased out.
In the end, under 150 of these were ever made, making them a rare piece of American boating and RV history. Despite the rarity, I actually found one for sale. It needs work, but chances are you won’t see another one of these for a very long time.
The most amazing part about this to me is still that factory. The company got different workers than it expected. Yet, from the sounds of it, the company ended up embracing its factory of women.
As you briefly mentioned Royalex was much more successful in canoe hulls like the Old Town Tripper that the demoed by wrapping around a bridge abutment and then straightening out after warming it up. I thought it was really cool but all of my canoeing experience in venerable but tinny Grumman aluminum canoes
HOBO is a houseboat and a fun camper. Mine is a 1983 model ?
Powered by a 10 hp outboard,
she is called Mosey Along.
They were originally designed
and built in Canada in Ontario
I mean, it’s cool. And a few companies have tried these but you never see very many of them. Personally, I don’t see the appeal of a boat that’s completely enclosed. I like to have a cabin area but you need an open deck area for fishing, lounging, sunbathing you know the things you go out on a boat for. I think the reason these aren’t more popular is the same reason there aren’t more amphibious cars. It’s trying to be two different things, and it’s only okay at both of them. It is cool and this was extremely interesting to read but that’s just my take on the boats themselves.
It looks like its more optimized for the houseboat role than the camper one, which is fine, it looks like a pretty nice houseboat. A lot of ones built in the early ’70s were to the corrugated metal and plywood trailer on a barge template, and this is obviously way more solid than that (other than Whitcraft, Whitcraft was cool).
Not sure why all the surprise at women turning out to be good factory workers, considering almost every plane churned out during WWII was pretty much built entirely by women, but 1970 was 25 years later, so maybe everyone forgot.
Wow! All the agony of owning a camper plus all the pain-in-the-ass of owning a boat! What could go wrong?
So do we have moderators that can shut this shit down?
You know I saw this and at first I was like man, that’s super neat! But I’ve thought about it some more… could you not achieve the same thing with, I dunno, a regular boat? Has anybody said you can’t just take a boat to a campsite and sleep in it?
I think the key would be a typical boat of that length isn’t designed for overnight stays. Even my 24′ boat, that has a v-berth, wouldn’t be very comfortable overnight. No kitchen, bathroom is a porta-potty hidden under the v-berth, no table, no HVAC, difficult to get inside from land – it’s basically designed only to be on the water.
Take anything that’s not already a boat, make it float on water in addition to whatever it does normally, and it’s instantly cooler! A friend of mine designed a pick-up topper that doubled as a surprisingly sweet-looking little fiberglass boat years ago as a final project for a CAD class he was taking. I’m pretty sure he got an “A”.
I actually do think this is a cool idea. not sure how the trihull and relative short length would handle big lakes, they tri-hull speed boats of the day were pretty bad in choppy water. but I imagine it worked well for stability in calmer areas, and who is going to use this for skiing anyway.
Reading this was like eating a madeleine. My stepfather, for reasons I now know to be connected to his becoming my stepfather, lived full time in an Otter Caraboat! It was very cool, if you were a smallish boy, in retrospect it was terrible!
It was very heavy, if you put enough marine ply into a job this tends to happen, and whilst largely watertight when in the water, when moved onto it’s trailer as a very top heavy caravan all the joints shrank leading to inevitable problems when returning to the water. Years passed and stuff happened, but the boat/ caravan thing remained, it was a useful place for putting things in (garden chairs, bags of cement, visiting stepsisters, bits of ancient franco-italian cars and bulk purchases of bog roll).
And then I lived in it!
My first house was a fixer upper, well it had most of three walls and a 100ft deep well, and a mooring on the river. Living on/ in the boat/caravan was, I suppose, good incentive to learn the arcane arts of stonemasonary, bricklaying and the other stuff that houses are made of.
The boat? A viking funeral, launched one last time, filled with fireworks,and gifts from all who had sailed in her waddled of into the English Channel, the first, and last time ever to meet the salt (as all boats should) and exploded in a sad but spectacular fashion.
OH, the boat/ caravan/ shed/holiday cottage/secret hideaway? It was called Ponder.
Looks like a cool concept.
I recently stumbled upon AYO Fishing on Youtube and he’s restoring a fiberglass houseboat that’s around that size.
I do wonder why the idea fizzled out.
“Bob, this whole interior makes me think of the 1970’s and my childhood; but there’s just something off.”
“What do you mean, Ted?”
“I don’t know, Bob. We’ve got the old appliances, the old upholstery patterns, and the CB radio. It’s almost there, but not quite. Know what I mean?”
“I think I do, Ted; and I’ve got the solution.”
*Hangs fly swatter off of hook on cubby.*
“That’s it, Bob. It’s perfect now.”
*Wipes tear from his eye.*
That’s a pretty neat camper boat thing.
I’m not at all surprised that they were happy with their accidental female workforce, and decided to go with it from there. As a middle school shop teacher, many of my best students are girls.
Given Mishawaka’s relative closeness to Middlebury, Indiana (headquarters of Starcraft RV) and New Paris, Indiana (headquarters of Starcraft Marine), I wouldn’t be too surprised if there wasn’t a relationship between the companies.
I believe Elkhart is the world epicenter of RVs and whatever those swoopy graphics on RVs are.
You are correct. The RV Hall of Fame is there.
I love boats and I love campers. That being said this boat/camper is a bit large for my tastes. I love the concept though.
Good on them for making it.
I’d Love the same thing but in a smaller package, maybe with a little sail and the ability to accept a very small outboard.
I once worked in a production machine shop of perhaps 30 people where the workers were about half-and-half male and female. The women were grouped together; they chatted constantly but produced consistent quality work which is saying something and was what the company needed. The guys might get bored, get attitudes, make mistakes and not care.
