Great Lakes Boating

March 2021

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w w w.G r e a t L a ke s B o a t i n g .c o m P r o f i l e | GREAT LAKES BOATING 25 F or as long as Michael Jennison can remember, he's always admired the classic look and timeless design of Burger Yachts from the mid-60s. He's been a boater for most of his life and has even lived on a boat with his family for many years, racking up about 20,000 miles of cruising all the way from Maine down to Venezuela. Through all his boating experience, Michael always favored the Great Lakes boating scene because it was close to his home in Pittsburgh, Pa. He also continued to cultivate his dream of one day owning a classic Burger Yacht. "I always had my eye on a 60s-era Burger just because I thought it was such a classic," shared Michael. "Whenever you look at articles about the 10 or 20 most classic boats of all time, you usually see a mid-60s Burger in the list." So when he saw one come up for sale in 2013, he jumped on it. Discovering The Estrella Michael found the 1965 Estrella del Mar in Florida and fell in love with it. This 82-foot Burger Flushdeck Motoryacht offered the look and feel he'd been craving all of his life. Plus, the boat has a unique history that starts in the Great Lakes, extends beyond it and finally ends here again. It started when the Stater Brothers sold their chain of super- markets in Southern California in 1964. One of the founding brothers, Cleo Stater, used the money from the sale to contract with Henry Burger for the construction of the Estrella del Mar. Once the boat launched in 1965, Cleo immediately brought it down to Long Beach, Calif., where it spent a lot of its life before making its way over to Florida and a smorgasbord of other places in between. Upon discovering the boat in Florida in 2013, Michael knew the Estrella was exactly what he was searching for. He bought it and now she's back in the Great Lakes where she belongs. "After a lifetime in Newport Beach, the Pacific Northwest and Florida, she is now back in the Great Lakes for the first time since 2013 to finish out her second half of life," added Michael. Once the Estrella made it to Lake Erie, Michael did a lot of work on her between the western side of the lake down in Catawba and in Erie, Pa., since it's the closest major port to his home in Pittsburgh. Keep It Classic When it came to updating the boat, Michael's whole idea was to keep it classic. With many of these 60s-era Burgers, he's noticed that many of them were allowed to age about 20 years before people started doing major upgrades on them around the 80s and more recently, in order to modernize them. Michael was looking for one that hadn't been modernized, which is why the Estrella was a perfect fit since it had undergone only slight modernizations. "So I got all the original drawings from Burger," explained Michael, "and then instead of doing a big refit to make it modern, we did a big refit to make it almost like it was in 1965." The results are nothing less than stunning, and a large part of the appeal in such a vessel is its simplicity. Since Michael spent much of his time as a sailor before getting the Estrella del Mar, he mentioned that one of his strengths when it comes to boating is his tendency to keep things simple. "Modern boats have so much complexity on them and they think it's to help you automate things and be simpler," observed Michael, "but I think it just adds way more things that can break. So we were really going for simplicity and systems that could let you go on extended cruises and anchor out because that's what we like."

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