Cut the fucking rope !!!

When I bought my 32 foot boat after moving here it hadn’t been ran for a long time. The lady I bought it from was living on it and had put about 20 grand into it fixing it up, it had new tanks, head, all new 110 volt wiring, and all sorts of things, and I got a great deal on it when she got paranoid about it having an engine in it and bought a home in town and sold it to me for twenty-five hundred dollars.

I knew the boat pretty well as I had rewired from the pilots station to the engine compartment for her not long after moving here. It had a beautiful cabin in it, and the big berth was cedar. The engine and outdrive was like new but the only time it had been run while she owned it was when I got done with the wiring job and we took it to the fuel dock for some fuel, it was a 350 Chev gas engine, on the way back to the berth I swung out of the marina and around the harbor buoy, that was the only time in over five years that it had been anywhere other than at the birth where she lived on it.

I bought it just before my birthday so I decided to take it out for the first time on my birthday. It was a cloudy and windy day but I wasn’t worried about that, it wasn’t that bad, or so I didn’t think. I went over to swing around the city pier and then headed toward the old Rainier mill site, just about the time I got near the old mill pier I noticed steam coming out of the engine hatch cover so I shut the engine down to check.

Being as the boat hadn’t been run for years the water cooled exhaust manifolds had plugged up some and the rubber tube connecting to the outdrive exhaust had burned through and was filling the bilge with water, not a lot, but some, and the engine was starting to overheat on top of that. I jumped into my inflatable skiff with the electric trolling motor that I was towing behind me to try to tow the boat away from the pier that the wind was blowing me toward, but it wasn’t strong enough to tow against the wind.

So I went back to the boat and got back on it and tossed an anchor out and got the drift stopped about a hundred feet from the pier. Then I took the skiff back to the marina to look for someone to tow me back to my birth. There was a nice guy there that was almost always there after work everyday. He was a drunk, not that I have a problem with that, as long as they can still function well. I asked if he would take me back to my boat and tow it back to the marina. No problem he said, we could go as soon as his wife showed up, and she did shortly.

It didn’t take long to get to my boat, it wasn’t that far away, but I swear, he had three double drinks on the way. I grabbed his boat hook when we got there and told him to go by my anchor rope so that I could snag it and use it as a towrope. Just as I snagged it he swung into to the rope instead of away from it. I guess you know that at that point things pretty much started going to hell in a hand basket. I couldn’t hold the rope away from his outdrive and his prop grabbed it and twisted it up in front of it.

It grabbed enough rope around it that it pretty much made his boat ineffective also so both of us were now in trouble and being blown toward the pier. What fucking fun. His boat was upwind so it blew his boat toward mine, when it got to my boat I thought, “Fuck it, I’m getting back on my boat.” And there I am in my fifty’s trying to climb onto the higher bow of my boat in these waves with the two boats trying to kill me, but I made it, don’t ask me how.

By the time I got to my pilots station to start the engine up our two boats were beside each other and my boat had smashed out ten feet of his windows on the starboard side. I got away always from him and hollered at him to cut the anchor rope. He grabs the boat hook and snags the rope and sits there with a stupid look on his face like, “You really want me to cut it?” “Fuck yes I want him to cut it, it’s just a fucking anchor and I’m only twenty-five feet from ramming into a fucking pier.

So he cut it and I got the hell past the end of the pier where the wind wouldn’t blow me into it before I shut the engine off again. He got his trolling motor started, finely, because he hadn’t used it for some time and it was cranky, and he also got away. Then thanks to his being a nice guy other than being drunk, he came to get me again. I tossed him a rope and he towed both of us back to the marina with the trolling motor. He wanted to tow me to the boat launch next to the marina but I wasn’t having anything to do with that, my engine wasn’t over heating that badly.

When we got near the marina entrance I tossed off the tow line, started up my engine and went in on my own power back to my birth which was right by the entrance anyway. Naturally, very thing that went wrong out there was my fault to him hear it. But it didn’t turn out too bad. Boat people stick together pretty well and a couple of men there replaced his windows for a hundred and fifty bucks for me. I went and insured my boat as I hadn’t done it yet. I bought him a big bottle of his favorite scotch so he was happy all in all. Only his wife always bitched about having to clean up all the glass. Maybe he didn’t share the scotch with her?

I was two hours late for the birthday party that Helen had planned for me but it all worked out okay in the end. What the hell, I was still alive when I could have been dead in the sea, and it’s a great memory to tell if I get old. Then I took off the exhaust manifolds and boiled them out with muratic acid and my boat ran fine after that. I didn’t like how the cooling system was plumbed on it so I redid that also. I always meant to go back and look for the anchor, but I never did get around to it.