Boat Journal

Chronicling a love affair with sailing

And for this year’s parade…..

My favorite saying, that I made up, is that you can always have a good time, or a good story. Every Lighted Boat Parade that we have been in has been both. One year, I thought the lights could run off the batteries. Well, a few of them can. Not many. So we had few lights that year. There’s been the endless problems with generators. One year, I rented one and it worked out great. I could never find that size to rent again – they were always too big to use. There was the year I finally bought a generator, and it worked that year. But it had to be replaced the following year because it failed to work. That’s what I get for buying a cheap Harbor Freight generator, I guess. There were lights that wouldn’t light. Fog. Leaving late. If it could happen, it has.

This year, I put the lights up a week ahead of time so there would be no last minute rush. We got to the parade on time. We couldn’t go down Sara’s Creek, because I wasn’t sure where the channel was and I was seeing the depth keep getting lower. But we made it through the rest of the parade ok. At the end, the battery monitor still showed 57%, so I figured we had plenty to make it home.

Not so. We started home, and the boat kept slowing down. I pushed the throttle forward, and nothing. I finally plugged our destination into the GPS and it showed that it would take an hour to get not that far down the river.

So I called SeaTow. Doug, the marina owner, came on the radio and said he could help us out. SeaTow said they’d stand by. SeaTow, I guess, was furious. They called the boat captain that came to our rescue and chewed him out. He figured that he’d lost out on a tow. I found out that it was TowBoat I was supposed to call, not SeaTow. Those were the folks I had the insurance with through BoatUS. If SeaTow had come, I’d have been out several hundred dollars.

When we got to the marina, Jessica, the marina owner’s neice who sails with us, came by to invite us up to the ‘big house’ for food and drinks. I figured we’d eat what we had on the boat, then go socialize. So I poured the alcohol into the stove and lit it.

Well, I couldn’t see the alcohol going in and I apparently spilled more on the sides than I got into the receptacle. It caused quite a blaze. Not dangerous. But enough to melt parts on the stove. So I put it out with the fire extinguisher, which put powder all over the boat. Needless to say, we headed up for the other party, rather than stick around.

The party was great! Good people. Good food. Good conversation. Good drinks. Good music. We had a wonderful time.

So, a good time and a good story!

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