Daniel Cedolia’s first construction of a sauna on board a pontoon boat (leading to the word ‘sauntoon,’ a blend of the words sauna and pontoon) came about in 2015.
“A customer of mine from Pine Island (Phil Murray) approached me and said ‘I want to build a sauna on a pontoon boat.’ So it started from there. It was his idea...he still uses it to this day off Pine Island,” said Cedolia, owner/operator of Loonie Toons Pontoons & Powersports in Desbarats.
“It was really Phil’s idea. I was busy selling used pontoon boats, somebody came to me and said ‘Daniel, this is my vision. Can you build it?’ And I said yes.”
“I made his dreams come true,” Cedolia chuckled.
A lifelong entrepreneur with a taste for adventurous outdoor pursuits, Cedolia once specialized in filming snowmobile races and adapting the footage for sale on home video from the 1980s to 2014.
A few years ago, Cedolia sold his first pontoon boat online, receiving eight offers from interested buyers within an hour.
Seeing the demand for pontoon boats, Cedolia went into selling them full time.
“A lot of times you can’t get a permit to build a sauna on your shoreline, so you can park this at your dock and use it as a sauna, or in this case, you could sail it.”
“It’s quite a head turner for sure,” Cedolia said.
“It’s all handmade. You buy a platform pontoon and you build up from there. It is a lot of work. Once you turn it into a boat and sauna, after you wire it for lights, a shower, it’s a pretty big undertaking.”
“It’s fun (selling boats, whether regular boats or boats fitted with a sauna). I’m a humble guy by nature, but I’ve always been creative. I have fun with what I do and it’s always been that way. When I was making videos I was around snowmobiles and people enjoying snowmobiling, and now I’m selling boats to people who want to make memories with their families on the water,” Cedolia said.
View the original story and additional photos at SooToday.com.
