Island Moon
July 1, 2011
Stuff I heard on the Island
A 11
Creating Dreams for Island Homeowners
WHITECAP LIQUOR
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By Dale Rankin We’ve all heard the jokes for years. The best two days of a boat owner’s life are when he buys it and when he sells it. B-O-A-T- Bust Out Another Thousand. A hole in the water to pour money into...but we keep on buying boats anyway. Hope springs eternal. Understand that my experience at boating consists of running a bass boat around on Lake Eufaula in Oklahoma where there are no worries about tides, shallow water, wind, currents, navigation, or getting stranded somewhere I can’t get back from. If you get marooned you just grab a lifejacket or a log and dog paddle your way to the shore and walk out on the highway and thumb a ride home. You just jump in your boat and put on the power and go tearing off down the lake and when you get ready to go home you just reverse course. I started looking for a kayak...with a sail. As small as I can afford I’ve been staring at my empty boat slip for a while and started telling my friends I was looking for a boat. I listened to the jokes for a while. “What kind of boat are you looking for?” they would ask. “As small as I can afford,” I’d say. My boat budget is about as close to nonexistent as a boat budget can get. I needed something just big enough for me, a skinny wife, and a fat dog. Preferably something we can pick up if we have to. Me and the wife that is, the dog is no help. I talked to Tractor Steve about what kind to buy because giving advice about boats is part of his job as Island Ambassador. His advice was simple; old aluminum boat, new motor. “Easiest thing to take care of,” he said. Steve owns a pontoon boat - old aluminum - and a new motor. I talked to Captain Art over at SeaTow and just about anybody who I thought might know where to find a boat. I looked at houseboats - what I really want - and I looked at speed boats - couldn’t work on the engines myself, I looked at center consoles - I don’t fish, I looked at a zodiac - too easy to puncture. The one thing I heard from everyone was don’t buy a wooden boat. They’re cool but they’re too hard to take care of. If you buy one expect to pay $100 per foot per year for upkeep. Since I don’t have a lift my boat will spend most of its time in the water and for a wooden boat that’s bad. Various people would begin to explain to me how to apply copper paint to the bottom to keep it from growing stelagtites. I’d get about halfway through their instructions before I’d zone
out and start thinking about where I might get a boatlift so I wouldn’t have to worry about paint.
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But for months I never got close to actually buying one. Then came the phone call. Then a phone call Then last week my friend Diver Dave called up and said to look on Craig’s list. “There’s a boat there that might be small enough for you,” he said. I checked the list and the ad said, “Motor for sale. You can have the boat if you want that too.” Free. I might be able to afford that. By that afternoon we were standing around a boat lift on The Island looking at a wooden boat It was about twelve feet long and looked like an old Aristicrat from the 1960s. It was small and light with a working 6 horse outboard that ran. The owner had to sell it because he has to move out of the house so the price was right. It was made by an Islander who has made several wooden boats around The Island But there was a problem - isn’t there always a problem? During a rainstorm water had found its way under the boat’s covering and put so much weight on the straps it had crimped the wood to the point that it now boated water. So to get the boat out the motor would have to be removed and the boat carried over the water and lifted over the bulkhead. And one more thing; there was no trailer. An hour later I was a boat owner.
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And so it begins... I called my friend Daryl who had built a wooden boat from scratch a few years back to see if he knew of anyone who could work on it. “So you bought a wooden boat without a trailer and it’s in a sling over the water but you can’t put it in the water because it will sink?” he asked.
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“Well,” I said, “it does sound kind of stupid when you say it like that.” So now I’m looking for someone who can work on a wooden boat. And it has a sump pump that runs on a motorcycle battery, and it needs a trailer, and maybe a new light... And so it begins.
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