Grand Romance

June 26, 2022

[Warning: This piece contains a bit of salty sailor language!]

My fellow Vallejo residents who have recently ridden the ferry have probably noticed the lonely, dilapidated husk of an old paddle boat near where the Napa River meets the Bay. Though its paint is peeling, its balconies are sagging, its boarded-up windows are covered in graffiti, it still manages to flamboyantly proclaim its name: Grand Romance Riverboat. Curious about how such a stately vessel fell so hard from grace, and how it landed here in Vallejo, I embarked on some online research.

While one online article described the Grand Romance as a 19th-century Mississippi riverboat, it didn’t take much further digging to discover this to be an exaggeration of about a century. The boat was actually built in the early 1990s just up the road in Fort Bragg by Bill Barker, an electroencephalograph technician from Santa Rosa. His father Neal (a World War II Coast Guard veteran and former coin-sorting machine salesman whose hobbies included chicken ranching and running sportfishing expeditions) and the other Barker siblings and spouses all helped design and run the ship, which took three years to build.

The boat debuted in 1993 as the Petaluma Queen, offering dinner cruises along the river in downtown Petaluma. By all accounts, this was the boat’s golden era. The vessel featured Victorian ironwork, a calliope, and a ballroom with a marble floor and stamped tin ceilings and proclaimed itself “the grandest authentic riverboat to operate in California.”

The Petaluma Argus-Courier, in a retrospective article a few years ago, said the Queen experienced “a number of reputation-diminishing problems” in the early years, including when a woman on a cruise for senior citizens stepped out a side door straight into the river, where she drowned. Overall, though, Petaluma residents seem full of fond memories of the boat’s elegance and fine dining, and a downtown mural depicting the history of the town features the Queen.

In 1996, the Barkers acquired the first riverboat gambling license issued in California since the 1940s and added a few card tables for poker and blackjack. The Queen’s third floor was outfitted as a gambling parlor with armchairs upcycled from the Palace Hotel, and the Barkers hired a “cardroom consultant” named Dennis Luddy who predicted they were on the brink of a multimillion-dollar business. He boasted: "I'm going to have major tournaments here. We're going to have players fly in from Las Vegas and Reno. If we're a success, people are going to follow."

Success did not exactly ensue. By the next year, the Queen’s owners were in court on charges of running an illegal gambling operation. I haven’t been able to find any details online about the specific charges or the trial itself, but the Barkers lost the case and in the summer of 1998 jumped ship, so to speak. The boat was re-christened the Grand Romance, and the Barkers began offering cruises in Suisun City and then along the Napa River.

In another attempt to reinvent his business, Bill Barker moved the boat to Long Beach’s Rainbow Harbor a few years later. He had hired a Dixieland band to welcome the Grand Romance to her new home, but in a case of extraordinarily unlucky timing, the boat arrived on September 11, 2001. Before long, though, the boat had a busy schedule of dinner cruises, murder mystery shows, toga parties, weddings, and many a “booze cruise.” The boat even hosted a funeral cruise for one of its employees to scatter her ashes at sea.

An LA tourism website that still has an entry for the Grand Romance describes “a 100 seat murder mystery showroom where multiple murders take place every weekend.” The boat's website, which until recently still existed in a wormhole of cyberspace, promoted it as the ideal venue for a wedding or even a honeymoon: “When you have the profound urge to book a romantic cruise boat, you will not be disappointed with the outstanding service offered at Grand Romance Riverboat.”

Unfortunately the reviews from actual customers from this period are not nearly so glowing. One gem on their Facebook page reads: “The following is my review for Grand Romance Riverboat. THE BOAT BROKE.” Grand Romance still has a Yelp page with an overall rating of two stars and many hilariously cringeworthy reviews. Many customers complain that they are required to give at least one star, and there are recurring themes of cruises regularly leaving two hours later than advertised, toilets backing up, and less-than-fine dining. (A 2016 New Year’s Eve “Banging in the Bay” trip billed as an elegant dinner cruise with a champagne toast reportedly served only chicken nuggets and hot dogs – not a drop of bubbly.)

Some highlights:

“You could smell the old oil all around.”

