The other day when I was looking for seadoo covers sites, I started reading about seadoo history, and how the Sea-Doo (pwc) and Jet-Ski actually came about. So since I like to know why things are as they are, and where things come from, I did some procrastinating on the sea doo covers research, and kept reading about the beginnings of seadoos.

I have to admit that I’m definitely part of the older crowd now, so you would think I already know when these water machines were created. I didn’t have the money back then to even consider buying one, so in fact I didn’t pay close attention to them at the time. I had always thought that pwcs came out in the 80’s, but little did I know that was only the refinement – digging a little deeper gave me a much better picture of the early evolution.

It was actually in the mid 1960’s that the Canadian family who invented the ski-doo snowmobiles (the Bombardier family) started to think of a snowmobile type water vehicle for getting around their lake in Quebec, Canada. After starting some design ideas they ran into some difficulties, at which point they found an inventor from the US by the name of Jacobsen who was already designing a similar vehicle.

Jacobsen wanted to create a motorcycle that traveled on water. After meeting with the Bombardier family Jacobsen agreed to help. Before long, Jacobsen designed what would be the first Seadoo. Bombardier bought out Jacobsen’s interest in the project and added a rounded hull and their signature yellow and black Ski-doo coloring. Bombardier also marketed the yellow and black seadoo covers. The Seadoo was offered to the general market in 1968. A slightly improved model with a liquid cooled engine was offered in 1969.

The Bombardier Seadoos were limited by the market technology of the times. The 1968 engine was air cooled. This posed as a great problem as the hull wasn’t big enough to allow the proper air circulation. In 1969, the design was changed to allow a liquid cooled engine. This helped a bit there were other problems to contend with. Most of these Seadoos were sold on the east coast and used in salt water. The salt corroded everything. Apparently Jacobsen had some ideas to improve the engine and reduce corrosion but these ideas were not adopted by the Bombardier family.

The Bombardier family ran out of steam on this first version of the Sea Doo, and they retired the idea for about 20 years. In the meantime, the rights to the invention reverted to Jacobsen a few years later, after which point he partnered with Kawasaki and went on to develop the Jet Ski. The Bombardier family would then revive their idea and release the modern Sea Doo 1988. So from searching for Sea Doo covers, to the history of the Sea Doo – there is a lot of interesting background before my favorite watercraft came into being!