My boat isn't fancy. It's a 15-foot, plain-Jane aluminum fishing boat. There are no pedestal seats, there's no casting deck, and there's no livewell, either, unless I leave the drain plug open for a few minutes. The newest thing on the craft is a '94 Evinrude outboard, which my wife and I bought used a few years back after our vintage Johnson motor ground to a halt in spectacular fashion on the Castle Rock Flowage. I'm not bemoaning the boat's vanilla qualities, though. It does what Lori and I need it to do without a lot of fuss. Which is not to say that I don't occasionally look longingly at new boats with all of the refinements that a high monthly payment can provide. Recently I was looking at a boat displayed in the catalog of a famous tackle distributor. The boat has every bell and whistle, but I'm pretty certain that the photograph is posed.
Why do I think that? It's because the angler in the photo is in the stern, facing away from the two bikini-clad lovelies who are sunning like lizards on a hot rock on his casting deck. Yeah, I know. It happens all the time to me, too, and it's a damned nuisance. Man can't hardly go out and catch a basket of bluegills these days without vixens draping themselves all over his boat, fouling up the ropes and making it difficult to cast. Actually, it's never happened to me. My wife might sit in the bow, but she'd never lie down, partly because it'd be uncomfortable as heck and partly because of a stinkbait spill which I haven't gotten around to cleaning yet. Anyway, the boat in the catalog is very nice. I bet its drain plug even fits. That it does is significant in a way which I hope will become clear soon.
I've written before about the houseboat my father built in our backyard in the early 1970's. We had a grand time, mostly, whether we were on Lake Winnebago or Lake Michigan or the Mississippi River. I say "mostly" because, well, we did have some incidents, such as the electrical storm on Lake Poygan where we kids stood on the top deck, pointing at each other and laughing hysterically as our hair stood on end. When you spend as much time on the water as we did, some of this stuff is bound to happen, but to this day when I hear the word "vacation" I immediately picture my mother, sitting in the galley and praying the Rosary. I'm kind of glad we never went to Disney World. I imagine how alarmed other kids would have been, sitting in the spinning teacups while in the background my mother intoned "...now and at the hour of our death, amen."
My younger brother, Craig, is planning a performance about our boating experiences, entitled "28 Ways to Die." I think he's exaggerating. I only count 27. Craig thinks that the reason we got into some of those scrapes is because my dad had a kind of devil-may-care attitude stemming from his service as a fighter pilot in the Wisconsin Air National Guard. So why do I run into so many scrapes on my own boat? I haven't been a fighter pilot, and my attitude is not devil-may-care but instead one of willful ignorance. Which brings us to the drain plug.
One day about twelve years ago I hitched the boat I then had to my truck and headed north to Menasha, where I grew up. My friend Steve and I planned to take his nephew Adam after walleyes on Lake Winnebago. If I remember correctly, it was to be Adam's first real "big boy" fishing trip. I'm good that way; always willing to share my knowledge with others, and at the launch I imagined how it must feel to be in the presence of such a giant as myself.
"Alright, Adam," I said as I pushed us out into the Fox River, squinting into the distance like Captain Ahab searching for spouting whales. "Let's go catch some fish."
It didn't take long for us to realize that I had left the drain plug out, as green water poured into the boat. The plug had never really fit very well. Time and sunlight and possibly gasoline had made it expand to twice its original size, so it was a real bugger to get in, even under the best of circumstances. The best of circumstances did not include rapidly rising water, a friend making unhelpful suggestions, and a child seeing the myth of adult competency vanish before his very eyes.
"It's alright," I said as I fumbled underwater, trying to pound the plug in with a wrench. "I'll just start the motor and we'll run the water out."
That was an excellent idea, in theory, except that the starter cord had a way of coming off of the flywheel if I pulled on it too hard during times of stress. Which I definitely did, as our half-full boat drifted toward one of the more prominent Fox River landmarks.
"Hey," Adam said. "There's a sign up ahead. It says DANGER DAM."
"Aw, don't worry about it," I said, trying to reassure him. "It's just a place name, like Beaver Dam."
"Or Hoover Dam, " Steve said. "They say there are still workmen from when it was built going around and around and around in the undertow."
"Well, yeah," I agreed. "Or Hoover Dam."
With one hand I was frantically trying to replace the drain plug and with the other I was using a screwdriver on the motor, trying to locate the spring arrangement on the flywheel which would coil the starter cord back up. At first my efforts with the screwdriver had been, if I say so myself, almost surgical, but as we got closer to the dam they became more generalized.
"Mommy," a child in a riverfront home might have asked as we slid by. "Why is that man stabbing his motor?"
Since I'm writing this column, it's obvious that we didn't pitch over the dam. I was able to finally get the drain plug in and Steve and I took turns rowing against the current back towards the landing. We didn't get Adam out on the big lake after all, since I never did get the motor fixed, but we fished nonetheless, right next to the launch, in water up to our knees. I'm sure Adam remembers his trip well, and creating memories, really, is what fishing is all about. So take a child out on the water this summer. After all, children are the future of our sport.
Me? I've already done my part.
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