Notably, for tasks that might be risky or unpaid but help advance knowledge and position it was just a couple guys, while everyone else took their checks and went home to pay bills. Just an observation in that situation.
Royalex is good stuff! It still has a cult following in the canoeing community to this day, although I don’t believe anyone has manufactured the material for decades now. I had a canoe made of it at one point (which is how I learned that there are people out there who are crazy about Royalex) and it was indeed a fine and durable little thing, not too heavy, never gave me an issue despite my indifferent attitude to things like rocks and underwater logs. I suppose times and materials science have since moved on, but I wonder if there would be a place for a similar material today, should anyone start manufacturing one.
Also, in not-exactly-surprising news, “very progressive for the time” still seems to have left plenty of room open for patronizing gender-essentialism. Just goes to show that the most forward-thinking people of the day are often a bit cringeworthy when viewed from the lens of the future, looking back. A worthwhile lesson for any age—if you’re trying to be a fair and unprejudiced person, it’s not enough to just adopt the right talking points and make the right motions. You’ve got to do your best to identify the underlying principles of justice and equality, and then follow them all the way through to their logical conclusions.
Would you trade that canoe for a modern Kevlar Wenonah? I bet you would, if you portage often.
times have moved on, material science not so much. Royalex wasn’t phased out so much as tasered and phasers set to Vaporize..
There was a perfectly good Royalex factory producing the material for canoes. Then in 2013 it got bought out by a giant conglomerate corporation, SparTech. The profit margin on Royalex wasn’t high enough for them so they shut down the factory. There’s nothing that is as good for whitewater canoes, although Esquif in Canada has come out with a similar product T-Formex and NovaCraft has its TuffStuff. These are roughly equivalent in weight and functionality at double the price of Royalex..
The modern composite and Kevlar boats are much lighter than Royalex, at the expense of durability. The price is also about three times what a Royalex boat used to cost.
Both the canoes in my profile picture are Royalex, my yellow one is from 1978. The first owner used to run it solo down Nantahala Falls, a class III-IV rapid. Then she got too old to paddle and it was stored in the back yard where the vines grew over it, while the wood gunwales slowly returned to the earth. Eventually she put it on Craigslist for free. There were lots of callers, some of whom wanted to be paid to take the canoe. I called and said I’d give it a good home.. Replaced the gunwales and carry yoke, re-wove the seats, repaired a couple of cracks in the hull where time and the Denver freeze/thaw cycles had worked their nefarious way upon it. Of my fleet of six canoes this is the one I’m usually paddling.
Thanks Mercedes for the article.. I would have dearly loved a Royalex camper/boat..
A bit like the Amphicar, it’s a compromise between a mediocre boat and a not very good camper. Keep it on flat calm lakes and you’ll be allright.
But it must be fun to have anyway, and a forward control boat must be quite interesting to steer.
The Brits had an adorable one named the Caraboat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v223HkqHJbo&ab_channel=BritishPath%C3%A9
And the Aussies will make you a new one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFpn23bxi1g&ab_channel=CaraBoat
The red and white job hitched to the Charger is mine, all mine! Mean Mary Jean. Thanks for the memories.
That’s a great concept that could still work today. The build quality, at least the part Ship-A-Shore built in-house, looks far superior to anything you’d find in a similarly sized and priced camper today, plus it’s a boat! And the fact that they almost exclusively employed women to build them–in the 1970s–is great.
It definitely sounds like their choice of material is what did them in. I imagine Ship-A-Shore didn’t have the capital to convert to fiberglass once the Royalex proved unworkable.
The Royalex manufacturing process sounds eerily like the Duroplast the East Germans used to build Trabants. Actually, Duroplast might have been a better option! The stuff is cheaper to make than fiberglass, it’s lightweight, durable, and waterproof.
That is so unbelievably cool, and I want one.
Me too. It is much neater than what I was expecting when I clicked the link. I like the little deck/porch on the back.
Not quite the same, but there were boats designed to fit on the top of a VW camper bus. I would love to have one, along with the bus as well. I miss my ’64 deluxe sunroof bus.
Thank you, Mercedes, for this interesting article…you shine.
A houseboat/RV actually makes much more sense than a speedboat/car.
Imagine an electric one, where the relative weight penalty for batteries isn’t as big a deal. And electric boats have been around as long as electric cars – there’s one in Prospect Park Brooklyn that’s almost 100years old and its amazing.
I’d put a pop-up slide on the roof for flips>cannonballs.
the batteries would definitely result in a big deal weight penalty for floating and towing.
Yeah, not really man. Energy density of batteries compared to a gallon of gas is HUGE, they’re just so heavy. And unlike a car, which rolls on pavement with wheels and is in a fairly thin “fluid” (air), boats are in a fluid much thicker/heavier, so as soon as you cut the throttle on a boat, it comes to a stop almost instantly, so fast that boat’s don’t even have brakes!
The electric revolution on the water is a LOT more challenging than on land. People don’t get it…
Right arm..! Although, you could consider “reversing the engine” as a brake..???? it surely doesn’t get the results comparatively to dry land.
There are other’s. I saw one in the campground at Metro Denver’s Chatfield reservoir some years ago. I seem to recall it was a Land n’ Sea. You can search them. They used a traditional fiberglass hull and were thought of as a “Trailerable Houseboat”.
There was a 2019 one at Mecum.. Lacks that 70’s pizazz though..
https://www.mecum.com/lots/FL0121-443223/2019-land-and-sea-rv-inc-freedom-26/
I wonder if they had Barbara The Bonder or Gertrude The Gluer posters around the factory.
You Can Glue It!