Looking out the window at the snow, you could be excused for not thinking about the boating season. However, many of us look forward to the beginning of open water fishing and boating season. Maybe that is why this time of year the boating industry sponsors several boat shows around the country like the one going on in Portland, Feb. 26 through March 7. The vendors know that this is when future and current boat owners dream about the boat they must have. The Portland Boat Show is where dreams can come true if you have the resources.
In my family I had three brothers and three sisters, and we were quite fortunate in that our parents owned a summer cottage on “Lake Housatonic” which wasn’t a lake at all but a section of the Housatonic River between two dams, the Lake Zoar and Derby dams in Shelton, Connecticut.
As a family, we “moved” to camp the day after school let out for the summer and left it the day before school resumed for us back in Stratford, Connecticut. My earliest recollections of camp life are that it always included a boat or boats of some kind. Initially it was an old wooden 12-foot rowboat that we moved around the long lawn that extended from the cottage to the shoreline via a series of straight cedar logs. My dad would supervise us kids moving the logs from behind to in front of the boat depending on what direction we were going. We learned quickly to keep our bare feet out of the way.
At the beginning of the season, we would launch the boat into the lake and watch it leak water like a sieve for two days or so before we would get to bail it out. We kids were all concerned that the boat would sink and we would not get to use it but our dad said to have faith, it was just the boards that made up the bottom of the boat swelling up to their full size. If there was a particularly wide gap between boards when we had it upside down on the shore, my dad taught us how to drive a rope-like substance called Oakum into the gap with a screwdriver, putty knife, or chisel.
True to his word, we bailed out the boat and except for rainfall, it stayed bone dry all summer. About every third or fourth year, we had to put a new coat of paint on it. One year the boat was stolen and the thieves spray-painted it black. We knew that because the Derby police retrieved the boat from the thieves and returned it to us when they went to jail. My dad had carved some identification info under the bow seat that made the recovery easier. Word to the wise!
The boat was heavy and slow to row, but all the kids learned how to row and we wore out that boat going the eight miles or so up and down the “Housie.” It actually was a great fishing platform, and my brother John, who was a year and a half younger than me, used it daily to fish for all manner of fish in the river - mostly white and yellow perch, largemouth bass, Calico Bass, carp, and eels – all warm water fish.
One day dad came home from work with a 5 HP Champion outboard motor, and we thought we were in heaven. However, the motor never worked right, and dad wouldn’t spend the extra money to get it fixed. When it ran, we really got that rowboat moving even if it vibrated so much it tickled your backside. Problem was it never ran long enough to get a whole outing in.
As we were getting older, we needed something better and dad came through again this time with a 16-foot Winer fiberglass runabout with a 35 HP Johnson … we were styling then. The motor ran great, and we did many sightseeing cruises all over the lake. We also began water skiing as the boat had the power to pull us up out of the water and onto skis. All of us older kids, our brothers and sisters ages spanned over 15 years, learned to ski behind that boat.
When I was in high school, John and I had gotten the boating bug, and we began looking around Stratford for a boat of our own we could afford. We found an old Kapp Cruisette, an 18-foot wooden cabin cruiser that needed a lot of TLC stored on some timbers behind a local gas station. It was too heavy to be a ski boat, but it had a “V” bunk that could sleep three and a marine toilet. We hauled it home and began the refinishing process that would eventually turn it into what we considered a masterpiece. We had just finished painting the roof of the boat white when my father, who was hobby gardener, came around the corner and hit the wet paint with a water hose he always seemed to have in his hand when outdoors. We were hopping mad, but he had done us a favor because the water droplets made the surface non-skid and we were able to safely walk all over it.
We used that boat for several years mooring it at a public boat launch that had a decaying pier with posts to tie it to and anchored the back end that had a nice used 35 HP Elgin motor on it to an anchor. After a while we felt the pull to water ski more than we did camping out on the boat. so we put it up for sale. We rode our bikes down to the boat launch to meet a potential buyer after a super high tide only to find the boat sitting on the bottom with waves breaking over that roof. The tide had caused the anchor to drag and when the tide went out the bow of the boat hung up on a dock pier until the water came over the transom sinking the boat. The guy offered us $50 for the whole thing. We demurred.
Eventually we sold it and bought another boat, this one a 16-foot Starcraft with a 35 HP that pulled us and our many buddies all around the mouth of the Housatonic River where it empties into Long Island Sound. These experiences started my brother John and me off on a lifetime of owning boats of all kinds no matter where we lived. He currently lives in New Hampshire on Merrymeeting Lake and owns several boats including a 22-foot pontoon boat. I have my 18-foot Lund Alaskan with a 50 horse on the back on Thomas Pond, and I use it for fishing, cruising, and towing the grandkids around on tubes.
The only way you can go wrong about boats is if you don’t buy one! <
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