Boating VI

We have been blessed with rain recently so my brother and I were able to go out on the lake for the sixth time this season last night. JOY!

Ted, my brother, pointed out to me that I keep taking pictures of the lake and it basically doesn’t change that much. He is sort of right but I think there are subtle changes and different shots that make the pictorial record of each boat ride unique.

For instance, I managed to take a nice picture of the mama duck who is hanging around Ted’s dock:

Actually there seems to be a whole family of ducks that are living in that part of the lake. I saw them having a family meeting on a beach but the boat moved too fast to get a picture of them.

When we approached the culvert to head from the pond into the lake, it looked like the current was going pretty strong. See the roughness of the water in the culvert?

We thought it would be difficult to go through either going or coming back but it wasn’t too bad. And, since the water was deeper, we didn’t have to worry about scraping the bottom of the boat.

When we made it out onto the main part of the lake, past the no wake zone near the culvert, the water was pretty rough.

The waves in the picture may not look that bad but in the boat, trying to go full speed, it was very bouncy. It was thump, thump, thump, thump, thump which bounced us up and down and was a little uncomfortable. Between the rough waves and the wind, we had a hard time getting any kind of speed going and ended up mostly putting down the lake at a mediocre rate.

When we were at the bottom of the lake, the wind started dying down and clouds moved in.

With the wind down to a soft breeze, the water smoothed out and we were able to get the boat going at a good clip.

And, with the addition of clouds, the start of the sunset was very pretty.

At this point, the batteries in my camera died. I thought that it wasn’t behaving properly but I didn’t think it through and bring extra batteries with me. Oh well.

I do wish I had been better prepared because, after we went back through the culvert into the pond, we found a blue barrel floating in the middle of the pond. We looked around and noticed that there were three identical barrels by my brother’s neighbor’s dock. If my camera had been working, I would have taken a picture of it, both in the middle of the pond and back on it’s dock.

What happened was. since I was steering, I maneuvered the boat next to the barrel, my brother grabbed it and we headed over to the dock. It took quite a few tries to get in the proper position for Ted to get the barrel up on the dock. Turns out I learned a valuable lesson in steering the boat. When in reverse, steering is the opposite way. I kept steering it the wrong way and ended up farther away than I had wanted and then I had to go forward, go in reverse again, over and over, until I finally made it right next to the dock. It was good practice for me since the same movement is required when I am backing the boat into the dock when we are done boating. I generally have to kill the engine and Ted takes us in with the trolling motor. Maybe I’ll get good enough some day so that I can just back it in without the assistance.

So that was our sixth boat trip. I hope we have a few more before the summer is over. Maybe with the hurricane coming, the water level will rise and stay risen for the next month or so. Wouldn’t that be lovely and a positive out of a horrible storm?