Math-man-ship
Buying boats is like playing leapfrog. You buy a boat, and you have to buy a truck to pull it. You buy a truck and then, one day, it occurs to you that your truck could pull a bigger boat. You want a bigger boat – you always want a bigger boat – so you buy a bigger boat. You do a lot of towing of that bigger boat, and one low tide when you have trouble getting up a ramp you realize that a bigger truck could tow your bigger boat more safely and reliably. You buy a bigger truck. You’re happy for about seven seconds, or maybe a season, and then you figure out how lucky you are to have a truck than can tow an even bigger boat. Pretty soon you own a semi and the Queen Mary.
We’re not there yet, and Kevin’s been unsatisfied with the pace of our progress. So he dispensed with the whole leapfrog thing and went ahead and bought a boat and a truck.
The boat is a Steigercraft 23 Chesapeake, with an enclosed pilothouse and a cuddy cabin. At least I think that’s what it has – I’m still a little iffy on the terminology. Better I show you a picture.
The hull is from 1990, and has a recently re-fiberglassed deck and a new gas tank. The engine is a 2008 225-horse Evinrude E-tec. It’s s super-low-emissions two-stroke, the big brother to the 50-horse version we have on our oyster boat.
The best part is that it’s totally tricked out. It’s got super-groovy Raymarine radar and GPS, and outriggers on the roof that are controlled from inside the pilothouse. It’s got enough rod holders for a small village and – get this – autopilot.
I was a little worried about the autopilot when Kevin explained what it could do for us. “We can go out to Horseshoe Shoal and set it to go in circles over our favorite spot.” I immediately had visions of us, lazing in the sun, as our boat went on autocrash with another boat with the same favorite spot.
“Don’t worry,” Kevin said. “We also have collision avoidance.”
A 23-foot boat with a pilothouse and cabin is a lot more boat than our current 19-foot center console. It’s the biggest boat Kevin was comfortable trailering regularly, and he’s only comfortable trailering it with a big hairy truck. So he flew to Chicago, made a deal on a 2008 Ford F250 Super Duty diesel, and drove it home.
While he was gone, our friend Bob stopped by. Bob knew all about the boat; he went to see it with us to because we wanted it to get the Bob Seal of Approval. I told him Kevin was away, driving home in the big hairy truck we bought to pull it.
Bob scratched his head and took a pointed look around our property, densely populated with boats and trucks. “I see a lot of addition,” he said, “but not very much subtraction.”
That hit the nail on the head. When Kevin got home, we had a come-to-Jesus on the issue of subtraction. At first, Kevin contended that I was overreacting to addition. “Hey, at least it’s not multiplication,” were, I believe, his exact words. I told him that if he didn’t focus on some subtraction, we might be headed for a long division.
So we officially have for sale one 19-foot Eastern center console with a 70-horse Johnson, a 14-foot Carolina Skiff with a 25-horse Honda four-stroke, and a 1970 Series IIA Land Rover. No reasonable offer refused, since we’ll never have room for the Queen Mary at this rate.
Who goes there?
The first snowfall always shatters my illusion of privacy. I go out, the morning after, to discover that it’s Grand Varmint Central out there. There are rabbits criss-crossing the driveway. There are raccoons (still!) trying to get in the chicken coop. There is the occasional wild turkey. There is a coyote, or maybe the neighbor’s German shepherd. But what the hell is this? It’s a series of tracks, in one line, evenly spaced a little less than a foot apart. Each print is a … [Read More...]
Roots for the home team
Do you want the good news or the bad news? We’ll start with the good news. The good news is that our hoophouse has successfully extended our growing season. Granted, it’s gotten an assist from the warmest winter in human memory, but it still felt good to be out there in January, harvesting the parsnips and beets I planted in the early summer. Or at least it did, until I got the bad news. Root vegetables allow gardeners to remain in denial up until the very last moment. When you’re … [Read More...]
What not to do with eggs
Our new flock of chickens is laying on all cylinders, and we’re collecting up to ten eggs a day. I’m giving a lot of them to friends, but I don’t have all that many friends, so I still have quite a few left. There’s nothing for it but to eat them. Which raises a very important question: What on earth is the point of an omelet? I certainly see the point of mixing eggs with things like cheese and onions, mushrooms and ham. But it makes so much more sense to simply scramble all … [Read More...]
Best chicken breed. Period.
If you didn’t get chickens last year, or the year before, chances are good that you’re thinking about it now. You’re investigating local livestock ordinances. You’re deciding where to build your coop. You’re checking prices and availability at Murray McMurray. And you’re studying Henderson’s Handy-Dandy Chicken Chart to figure out how to pick your breeds. Henderson’s Handy-Dandy Chicken Chart is indispensable for anyone considering keeping chickens. It’s a comprehensive … [Read More...]
My first duck. Sort of.
I shot a duck. Here’s how it went down. Yesterday was the most astonishingly beautiful January day Cape Cod has ever seen. Temperatures rose into the high 50s, and there was a light breeze out of the southwest. We outfitted our oyster boat, a 17-foot Carolina Skiff, for duck hunting, by which I mean we put three chairs in it. Three, because Bob was going with us. You may remember Bob as the guy who’s taught us just about everything we know about Cape Cod fishing. Well, turns out Bob … [Read More...]
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