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Old 03-29-2016, 02:57 PM   #1
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Your first time on a boat

Wifey B: Not first boat you owned, but first time on a boat.

My first time, I was 13 and I snuck out without permission (well, I forged parent approval but then I often did that), and went with a church group, although I didn't attend the church. We went to a lake about an hour away. It seemed like a lifetime away. There were all these boats going by and we even got out on a big pontoon boat for a little while. That was like a dream, so far away from my life. All the boats, nice homes on the water, it was a world I knew I was only visiting and would never be part of, but for that afternoon, it was worth any punishment coming from it. There turned out to be none because when I got home my father was drunk and it was easy to tell him, I'd been at a friends and told him before I left and he had said ok. I didn't even allow myself to dream of actually owning a boat. I just relived that afternoon over and over in my mind.
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Old 03-29-2016, 03:16 PM   #2
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Imagine what a bayliner (w/ a 4 barrel carb 454) bought in the mid 90's from a junkyard for $500 looked like. That was the first boat I was ever on other than a ferry. All summer long my boss and I we'd drive up to the boat after work. Take the battery out of the work van bring it onboard and use it and a can of starter fluid to start the boat. We'd fish/drink all night, come back to the dock, put the battery back in the van and drive away. Nap, shower, work and repeat.

Imagine my surprise when the boat sank at the dock one night. The crap we'd get away with back then was great.
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Old 03-29-2016, 03:18 PM   #3
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Imagine my surprise when the boat sank at the dock one night. The crap we'd get away with back then was great.
Wifey B: Did you get it up and going again?
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Old 03-29-2016, 03:31 PM   #4
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My father and grandfather took me shopping with them to a Sears store. I was 5-years old. They looked away for a minute and I took off. After a frantic search they found me in the sporting goods department sitting in an aluminum row boat. Despite my pleas they refused to buy it for me. That was the first boat I was ever on.
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Old 03-29-2016, 03:44 PM   #5
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I was 8 months old when my parents rented a house on Penobscot Bay (that they later bought). The only access to it at the time was by boat and my parents' friends delivered us to it aboard their 40' +/- schooner.

The story goes that the landlady rowed out to meet us in a dory but the skipper didn't see her and rolled her under with the forefoot. My father fished her out with her spluttering that she had had the right of way.

I obviously remember every detail.
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Old 03-29-2016, 03:47 PM   #6
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Quote:
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Wifey B: Did you get it up and going again?
Oh no, my boss gave some guy a few bucks to tow it out of the marina and let it finish sinking that same night. Different times, different world.
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Old 03-29-2016, 05:27 PM   #7
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7 years old, I think, fishing a small water shed lake in Oklahoma. My uncle had a 16 foot aluminum john boat with a sears tiller steered engine. We had tent camped for the week. I remember every minute of it. We would check the trotline every morning and evening, rebaiting with chicken gizzards. Even caught some catfish. He also had bird dogs and shotguns and deer rifles and a old 4wd scout. He was my hero.
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Old 03-29-2016, 05:37 PM   #8
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Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland? Otherwise, a row boat in Santa Monica bay when 7 fishing.
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Old 03-29-2016, 06:11 PM   #9
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I got a 9' wooden row boat on Lake Huron when I was about 5. Grampa bought it for me and he bought a 7.5hp Evinrude for it when I was 7. I was in hog heaven and spent many, many hours on that boat.


That was the start of my bad habit which has lasted some 65 years.
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Old 03-29-2016, 06:30 PM   #10
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First I remember was when I was about 5 yrs old on Jobos Bay on the South Coast of Puerto Rico where I grew up. My Dad built a 14 plywood kit boat, with a 7.5 hp Evinrude it flew, well, it felt like it back then. The bay had lots of good fishing; Snapper, Snook, Spanish & King Mackerel, even some Tarpon. Lots of good times on it.
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Old 03-29-2016, 06:35 PM   #11
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I must have been four or five because my parents were still married. My father, Uncle Bob, Uncle Rick, and my grandfather took me with them for an overnight camping trip on Lake Zoar above Stevenson Dam in Oxford, Connecticut. The boat was aluminum, outboard motor in a brown housing, they all wore red plaid hunting coats. I sat next to the ice cooler between the seats. My grandmother packed us loaded baked potatoes in foil, but we got hot dogs at the Lake Zoar drive in before we launched too (although back then it was just the Lake Zoar food stand, wasn't called the drive in until high school). As I remember it was a long, long run on the water to the woods where we camped, but the whole lake is only about ten miles long. We got there so late most of the boat run was at night, very dark. Now that was exciting. Slept in a pretty smelly green canvas tent. Dad had to lift me in and out of the boat.

