We got back late last night from 8 days at Table Rock. It was the best boating experience I've had since I was a kid, thanks largely to the weather, which was hot, dry, and windless every day until the last. During the week, all 43,000 acres, with 750 miles of shoreline and covering 3 counties, were like glass.
We started the trip on June 19th, with our usual later-than-planned start. It was a bit of an inauspicious beginning, as 40 minutes down the road I shredded a front tire on the truck and ruined the wheel. If it's never happened to you, having a front tire blow at 70mph with 6,500# on the back will get your attention, and quick. It was the first flat I've had on this truck, now almost 13 years old, and it turns out I was better prepared for a flat on the trailer than on the truck. I had to move the jack to 3 different locations before I found one that would get the suspension raised high enough to put the spare on.
One crisis averted, we were moving right along on US 54 west of Nevada, MO when we came around a curve to traffic standing still at a sobriety checkpoint. I got the rig stopped (barely) and had no problem with the sobriety part of it. However, the nice officer then informed me that I'd have to turn off onto a 1 1/2-lane gravel road so that my boat registration could be checked (uh, I thought this was a sobriety checkpoint?). He directed me around his tall safety cone, which I promptly turned into a pancake with my trailer. I could hear him yelling, "My cone! My cone!" as I (now getting a little PO'd) kept on going, squeezing between two other guys pulling horse trailers. I showed my trailer registration to officer #2 who said, "So is the boat yours too?" I looked at him and said, "So you think I've got someone else's blue Four Winns boat on my blue Four Winns trailer?" He didn't seem to know what to say, so I told him to hold on while I dug it out. He glanced at it and sent me along to find a place to turn around. Finally coming back through their intersection I had to restrain myself from crushing another cone.
With all the delays, we wound up launching at - midnight! One of my boys and I made the several-mile trip from the ramp to our slip by the light of the bright moon. That was a trip I'll never forget.
We boated all day for the next several days. Unfortunately, we spent the better part of two afternoons towing people back to their marinas. The first was a very nice family in a borrowed boat with a battery problem. My jumper pack didn't help but then he admitted they had to jump it to get it started before they left. That was a very long tow. The next day, we were flagged down by a very nice (but clueless about boats) guy with an older gentleman who looked like his father and two other women in an old Mark Twain tri-hull that should've been junked 20 years ago. I've rarely seen such an un-seaworthy vessel. He said they were out of gas so we first took him back to his marina for a jug of gas. I should have dropped him back at his boat and hauled a$$ out of there, but no... I decided to wait and make sure they got it started... which of course they couldn't, and while they worked on it for the next 15 minutes I noticed the bilge pump was running like a fire hose, nearly non-stop. I figured at that rate and with all the cranking they'd been doing the battery couldn't hold out much longer so I threw him a line, told him to tie off on the bow eye (then told him that was on the front of the boat, not the back), and that he'd better have his bellows looked at quickly because of all the water he was taking on (and then told him what a bellows was). In all 3 of the towing situations we've been forced into, it's been a non-boating family in a borrowed boat that hasn't been maintained in the last 20 years. I'm all for paying it forward, helping out new people, etc - all 3 of the towees have tried to give us money and we would never consider taking it - but I have to admit that I'm beginning to resent being put in the situation of giving up precious vacation time for people who don't know a boat from a good grade of $hit.
I told my wife I'm going to name the boat "Sea Tow" and paint diagonal stripes on the hull.
Boys ready for a day on the lake (that's another FW on the other side, unusual since there aren't many of them at TR):
Getting one of them out of the wake:
This is boating water:
Obligatory boat pics:
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
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