2 days ago
- Business
- Hamilton Spectator
Burger boat floating food truck sinks before Turkey Point festival
The owners of a new floating food truck are staying positive after their burger boat flipped at Turkey Point boat launch last weekend.
Big Rig Burger Boat was heading out for the Norfolk County Pottahawk Sunday — just the second weekend of service for the new eatery — when the business sank.
It could have been a lucrative day on Lake Erie for the burgeoning burger business.
The annual flotilla
involves many boaters who imbibe while enjoying a day of sunshine, swimming and boat hopping near the sand bar southeast of Turkey Point.
The mobile kitchen on pontoons did not make it to the party.
Video posted to Big Rig Burger's Instagram account shows the semitruck-themed floating eatery flipping onto its side as it is lowered down the boat launch.
A post shared by Big Rig Burgers (@bigrigburgerboat)
After recovery, the business owners discovered that one of the boat's three pontoons had a 'hidden hole' that had filled up with water.
'It had zero buoyancy, causing the entire rig to roll and tip violently to one side,' they wrote on social media.
Big Rig Burger Boat's maiden voyage was just a week earlier on Bellwood Lake in Wellington County.
Owner Joshua Tuck launched the 'one-of-a-kind' big rig boat from Highland Pines Campground July 5. The floating tiki bar-like eatery served up a variety of smash burgers, chips and dip, as well as ice cream to customers dockside and on open water at the Grand River conservation area reservoir above Shand dam.
It was the eye-catching nature of the floating eatery and the reaction he'd get from customers that piqued Tuck's interest in launching the business,
he told Metroland reporter Isabel Buckmaster
.
'I always thought it would be cool to have a food truck on the water, and it just kept going from there.'
Even now, with a water damaged new business, Tuck isn't giving up.
A
GoFundMe
fundraiser was set up for 'the return of Big Rig Burger Boat 2.0.'
'The Wright brothers failed countless times before they took flight,' he wrote on Instagram.
'We'll learn. We'll rebuild. And we'll come back stronger.