“Our waitress was drunk.”

“First off this boat should be taken out to the ocean and sunk to the bottom of the floor because it looks like it is about to go down at any second.”

“Food is like a nursing home.”

“This boat is super gross…The problems that lie just under the surface are about as deep as the ocean.”

“They should hire Chef Gordon Ramsay and turn this boat around or else this boat will sink.”

“DO NOT GET ON THIS BOAT!”

Before long, getting on the boat was no longer an option, even if one wanted to after reading the reviews. In April 2018, the Long Beach Marine Advisory Commission – despite testimonials from the directors of the Dinner Detective theater and Dirty Little Secrets Burlesque, which both operated shows on the boat – revoked the Grand Romance’s permit to operate in Rainbow Harbor, citing “numerous health and safety issues.” The eviction followed several weeks of tension between Captain Barker and the city – somewhere in there Barker sued the city for $5 million, claiming they had caused the boat’s toilet woes by failing to replace his sewer pump.

After the eviction from Long Beach, the Grand Romance and her owner seem to have become unmoored in more ways than one. By September 2019 the boat had made another ocean journey up the California coast to Vallejo – it is unclear where she had been docked since April 2018, though the Yelp page indicates that management may have continued to sell tickets even after their permit was revoked and made it nearly impossible for customers who had booked these imaginary cruises to get their money refunded.

In January 2020, Grand Romance Riverboat opened an Instagram account that was primarily focused on building hype for the boat’s triumphant return to Long Beach…if a certain (never named) candidate was elected to city council. After three posts on its first day, the account cooled down until COVID lockdown went into effect. A post in April 2020 promoted a “Liberate Long Beach” protest to reopen local businesses. Another in May 2020 advertised an Electronic Dance Music Booze Cruise with the caption: “Bars and Nighclubs [sic] are closed but we can have parties once we leave the dock and are under USA control not California!...Fuck Quarentening,!” [sic]

It’s unclear whether this particular #boozecruise actually happened, but before long the Insta account had made an abrupt political shift. When a movement started in the summer of 2020 to recall Long Beach’s mayor – for allegedly condoning police brutality, taking campaign contributions from the police lobby, building a ginormous swimming pool for the affluent, and generally screwing over the city’s most vulnerable residents – Captain Barker jumped in with both feet. Still angry about the eviction from Rainbow Harbor and seeming to blame Mayor Robert Garcia personally for causing it, the Grand Romance Insta had 18 posts in June 2020 promoting the recall effort (at one point putting in a plug, while they were at it, for also recalling Gavin Newsome [sic]). One caption elegantly states: "Fuck Mayor Garcia."

And that is where the Grand Romance’s online journey ends. Perhaps this is because none of Captain Barker’s dreams were realized. The petition to recall Mayor Garcia did not garner enough signatures to get on the ballot. The boat did not sail back into Long Beach to redeem its sullied reputation, and by the time of that last post the boat had been docked in Vallejo for nearly a year, where she remains.

That’s not to say these three years in Vallejo have been without excitement. The Long Beach Press-Telegram, in an article about the Grand Romance’s “next chapter,” reported an incident in which a couple “broke into the boat, put on the survival suit that was onboard as well as lifejackets, lashed a trash can and an assortment of empty liquor bottles to it and in a MacGyver-like fashion they floated away. Fortunately the suit had a water activated an [sic] Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB), that alerted local Coast Guard authorities, indicating the vandals’ location.”

Maybe the Grand Romance has ended up right where she needs to be. The boat is in good company here with many of Vallejo's buildings: a boarded-up reminder of better days, her former majesty peeking out from beneath the graffiti. But in the end, what makes a romance grand? Isn’t it less about how it ends and more about the adventures along the way? Every great love, if it lasts, has to move on from the honeymoon period, eventually running into realities like overflowing toilets and tepid nursing home food. Perhaps the real magic is in daring to gamble, to dream big, to fuck mayors and sue cities, to reinvent oneself over and over. By those standards, I’d say our gal is the grandest of the grand.

Photo: Christopher Gray Chase

Grand Romance

June 26, 2022

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