It wasn’t much of a boat at that time. It needed paint badly, and the transom was so dry rotted you could easily push a screwdriver all the way through it. But, it was a boat, and he said he bought it just for me.
I never found out just where he got this boat, whether he bought it or whether it was given to him – but it did not matter. It was a boat and it was mine!
We spent the next few weeks working on the boat, getting it seaworthy again. A hand crosscut saw took the rotted transom and four inches of length off. We used a big piece of cardboard to outline the transom opening and cut two pieces of three quarter inch plywood to match the outline. A little glue, some trimming and a whole lot of brass wood screws later found a new transom in place.
Although it seemed like forever, it really didn’t take that long to make the boat a fishable craft. I never was one to take my time on any project – I just wanted to get it finished the fastest possible way. When I built model airplanes, they never had a lot of quality because I did not have the patience to wait for the glue to dry from one step to the next.
But my father was there to guide me, and although he had a lot of the same patience problem that I did, he saw to it that we had a safe boat – one that at least would not fall apart on the water.
He also found an engine somewhere. It was a six horse Wizard, one made by Western Auto that had been cleaned up and painted with a really cool green metallic paint. Supposedly it had been overhauled and was in good working order. It ran just fine hanging in our galvanized garbage can full of water.
The first trip was out of Matheson Hammock. The little boat was lifted inside my Dad’s 17-foot Squall King, and taken to the launch ramp, where we lifted it into the water and mounted the Wizard on the transom. A few pulls on the air-cooled Wizard, and we were on our way.
We headed for the mouth of Snapper Creek, a man made canal that emptied into Biscayne Bay. The spit of land made from digging the canal left a very nice place to camp, and that is what we did for that entire weekend.
We used the boat to run up the canal to the saltwater intrusion dam and then fished our way back to the point. In the early morning hours we would fish from the point, catching snook and tarpon as they fed on the mullet schools coming into the canal.
It was the most memorable camping trip I had ever been on, even with the sand flies and mosquitoes. I was barely a teenager and here I was with my own boat and motor camped for a weekend with no adult supervision. It just didn’t get any better than that.
The old Wizard engine only lasted for a few trips on my new boat. I guess the overhaul wasn’t as good as it could have been. It overheated in Biscayne Bay one Saturday and froze up beyond repair.
I can’t really remember what happened to that boat. I used it for a number of years without an engine, paddling to dive for lobster in the bay, or pulling it behind my Dad’s boat out of Flamingo. It seems to have dropped from my memory, almost as if I still had it.
But what I do remember is a father that had the foresight to find an old boat for a boy to have, the wisdom to help him make it a workable tool, and the love to let him use it all alone on the water. I’ll always remember that boat as my first excursion into independence – even if I can’t remember what ever happened to it.
