Something ‘Bout a Boat
I have always been fascinated by boats. Any boat. As a child I spent summers in our family cabin on the north shore of Lake Erie. We had a small brown Iroquois johnboat that occupied most of my time. The thin aluminum floor would flex and pop if you weren’t standing in the proper spot, but it never leaked. I rowed that boat everywhere. By the end of each summer, my hands would be as calloused as those of a Maine gill net fisherman. The ends of the straight wooden oars completely smooth from countless pulls. Sometimes I even pushed the boat through the shallow waters, providing the six or eight-year-old equivalent of outboard power – getting it to “plane” and put out a small wake. I was the captain of that ship, as small as it was, and I loved the feeling of freedom it provided. I credit my parents with allowing me such freedom, as I never felt like I was being hawked over by adults as I roamed the bay.
That’s the thing I think about a boat. Freedom. Motorcycle and car people talk about the freedom of the open road. But motorcycles and cars are bound by the highways, roads, alleys and trails made to facilitate them. Their path chosen by those that came before them. And so many ever-present rules. You can be in the middle of Interstate 70 in Utah, on a stretch of highway with no services at all for a stretch of 110 miles, in the dead of night, and you might not see another car the entire time. But the rules still apply. You can only go so fast, and stay to the right. A boat’s path is chosen solely by the captain, and in open water the rules are only those of common sense and self-preservation. Go fast or slow, north, south, east or west – in to port or out to sea. Or just sit completely still. Freedom.
My obsession with boats continued into my teenage years, but oars were replaced with motors and sails. My friends and I know every rock and reef on the north shore of Lake Erie from Buffalo to Crystal Beach. We fished every inch of it. We skied so much that my friend Ron could get up from a water start on a canoe paddle – a feat he is still rightly proud of to this day. We tried it all in all manner of boats ranging from 16 to 18 feet. I can tell you that no boat that we had access to could provide enough speed for barefoot skiing, although the memories of our attempts and failures can still put us all on the ground in fits of laughter.
Sailing also entered the picture, as there was a small cadre of people in our bay who would get together on the water on Sunday mornings for “friendly” races. The North Shore Yacht Club. Come one, come all. No class races. Sailfish lined up against, lasers and lightnings, and even a few larger day sailers like ours, an 18-foot O’Day. Each boat had its strengths and weaknesses and Lake Erie is one of the few marine environments with the capability of exposing each one at one time or another. Flat calm or near gail, the conditions dictated the race, but the race was always on. Those races still continue to this day, although an effort was made to unitize the fleet and now there are seven or eight JY15s on the bay and they very rarely lose.
Through college and in the years after I still returned to that bay in Canada, but less frequently. Always waiting though were the boats, and I missed them dearly. So much so that I began buying a few of my own as I built a career as a corporate lawyer. I now live on close to Lake Erie in a suburb or Cleveland and have kids of my own, and we still spend some time at the cabin in Canada. Anyway, I’ve bought and sold a number of boats in the last 20 years, and I will I’m sure delve into my boating escapades in future posts.
So that brings me to this blog. It is a blog about boats and the boating lifestyle. I’d like to try to impart a little of what has made boating such an important part of my life and some of the places I’ve seen, and hope to maybe inspire a few people to get into boating. I’m not sure of much more than that right now. I’m still looking for the perfect boat. But I’ve long enjoyed writing, and I have the opportunity now to spend some time doing it. So I will. I hope you enjoy it.
