Outboard Sagas

 It Could Have Been Worse I didn't burn up the motor. (I have a history of this, and the motor is older than my middle age children, so it's not completely irrelevant.) The boat didn't sink. I got to see some of the local porpoises. I caught some fish. I got a Trout, a Weakfish and a whiting large enough to filet. So when the motor began refusing to stay in gear, I knew it was no tragedy. I was not worried. I could get home on the trolling motor if I had to. But when I was drifting and snagged the bottom, and the drag was set too tight and the screws attaching the rod holder pulled right out and the rod was in the drink before I could grab it -- the reel on that one was my Quick Finessa. I'm really going to miss it. I bought in the early nineteen-sixties. This was three weeks ago. Since then, I have been working (a little) on the motor, thinking about it (a lot), and buying parts from time to time. Also, I am looking at new rods and reels.  

 By this time, I should stop calling them breaks. True, they have nothing to do with outboards, etc., but also, by this time, they aren't an interruption, but an ongoing behavior. Yeah -- I went hunting. I took pictures. I got out of the car and  suited up, and almost immediately saw this: A young tom turkey. As I walked down the trail, he would stop, look back at me, then hurry around the next curve. Finally, he wandered into the bush and I continued looking for a good place to sit and wait for a deer. After a while, I headed back to the car, and here he was again. That's when I took this pic. Here is where I have to mention Bill Watterson, creator of the comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes. When Hobbes leaps on Calvin, he is in the general shape of a giant letter "C," slightly elongated and tilted forward. That's what I saw next. In shadow, it looked just a bit like someone threw a dark blanket. The turkey squawked and took flight. The cat walked back into the path a

  It's Another Tuesday and this time I went fishing. It was a beautiful day, sunny with very little wind. Here in coastal, southern Georgia, the tides are more extreme than, say, south Florida. Today's was about eight feet. An aspect of such tides is that they flow really fast. If you're in a boat and want to fish under a bridge, it's probably best to fish a bit before to a bit after slack tide. It was perfect for that. I don't normally fish this way, so I was not perfectly prepared.                                                                                                                                                              That's the second Flounder. It may have been legal, but I wanted one more like the first one. It broke the line. This is the redfish (aka Red drum) I caught off an oyster bed. It is shown next to a boning knife, for size reference. It is of legal size and we will have fish and hushpuppies tomorrow.  I also got a whiting and an A

 I Took A Break I Was going to go fishing on Tuesday, but on Monday, I was talking to my neighbor, Jim, and It got around to hunting. There was an early deer season, three-day, Oct. 5,6,7, either sex, in a Wildlife Management Area nearby. I decided to go deer hunting instead. I would go the 5th and 6th, and leave Saturday to every kid and his dog that couldn't hunt during the week. My wife, Peggy, said, Take pictures!" I did. That's a pretty fresh print, but I wanted one so fresh the deer was still standing in it. This is an abandoned Gopher tortoise hole. Just stating the obvious here. These are purple false foxglove. There are field of them. they are beautiful. I also saw some gallberries, but didn't get a usable picture. Didn't taste them either. Would you? The morning dew on pine needles. The morning dew didn't destroy the spider web. By that time, if something wasn't trapped, the adhesive qualities of the web would have deteriorated anyway. And in the

My Tools I First, we need a definition of the word. For the purposes of this discussion a tool is any material thing that helps you perform a given task. That’s a pretty loose definition, I know, but if you want a tighter def, go to Merriam-Webster. II You could divide tools into several categories, small to large, for instance. Hand tools or power tools. For the last thirty years or so, tools, generally, have been amazingly cheap. And they keep getting better. Also there are homemade tools and special tools. For instance, anyone working on cars should have an OBD-II code reader, available from under twenty-five dollars to three hundred and fifty dollars, unless you want to get into the ones that have you upload the results to your PC. Those are really expensive. But this is specifically about working on old outboards, though a lot of it will transfer to other things. First, you need a portable flat surface to put tools and parts on, so that you’re not constantly bending

  If I Were a Wise Man   I looked at the boat some more today, and noticed there were a few more things I could remove. For the most part, they were screws, the purpose of which was not always clear. What did become clearer and clearer as I worked along was that the fiberglass that had been added on the inside wasn’t repair, but rather modifications. The more I looked, the worse it got. This boat is full of good ideas, badly executed. It appears that the vast majority of the added fiberglass work bonded poorly, or not at all. Look at the rear light. Not just a good idea, but a legal necessity. This one can lay flat in the daytime. It’s held on with two steel screws of different lengths. The wires are connected in what can only be called a substandard manner, as are all connections on this boat.      The bottom must be repainted. One of the previous owners (or all of them, for all I know) thought it was just fine to drill holes through the hull to attach things. At least mos