The Excellent Adventure

Yesterday started out pure suckage.

Short form, I had a ton of unpleasant, bureaucratic, paperwork-related tasks in my queue. And I am wrestling with a cold. And pregnancy nausea (the fool who called it “morning sickness” should be taken out and shot). And it was just looking like a lousy day all the way around.

And then, from the back of the boat, I heard the whine of a tiny motor.

The man who owned our boat before us was all about going fast. The old name of the boat reflects this. And the fact that our hardbottomed dinghy, rated for a 15hp outboard, sports an 18. We hadn’t started it up since Puerto Rico, and for some reason, Jason decided that it was time.

I poked my head out over the transom, where Jason was grinning like a mad thing. We’ve had a number of minor yet irritating failures in the boat recently, so it was great when something just worked like it was supposed to. “Wanna go for a spin?” he asked.

I had work to do. I had Real Responsibility staring me in the face. Business meetings. You know…. work.

Five minutes later, the boys and I had our jackets, PFDs, and hats on, and were in the dinghy.

It’s startlingly difficult to run an outboard that big without leaving wake. Every time we revved it down low enough, it threatened to die. We went under the two footbridges, which thrilled the boys, poked around the fuel dock, looked at people’s boats (and learned the names of some boats that we’d never seen before), checked out the pumpout stations for the neighboring marina to see if we liked theirs better than ours (we didn’t…), and because the boys were having so much fun and Jason was getting antsy to test out the full 18 horses, we got brave and ducked outside the seawall.

Let me tell you friends; there is very little in this world cooler than zipping around on a flat-calm bay in crisp fall air, surrounded by boys grinning like little maniacs (them and their father, yes.) Kestrel kept screaming “faster, Papa, faster!” and Rowan was just beaming. We were going so fast, we were throwing a roostertail. We zipped outside the breakwater, up around the seawall, and around the corner to where they’re reinforcing the seawall that’s slumping out from under the very large and very old chinese restaurant (probably the Sea God’s revenge, since they serve shark fin soup. But I digress…)

Jason throttled it down so Kestrel could check out the construction equipment; he’s obsessed these days with bulldozers. That’s two for ya. After less than 30 seconds of putt-putting along, both boys turned to Jason, and screamed, as one, “Do it again, Papa!”

So off we went, screaming back past the people up on top of the wall, back around the breakwater, and into the marina, surfing through the entrance as our own wake caught up to us.

Back to work, spirits lifted by a dinghy ride.

Tags: Jason, Maintenance, Talking Story

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