Showtime in the harbor

Alex Coolman

The Fun Zone Boat Co. tour is slowly chugging up the Newport harbor,

the spectators are sitting in their seats like parishioners in pews, and

Capt. Ken Herkimer is preaching his heart out.

“And Dean Koontz -- the novelist? -- lives right here,” Herkimer says,

his voice broadcasting through loudspeakers mounted throughout the tour

boat. “In fact, he’s in there right now!”

You can hear it in his voice when he talks: the enthusiastic, slightly

unhinged quality of an announcer at a particularly gaudy circus. Herkimer

is in love with the weirdness and the variety of the Newport harbor, and

he communicates that love to his customers by any means necessary.

The boat motors past the palatial spread of a famous businessman’s

home, and Herkimer is ready with a little editorializing.

“Look down the street here at the size of this guy’s house!” he

exclaims. “He’s 81 years old, and his new wife is 30! Just thought I’d

throw that in there.”

Herkimer says he spends a lot of time in the library making sure his

facts are right. That may be true, but his manner of presenting the facts

is more that of a salesman than a scholar. And he’s not above throwing in

the occasional eyebrow-raiser, just to see if people are paying

attention.

“You’ve heard that story about California breaking off when the Big

One hits?” he asks, pointing to a spot near the harbor entrance where he

claims a fault line enters the water. “This is where it’s supposed to

happen.”

Also an important part of the spiel are nuggets of the obvious

disguised as revelations.

“They are mammals just like us,” he notes of sea lions that congregate

near the mouth of the harbor. “They have brains.”

Somehow or other, it adds up to a hilarious and entertaining ride.

“It’s interesting the way you learn this whole area started from

basically nothing,” said Raul de los Santos, an Orange resident who took

his parents on the tour for the day.

And every passenger seems to come away with some different souvenir

from the floating circus.

“I liked the seals and the breeze,” said Newport Beach resident Jen

Engel. “I was really interested in that fault line.”