The Nome Nugget

Plumber Designs Weird Craft for Floating Shop

SEATTLE. (R) Roland Burrows has come out of the north in one of the weirdest seagoing contraptions a plumber ever hung together. To folk around Juneau, the contraption was known as "The Thing" while it was building.

To terror-stricken fish along the route from Juneau to Seattle, it probably appeared as a great green whale, with its jaws agape to dredge in little fish and its stomach already rumbling in anticipation.

To plumber Burrows, though, the contraption's no "thing" at all. She's the light of his life. his self-designed, homemade 46-foot catamaran dreamboat, the Blue Star.

True to the catamaran type, the Blue Star is a twin-hull job, with a gap between the hulls. The Blue Star, though, is like no catamaran that ever visited Seattle before.

Burrows spent the past seven years designing her, he says, and the past year and a half building her in his spare time.

She took six days for the run south, but Burrows sets her top speed at "about 12 knots as soon as the wrinkles are out of her engines." He estimates his strange craft's cost at $30,000.

She'll be worth all that, he says, as a floating shop for the plumbing service he calls the Burrows Welding Co.

And with his floating shop will Burrows be right there when anyone in southeast Alaska calls for a plumber? "Well," Burrows says, "I'll be just a few hours away."

He's sure his Blue Star won't break up the way Gar Wood's experimental catamaran, the Ventura, did off Florida last year.

"Wood's boat was made of plywood and shingles," Burrows says. "This one I know is going to hang together. It's steel construction, and I did practically all the welding myself."