A Captain Goes Down With His Ship

Decided to do a shakedown cruise with the boat today with mixed results. It's a 1965 Crestliner 14ft runabout. Did get it in the water, that's about the only good thing that happened.

 At least it wasn't a "3 hour tour"!! The Old Lady has been joking about the S.S.Minnow and asking what's the Finnish word for minnow?? It's "sintti"*.

I picked a small inland lake where I figured there would not be a lot of people so I could do my thing without a lot of people around. That way I could take my time as it turns out there is a learning curve to this boating thing. Also there was nobody to laugh at me other than The Old Lady, and she does that a lot anyway.

This picture was supposed to show the boat sinking. The water was coming in at a good rate around the drainplug. I pulled it back out of the water to fix the plug, but couldn't find anything wrong after the water drained out. So put it back in and had the same problem, but this time I tightened the plug and stopped the water coming in. At least this time I got the outboard motor to run. The last time (about 8yrs ago) I put it in the water I couldn't get it started. But there was a problem with the way it ran. It would kick back while running like if it was out of time, but not constantly, it would run for a little while and then kick back and run again. A while back I called it a Lemonrude (Evinrude) and people laughed, maybe I was more right than I thought!! If I can't get the motor to run smoothly, I may have to buy another one.

We did do a little spin around the lake and at one time the compass was spinning like a whirling dervish. There must be a large deposit of iron ore under the lake.

Another thing that happened was I blew a brake line on my truck. The line to the rear wheels blew and I only had front brakes after that. At the time I thought maybe I blew a wheel cylinder because I could see a trail of brake fluid on the ground. At least it happened while launching the boat, not when I needed to do a quick stop from highway speeds. Because I knew the brakes were not up to par, I tried to keep it under 60mph on the way home. When I got home, I crawled under the truck and saw the brake fluid was coming from the line just before it connects to the flexible line to the rearend.

*google is a wonderful thang

Got My Boat Back

Friday I went and got my boat back.  About 6 yrs ago I gave it to the son-in-law.  He used it for a few years and then lost interest in it.  The registration expired in '08.

As it looked Friday morning.

After sitting in the back yard for several years, the boat was not looking too good.  I took the cover and the plastic sheet under the cover off and put them in the trashcan.  Next summer I'll have something to occupy my time fixing the boat up.  Now I'll have a chance to do the things I originally planned on doing to the boat.  Like new seats and building a seat across the back with the battery and gas tanks underneath.  Also finish stripping the paint off and repainting it.  I think the white paint on it is the paint used for painting lines in parking lots!!  When I first got it there were several cans of parking lot marking paint in the boat.

The worst of the flat tires.

 All the tires were flat, this picture shows the worst of them.  Tried to air it up using an air tank and a strap around the tire to get the bead back on the rim.  Wouldn't hold air enough to seat the bead, had to take it to a tire shop and had them put bead sealer on it and then air it up.  The other tire looked like it was just low, but had to take it to the tire shop for bead sealer too.  The spare wouldn't take air, but by then I figured I was done playing with tires.

Parked for the winter.

Spent Saturday afternoon getting it ready for winter.  Blocked up the trailer to take the weight off the wheels and springs.  Made a roof over the open part of the boat and put a tarp over it.  We seem to have a lull between snowstorms which allowed me to go get the boat and create an area to park the boat out of the way.  Come next May I'll be able to take the tarp off and start get it ready for summer.