End Of An Era

CRUISING THROUGH THE YEARS WITH HEF

- Michael Peters

Sex certainly doesn’t come new to boating. History tells us that Mark Antony was setting the rhythm for the oarsmen aboard Cleopatra’s barge as far back as 41 B.C. By the 1930s, Hollywood bad boys like Errol Flynn were having trysts aboard his yacht Sirocco and Howard Hughes was bedding young starlets offshore aboard his yacht Southern Cross.

Boating as a national sport didn’t really go through puberty until Hugh Hefner’s introduction of Playboy magazine in 1953. The great appeal of a boat as a sexual venue wasn’t openly realized until the sexual revolution of the 1960s. By the time that decade rolled along hot boats were being promoted by busty, bikini-clad girls on the cover of West Coast boating magazines and Don Aronow had introduced his aptly named 35-foot Cigarette Mistress in Miami. By the mid-1970s, even Riva catalogs featured naked women.