It’s not a surprise that Martha Stewart, the doyenne of good taste in the United States for the past 30 years, owns an iconic Hinckley Picnic Boat. Indeed, she’s owned it for almost that long. The 36-foot-long Picnic Boat was the first boat Stewart ever owned, and she says “I learned how to drive it right from the get-go. It was the perfect size for me.”
Stewart, if anything, is a hands-on person. After all, she won fame and fortune and created a media empire by showing the rest of us how to do things. Born 82 years ago in Jersey City, NJ, she was a model before she graduated from Barnard, and then did well as a stockbroker on Wall Street. But she got bored with that, and started a catering business out of the basement of her 1805 farmhouse in Westport, Connecticut.
It took off, and she started her own magazine, Martha Stewart Living, in 1990. She became so famous that a parody, called Is Martha Stewart Living?, sold 150,000 copies. She became the first American female self-made billionaire when her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, went public in 1999.
Stewart’s career hit a glitch when she served five months in jail in 2004 for insider trading, but even then she made her time pay off, creating a Nativity scene that became a best-seller.
She bought Skylands, her summer estate in Seal Harbor, Maine, in 1997, and bought the Hinckley soon after. In a story on its webpage, Hinckley quotes Stewart as saying, “I bought the most beautiful house on Mount Desert Island, named Skylands, and I just had to have the most beautiful boat to go with the most beautiful house.” She named it Skylands ll.
And she uses it, for picnics on the coastal islands nearby, for whale watching, for trips up to Lubec and visits to the Roosevelt family home on Campobello Island, for trips down to New York, and most enjoyably for lunch at Beal’s Lobster Pier with her grandchildren; it’s in Southwest Harbor, near the Hinckley yard there.
Hinckley takes good care of Stewart’s boat. “You would think my boat was made yesterday because it’s in such good shape and has withstood the test of time,” she says. She’s proud of the way it looks. ‘My hull is a beautiful biscuit color,” she says, “and the interior features orange upholstery and cherry-wood trim. It’s chic and comfortable.”
Over the years, there’s no doubt that Stewart has collected an eclectic group of friends. She’s had tea with the maestro Leonard Bernstein, and more recently made mashed potatoes with the rapper Snoop Dogg. She has persuaded some, including Disney CEO Robert Iger, to buy Hinckleys for themselves.
This summer, Stewart is planning a trip down to New York and then up the Hudson, where she’ll visit her friends Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, and Annie Leibovitz, the photographer.
Read more at http://hinckleyyachts.com and see a video of the Picnic Boat’s history below:
