We've had three small boats in the past 18 years. My husband loves to fish, I love to drive. A match made in heaven, or somewhere.... Our latest boat is a 16.5' open bow. Kind of small, but I think it is a great size for the two of us, him fishing, me driving.
However, boating is EXPENSIVE. Several years ago, a friend said that if you can afford to put $100 bills into a garbage disposer, then you can afford to have a boat. Since the end of 2007, we couldn't afford a boat, so we towed it down to our property while our house was being built, and there it sat, covered, untouched, and unused.
In late July, my husband decided our little boat had sat there long enough. He uncovered it, cleaned it up, started the motors (main, plus trolling), and said let's go. I got it registered, he got it insured. We were ready, so on the second Tuesday in August we headed to Wahweap for a shake down cruise. We'd boated on Lake Powell in the past, but always the northern part of the lake (it is a HUGE lake - check it out on Google), never Wahweap. Now we live near Wahweap, so we'll learn a whole new part of the lake. Not having been out for almost 3 years was concerning - would it be like riding a bike, or would it all be new?? Well, it was mostly like riding a bike, but it was a bike that didn't work very well. We got it off the trailer without problems, and then got out into the bay a little ways. When we tried to do a radio check (marine radio - a necessary life-line, believe me!), we could hear them, but they couldn't hear us. Ka-ching, our first future expense, get a new radio. Then we tried to get "up" onto the water into a plane position. The engine had always had a "dead spot" when accelerating, but this time, we couldn't get past it. It would stall out. So, my husband (the floating mechanic) worked on the boat for a while, which didn't help, then we drove around at slow speed, checked out the trolling motor (which was ok), and headed back to the dock. We decided that our best approach was to drop it off to a mechanic in Big Water (~10 miles away from Wahweap) rather than have my husband work on the engine. Their diagnosis? It needed a carb rebuild and float. Second Ka-ching!
Two weeks later, after being told that it was fixed and ready to go, we did our second shake down cruise. Well, it still had the dead spot, but we could plane if we eased the throttle up to high speed. We drove to Lone Rock, which is fairly close to the marina, and trolled in the shade while my husband fished. We weren't skunked - he reeled in a 3" blue gill (the pirhana of the north), and then sent it off to hunt again. Other than asking the mechanic about the dead spot, and still needing to order a marine radio, the other issue was did we have the correct propeller? My husband was worried that we were running at too high RPM's while at top speed. The mechanic said that the dead spot could be fixed with a minor adjustment (free).
So, another week, another drive to Wahweap, and another shake down cruise. We borrowed a higher pitch but smaller diameter prop from the boat shop, had a new marine radio ready to plug in, and headed off to the lake. The new radio worked (yes!!). The prop was a bust, we were better off with our old one, but we could still get up to plane ok. We still had the dead spot, so the mechanic must not have made the adjustment (or if he did, it didn't work). But despite those issues, we felt like exploring a bit with our little less than a half tank of gas. Off we went to find Warm Springs Bay (aka Warm Creek Bay). We had a great map, but the lake isn't marked that well. We followed a house boat, and found the cut between two large cliffs that got us out of Wahweap Bay. Talk about narrow and shallow, but well marked by buoys and no wake, so it wasn't bad. At that point we dug out our little Explorist 200 GPS and turned it on, and then drove all over exploring Warm Spring Bay. After having lots of fun for a while we saw that we were getting close to the point of no return on gas, so we turned around to head back - and promptly got LOST on Lake Powell, and didn't even know it for almost half an hour. After realizing we had no idea where the cut back to Wahweap was, we drove over to some people camped on the shoreline. They were really nice - the bad news was that we were completely opposite of where we thought we were, but that it was pretty easy once you knew to look for a cliff called "Castle Rock." The gas was below 1/8 tank by then, but we kept our fingers crossed and headed in the correct direction, found the cut, and make it to the fuel dock (on fumes). Of course, we always had the trolling motor with its 1 gallon of gas, but that would have been very slow going. After we got 10 gallons, we decided we weren't ready to pull out yet, so we headed back to Lone Rock, turned off the engine in its shade - while my husband fished I lounged in the open bow with the paddle, adjusting our position every few minutes.
All in all, we had a good learning experience on our third shake down cruise. However, when we got back to the boat storage in Big Water and got our prop back, my husband learned that they had received the wrong carb kit for our engine, and used it anyway; they had ordered the correct one and would install it when they got it (no charge of course). So much for telling us it was fixed, and that it just needed a simple adjustment....mechanics are pretty much the same everywhere, no matter what they work on.
Lessons learned: (1) don't explore if you don't have enough gas; (2) turn the GPS on at the marina and mark it; (3) pay attention to landmarks and rock formations; (4) ask for full disclosure from mechanics and (5) we are darned lucky.
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