Couple’s boat home draws many curious visitors

The yacht was the last
wooden vessel made by a Port Clinton, Ohio, company.

BAY CITY, Mich. (AP) — Don’t stray off the walkway leading to Jon and Lynn Cisky’s air-conditioned, three-bedroom Bay City home. It’s a 10-foot drop to the Saginaw River.

Not that it keeps the curious from peeking off docks into the Mahogany, the 60-foot-long wooden motor yacht where Jon Cisky — former Michigan state senator and founder of Michigan’s “Crime Stoppers” program — resides with his wife in summer months.

“When we took the boat to the East Tawas state dock this summer for a month, I’ll bet we had 100 people through here by the time we counted their family members and friends,” said Lynn Cisky, a retired vocal music instructor for the Saginaw Township Community School District.

“After that I made some curtains for the side windows above the galley, because people were actually on their hands and knees at night, peering inside [the yacht], when we had the lights on,” she said.

The Ciskys, who live most of the year in a home in Fort Myers, Fla., appreciate the more polite visitors to their boat, docked much of each summer at Bay City’s Pier 7 Marina, along the Saginaw River’s west side.

Jon Cisky, 66, calls his wife a “consummate entertainer and a fantastic cook,” and bottles of herbs and spices sit on shelves behind the electric range in the boat’s galley.

“I do pasta, seafood, salmon — I cook here all the time,” Lynn Cisky said. “It’s like a toy kitchen. We’ve had dinner for eight, more than once, on our aft deck.”

The aft deck, behind the boat’s wheel, constitutes one of five levels of living space on the boat. The master cabin features an 8-foot-wide bed, though each of two cabins at the front of the boat features a pair of bunk beds.

“It’s easy to entertain because we have these two extra bedrooms,” Lynn Cisky said. “By entertaining, you’re sharing your good fortune with others. That’s wonderful.”

Jon Cisky calls the Mahogany — constructed in 1970 — the last wooden vessel built by the Matthews Boat Co. of Port Clinton, Ohio.

The yacht, made mostly of teak and mahogany, once belonged to the late Tom Brennan, an owner of the former Brennan Marine Sales business in Bay City.

“It’s one of the larger boats in the area, and it’s wood, so that catches your eye,” said Jamieson Poirier, manager of Pier 7 Marina.

“When you travel to different ports on the Great Lakes, you rarely see wooden boats any more,” Poirier said. “When a wooden boat pulls into, say, Mackinac Island or Tawas Bay, it’s usually the only wooden boat there.”

The Ciskys also do an excellent job maintaining the Mahogany’s interior and exterior, Poirier said. Jon Cisky said he’ll paint the very bottom of the boat himself after workers remove the boat from the water.

Though he left the Michigan Senate in 1999, Jon Cisky works as a consultant for Wolverine Human Services Inc., which operates residential centers in Vassar and in Saginaw County for juvenile offenders.

Cisky founded “Crime Stoppers” in Michigan in 1984, using TV, radio and newspaper publicity to catch criminals in Flint, Saginaw and Bay City.

When a reporter knocked on the Ciskys’ door last week, though, Jon Cisky was playing detective on the metal floor of the boat’s engine room, examining the boat’s two rebuilt Detroit Diesel engines.

When the boat leaves port, a generator powers its three air conditioners, heating system, refrigerator, dishwasher, microwave oven, electric range, 32-inch TV set, computer, ice-maker and water system supplying two showers.

Despite all the amenities, Jon Cisky’s favorite spot is in a padded chair on the aft deck, where he watches deer, egrets, ducks and cormorants in a wetland area along the river’s western shore.

Earlier this summer, he said he saw a fox duel a blue heron for a fish.

While the Ciskys’ spot docked in downtown Bay City offers wildlife as well as night life, it’s not always smooth sailing on Lake Huron, where inclement weather can show the harsher side of nature.

“Fourth of July, in 2006, crossing Thunder Bay, I could have given you this boat,” Lynn Cisky said. “I was sick — as in seasick — to start with, and in bed, but the waves rolled me out of the back bunk.

“We were in a storm and towing our dinghy, but the line to the dinghy frayed and broke. I looked out the porthole, and our boat was going one way and our dinghy was going the other.”