Propellers, tenders and permits – The Dive navigates its first season

ALTON — No new business in recent memory has made as much of splash as did The Dive, a bar built on a barge, when it opened this summer. The owners said they consider their first season a success, though it didn’t go as expected and proved even harder to operate than they thought it would.

“It was a learning season for us," said Betsy Sullivan, who owns The Dive, along with fiancee Jamison Merriam and business partner Lee Miller. "We exceeded so many things that we had in our head, profit-wise.”

Merriam, whose background includes commercial diving, the U.S. Coast Guard, boat captain and marine construction management, and opening and operating restaurants in Australia, came up with the concept for The Dive. It's a bar and restaurant that can operate anywhere on Lake Winnipesaukee. Sullivan encouraged him to go forward with the idea, and Lee Miller, a former miner, helped build the vessel, which launched in July.

They envisioned their business to operate primarily for ticketed cruises and private functions. As soon as they took the finished vessel from its base of operations at the West Alton Marina to the Smalls Cove sand bar, however, they realized that they had a problem.

“We were only open for eight weeks, and we were inundated. I couldn’t even think about doing a cruise until two or three weeks ago,” Merriam said.

The Dive was a smash hit with the sand-bar crowd, boaters who head over to shallow, sandy parts of the lake, anchor their boats and wade in the cool water. They loved the opportunity to walk over to The Dive, which can drive “spuds” from each corner into the lake bottom to keep it stable, and come on board for food and drinks.

The concept was as popular as Merriam and Sullivan hoped it would be – but keeping the food and drinks flowing was more difficult than they had imagined.

The challenges started even before they opened. The state’s Liquor Commission didn’t quite know what to do with them, having never seen anything like The Dive before. Even the M/S Mount Washington, which also serves food and alcohol on the lake, operates out of a fixed point at Weirs Beach. The Dive proposed to float around the lake, as the weather and seasons changed, picking up patrons via a gang plank they could drop onto public docks.

They couldn’t use public docks, it turned out – at least not without necessary permitting, which they don’t want to pursue. Earlier this month, when they tried to sell tickets to a karaoke cruise that would collect ticket buyers from the Alton public docks, police officers were there to prevent any guests or supplies from leaving the shore. Any future cruises will have to depart from privately-owned docks, such as those owned by East Coast Flightcraft, at Weirs Beach.

“We found out the hard way, things you can and cannot do, and we had to overcome them,” Merriam said.

The Dive spent its July, August and September at sand bars – mostly Smalls Cove, but also at Braun Bay in Moultonborough. Even though The Dive is big for a boat – 62 feet long and 22 feet wide – it has limited storage. On a sunny day, the tender boat is constantly running from the barge to the onshore freezers and back, in order to keep the kitchen stocked.

“Ice was probably our biggest problem of the season,” Merriam said. “We literally picked up 50 to 60 bags of ice every morning.” He ordered and installed an icemaker, but it never worked. It wasn’t until last week that he had the time to schedule a service call to finally get it operating.

Other problems were harder to solve. Merriam selected a pair of outboard engines based on their efficiency, and the first day that they ventured away from Smalls Cove, the engines overheated.

“The engines are extremely new to the industry and they’ve never pushed anything this large,” Merriam said. There’s a delicate balance between engine speed and propeller angle, he explained. What happened was that the propellers were turning too fast, causing the water to churn with bubbles. That caused the engine’s cooling system to draw in air instead of water, and the engine got too hot.

“When we overheated on our first long trip, that was a scary bit,” said Merriam, who has been working with a custom propeller manufacturer to design props that will allow the motors to run fast enough to push the 96,000-pound craft.

Despite all of the problems, Merriam and Sullivan are already looking forward to next season.

“It’s exciting, it’s challenging, it’s fun; I can’t wait to have a full season,”  Sullivan said. “We were just getting started and summer ended.”

“I’m really happy with what happened. The problems that we have are easy to fix. The best things about this are the people we’ve met,” said Merriam, who added that many of their regular customers have become close friends. “We love what we do – that’s the best part about it.”