Interesting how so many of us remember those moments so vividly. Funny though, my father doesn't remember that boating/camping trip at all.
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Old 03-29-2016, 06:56 PM   #12
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I don't remember my first time at all. Both my father and uncle had aluminum fishing boats as they argued over motors. They both had 9 hp or 9.9 or whatever was in that range. Uncle had Mercury, father had Evinrude. Like most of my childhood, I don't have specific or detailed memories. Don't remember ever actually being on either of those boats, just know I was.
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Old 03-29-2016, 07:08 PM   #13
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First time on a boat was on a rented wooden rowboat on Clear Lake, CA, perhaps 12 or 14 feet long, and wide enough my brother and I could row abreast of each other. No PFDs of course. No nanny state then. We were expendable.
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Old 03-29-2016, 07:39 PM   #14
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A rental row boat with my father and older brother off of Miller's Island Road near Pleasure Island in Maryland. The rental company was Hartmann's and I was very small. Went fishing, and I was surprised how many other boats were there when it became light. Maybe 1965.
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Old 03-29-2016, 08:27 PM   #15
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First time on a boat? Well, that would have been in early June of 1947, when my mother brought me home from the hospital to the sail boat they were living on in St. Petersburg, FL. Then mom got home sick, made dad sell the boat, and we drove back to Washington state where they were from. No place to live, so we stayed on my grandparents boat while dad built a house for us. A few years later dad built us a boat that we lived on during the summer months, cruising the San Juan's and BC. So when people ask me about my thing with boats, I just tell them it's not my fault!!
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Old 03-29-2016, 08:35 PM   #16
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First time on a boat?
Well, if I cheat, it was days before I was born.
Mom had a difficult delivery with my brother so, rather than let the camp first aide/cook/flunky/barber bring me out in a bunkhouse, it was decided I would arrive in style. So off on the Union boat for a trip to St. Vincent's in Vancouver.

Ok, so I guess the first real life boat ride was a couple weeks later going back to camp. Maybe 10 days old. After that, I was on anything that floated.

Boats were our life. I don't have memories prior to about 4 but know there would have been many trips in those early days. A lot of the camp boys had boats at one time or another but most were used to try to move rocks.

I have lots of memories, sitting on the back deck of fish boats, making the frequent short grocery and liquor runs to Alert Bay or Sointula from Englewood (now Beaver Cove).

The most vivid memories are from 4 on...

There was a bustling sawmill in Telegraph Cove that had a big seine boat named Hillicum (spelling?). She had no fish gear, but a big hold and was rigged to haul lumber on deck or tow scows around the immediate area and up to Port Hardy. Many rides on that one, just to get us kids away from camp and give moms a break. I recall a trip up to Namu, (Old) Bella Bella and Klemtu. Slept and ate aboard. Kids paradise.

There were 2 bootlegging brothers in Alert Bay who eventually bought a pair of brand new Chris Crafts that had seats like a bus. Sat maybe 20. First real water taxis at Alert Bay.

Other names I remember were Gikamee and a big fast lapstrake, maybe Clinker, named Phantom Lady that ran from Alert Bay in all directions but mostly to Kelsey Bay when weather allowed.

I could go on...
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Old 03-29-2016, 09:56 PM   #17
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With my parents in a rented 14 ft wooden boat with a 5 hp Johnson on Diablo Lake in Washington State.
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Old 03-29-2016, 10:12 PM   #18
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Too young to remember. Best bet is that my first boat ride was while I was still an infant in the early 60s, on either a wooden kit runabout built by my father or a rowboat built by my grandfather, on St. George's Creek in Southern Maryland.

I have an old home movie of my mother tearing around on the runabout, with the steering wheel in one hand and an infant in the other (I forgot which one of us). Neither she or the infant are wearing a life vest. My father was on the foredeck, facing aft with the camera to get the shot.
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Old 03-29-2016, 10:13 PM   #19
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It would be a raft my brothers & I built out of logs and driftwood, tied together with a bit of rope. We launched it on the Goat river in BC when I was about 8 or 9. It broke up when we hit a bit of whitewater, and I lost my glasses in the ensuing chaos.

The following summer, I saved up my cherry picking money and bought a proper 6 foot vinyl dinghy from the Sears catalog. We shot the rapids in style then.
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Old 03-29-2016, 10:27 PM   #20
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Camp Sea Gull on the Neuse River in 1974.

(assuming the log flume at Carowinds or the little boat ride at Pullen Park that just went in a circle don't count... I think I was 3... I have the film)
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