BOAT: Bust Out Another Thousand

The other day Bobby and I finally fulfilled my- I mean OUR dream, of buying a boat. I've been on the lake all my life and have always wanted a speedboat so after almost a month of looking and one failed deal, we finally found a boat in Portage, MI, and well, the price was right. :-) So we went up Tuesday night and met the people about 5:45. The plan was to get it back to the lake and get it in the water that night. Well, it was not on the trailer, so we had to go to the marina, pick up the trailer then go to the boat launch where the wife met us with the boat. We got the boat on the trailer and were headed home when Bobby asked me to grab the owner's manual for the truck and check out the instructions for towing with his truck. An here's where things started to go downhill. We realized that his truck is only capable of towing 2,000# from the bumper. Guess how much the boat and trailer weighed: 3,500# so we were putting a lot of stress on the truck and it was SUCKING down the gas!

By the time we got the boat (may I interject that her name is "Shagadelic," named by the wife) back to the cottage it was 8:30 and we decided to clean her up a bit and so we could get her in the water tomorrow. I started working on the outside and Bobby began working on the inside. (Wow, Magic Erasers really are magic! They worked great!) When he began wiping the vinyl in the bow, part of the backing to the seat came off and we realized that this boat was not as great as we thought. All the seat backs in the bow were rotten as well as the back part over the engine and sides of the boat. At this point we were frustrated and decided to call it a night.

The next morning we got up and thought, "New day, new attitude." We took her down to the launch, got the trailer in the water, the boat unhooked and... She wouldn't start! We knew she ran yesterday, the battery was working and there was gas in the tank so we couldn't figure out what was going on. While we were messing with her another gentleman arrived at the launch and tried to give us advise but he wasn't very helpful and by this time, we've drained the battery trying to start her so many times. This was when I took my first ride in our "new" boat- when Bobby pulled it out of the water on the trailer. We messed with it for a bit and finally decided to take it to The Boat Shop, on County Line Road, about a mile away. When we got there Dave, the owner, took a quick look at it and told us to come back in half-an-hour so he could charge the battery.

When we got back he gave us a quick lesson on how to properly start the boat and he even tuned the engine to make her run better. We talked about the rotten seats and they said that over the winter we could have the boards and vinyl replaced. They were great, so we paid them and were out, but our story does not end here, oh no.

We got back to the launch, Bobby unhooked the boat from the trailer and while he was standing on the trailer, he slipped and his feet crashed into the cement on the launch. He was in A LOT of pain and had a hard time walking. I took the boat and drove it home and he hobbled out to the end of the pier to go for a ride. After taking it around the lake a few times, I sent him in the house to get off his feet because now I thought he might have broken bones in both of his feet. So I spent the next hour figuring the best way to secure the boat so she is still there when we go up next time.

Needless to say, it was a rough weekend with the boat and hopefully next time we get up there things will be better.

Oh, p.s. Bobby refuses to get an X-Ray of his feet so he is limping around and still in pain.