Let's go boating . . or maybe not.

We have a boat. I don't know that I ever really wanted the responsibility of a boat, but it seems to be a sign of success for me. I always thought that if I could ever afford a boat, I would have "made it". I question the silliness of it.

In MN, we have about 8 months of winter, or at least times that the water is too cold to water-ski in/on. Now, if we were fishermen, they do that all year long. Ice fishing is the rage here. I don't quite get that either - proof of not growing up in MN. The boy went on his first fishing expedition with his grandfather this summer and caught his first fish. That is a whole other post.

So, we finally had some time and the weather was cooperating. We like to go in the early morning or at about 6-7 pm when the water is calmer. We make it to the lake, get the boat in the water and the motor starts. Sometimes that is questionable on the first time out. I was sitting enjoying the breeze when we stop to see if weeds have gotten stuck on the propeller.

You guessed it, the motor would not go up. This is not a good sign. We could have played for awhile, but the sun was quickly going down and we had to get the boat out of the water and this is almost impossible without tearing off the propeller in the process.

Did we have any tools? No. If we did, would we know what to do? No. Did we have the manual with us? Of course, no. We attached the boat and tried to see how much clearance we had at the boat landing - not enough. Some great guys tried to help, but didn't know much since they fish in a canoe.

What happened? I stayed with the kids and the boat in the water by the dock. The husband ran home to get some tools and a different hitch that was lower and would hopefully raise the boat just enough. This did work, barely. The neighbors were great and let us park our boat in their flat driveway opposed to our steep one.

My husband read the manual and figured out how to manually raise the motor - this would have been nice to know earlier - and got the boat in our driveway. Turns out that a relay switch, no bigger than a square inch, had failed which only allowed us to move the engine down and not up.

$100 later we made it back out onto the lake. The cost of "success". Why do we have a boat anyway?

blessings