Boats, Water, and Swimming

We got the boat in the water. It has been a story of fits and starts. To start with, last fall I had Lee drop it at my house so I could do some work on it. However, this spring has been so cold, windy, and wet that I never did get the time to attack any of the cosmetic things I wanted done.

So, a week or so ago, I put the water impeller and tubing and plugs back in place, re-lubed the lower unit, and fired it up. It started easily. It also leaked easily. I must have had a section of the head which didn’t drain well last fall and the head and corresponding manifold section had splits from freezing.

After talking to Lee I decided to just try JB Weld on the splits and that seemed to work. So Lee stopped by one morning and we loaded it up and brought it down to the docks. Again it fired right up and now didn’t leak. However, since it started up so easily at home, I had never run it long or tried it through its RPM range. Now, down at the dock, even when warmed up, it wouldn’t idle. As soon as I throttled down to anything under 800 RPMs, it just choked out and died.

Lee popped the gas up while holding down the carb air intake to try to create more vacuum to suck out any sludge, and, while it helped some, the problem largely remained. We managed to slide it into reverse and off the trailer and over to one of the slips. Over the next few days I ran the boat a few times and even did a superficial carburetor cleaning, but never really got it fixed.

By now it would idle low enough to safely shift, though and we did get out last Sunday for a few hours. Then, on Monday, I got the call that the slip spaces needed clearing out and that I needed to get the boat out to the mooring. This boat hadn’t been on that mooring so I loaded up the ground tackle I needed and punched through the wind to our mooring spot. However, once there, I found that the guy who stripped the buoys in the fall and re-installed them in the spring had completely messed up hanging it and there was no way I would be able to fix it in those swells.

So we motored back to the dock, explained our frustration, left the boat in the spare slip, and waited for a calmer day. By noon yesterday the wind had slowed some and shifted some and out we went again. This time things went quite well and we both straitened the buoy out and got the main hawser and back ups set properly.

With everything in order, Jen and I went back one more time to the dock, dropped her off, loaded the kayak, and went back to the mooring solo. It’s a good setup and it worked well even single-handedly. After I clipped on to the mooring, I threw the kayak over the edge and tied it to one of the back cleats. I then shut down the boat and grabbed a few ropes that I wanted to bring back home.

Unfortunately, one of those ropes was identical to the line I was using to tie the kayak. The end result of that identity crisis was that I looked up to see the kayak quietly floating away. I waited for 5 seconds to comprehend the limits of my choices, stripped down, and dove into to water that I knew would be cold. In reality, cold would have been an improvement. I swam as fast as I could, got the kayak and swam it back to the boat. I scrambled back on board, double tied the kayak, and toweled off. I flipped the batteries back on and checked the gauges. The water temperature was 42 degrees. Feeling what I believe is referred to as refreshed, I finished shutting the boat down, slid into the kayak, and paddled back to the dock. Problems and misadventures aside, it’s good to be back on the water.