The Story

For years Steve Leuenberger built canoes and kayaks. Working on the small craft in his Stellhorn Road garage in Fort Wayne, he kept thinking about building something bigger. A battle cruiser, perhaps. One day he said to himself: what the heck, why not.

He drew it on paper first. Not a kit, not a plan bought from a catalog — sketches of his own. Then he built to the sketches, more or less. As he told the Journal Gazette in 1985: “I came close to the sketches. While you’re building, you say, ‘That looks about right,’ and you go on with it.”

He went on with it, and in the summer of 1984 the USS Fort Wayne was ready for the water.

The first launches

The tests were on the St. Joseph River, putting in at the Shoaff Park boat launch. Twenty feet of gray warship coming down a river in Indiana turns heads, and it did. Riverbank walkers stopped. People asked questions. A newspaper photographer came out in April 1985, and the story ran that May under the headline “Battle cruisin’ down the river.”

What the photographs show is a ship that looks entirely serious from a distance, and, up close, a man in a t-shirt reading CAPTAIN lying back in a carpeted seat with a homemade switch box in his hand.

An invitation

Near the end of that 1985 interview, Steve shared what he was really hoping would come of it — not a boat of his own to top it, though he allowed that with the money he’d have taken a thirty-five-foot cabin cruiser. What he wanted was other people building ships of their own, and someone to sail with:

“What I’m really looking for is someone interested in building ships like this. I’ll tell them how.”

And then, waving out at the river:

“I want to go up and down the river with a whole fleet.”

He was offering to teach anyone who asked. The ship was an invitation.

The years after

Whether anyone ever took him up on it, the log book doesn’t say. What it does record is that the ship kept sailing. From 1986 through 1996 it lists voyage after voyage — Ball Lake, Hamilton Lake, Golden and Hog Back and Bower, Story Lake, Pretty Lake, the Cedar Lakes, and back to the St. Joe. Ninety-some outings, most of them a full day on the water, every one of them hauled there on the roof of a car.

In the newspaper

Quotations above are from “Battle cruisin’ down the river” by Dell Ford, The Journal Gazette, May 5, 1985.

The Journal Gazette returned to the story in 2022, running the 1985 photographs as a reader caption contest before printing the original article again: April 26, 1985: A mini battle cruiser on the St. Joseph, History Journal, by Corey McMaken. The photographs there are worth a look — one reader’s suggested caption was “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”