Morning Guy Blog

For Early Risers Who Wish That It Could Be Morning All Day

For Early Risers Who Wish It Could Be Morning All Day

Green Electric Boat (sort of)

By


Can an electric 12-volt 1-hp trolling motor with a 100ah battery push our 4,500-lb. boat to that distant island (2-miles) and back? That was the bet. And we won. In fact, it pushed us along at 1.5-knots (nice trolling speed) for 5-miles, and it still had juice remaining.

We never fired up our very thirsty 4-barrel 250-hp Mercruiser. First time. And we feel virtuously green because, as everyone knows, electricity comes from the pixie dust raised by the stomping golden hooves of dancing rainbow colored unicorns.

Okay, we used a lithium battery. But still, that’s a lot of barge to push through the water.

We would now call it an e-boat, if WWII history had not already taken that name.

Hanging on tight to the might of 1-hp!
There’s a showoff on every cruise, it seems.

 

Failure To Launch

By

Stone art on the shores of Flathead Lake.
I’ve been waiting for 8 months. I knew from past experience that I could launch the boat when the level of Flathead Lake achieved 3′ below summer’s full pool.

Wrong!

Either I miscalculated or winter storms have pushed the shoreline rocks higher. I think the latter. Anyway, not enough water for launch. All I accomplished was a broken trailer taillight and an unintended swim in very cold water (while searching for the taillight pieces). We did salvage the outing, however, with picnic at a nearby park.

Falling in the freezing water of Flathead Lake was the second shock of the day. The first was filling the 60-gallon boat tank with premium gas at the new, post-Covid prices! We may be outfitting the boat with long paddles.

Matching Relics: ’95 Econoline Pulling ’96 Maxum
Searching for my trailer's license plate in Flathead Lake.
Looking for taillights in all the wrong places.

Looking towards Glacier National Park across Flathead Lake.

Wanted Dead Or Alive!

By

Flathead Lake squirrel stowaway. Montana.
Have you seen this squirrel? Brown, furry, dark demon eyes, long whiskers, sports a sailor hat. If so, please report him to the nearest Coast Guard facility. Do not be fooled by his small stature and attempt to approach him. He’s no ordinary squirrel. He has sharp, pointy teeth!

Sinbad the Squirrel is wanted for chewing his way through the cover canvas of our boat.

The furry perpetrator further vandalized the boat by building a nest in a life-jacket and, well… generally treated our boat like his chew toy.

We happen to have a strict no-squirrel policy, so Sinbad is now wanted for the counts of an illegal break-in, chewing-on-entry, setting up residence without a live-aboard permit, and attempting to be a stowaway squirrel.

No baby squirrels were involved in this incident (yet).

Dry Tortugas

By


Trying to sculpt out a rough draft of The Improbable Sea Dogs of St. Croix North, I’ve been thinking a lot about Dry Tortugas. Back in the mid-90s, when my family and I were learning how to ocean sail, we considered this our “Apollo moon shot.”

Borrowing from President Kennedy’s infamous 1961 Moon Mission speech, I announced to my family in 1997:

“I believe that we should commit to achieving the goal, before the year is out, of landing on Dry Tortugas and returning safely to the Charlotte Harbor. No single sailing project will be more exciting, or more impressive to our family, or more important… and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.

We choose to sail to Dry Tortugas this year and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”

Well, maybe I didn’t use those exact words, but it was something equally inspirational, I’m sure.

For those of you who may not know, Dry Tortugas is a small, isolated archipelago of the Florida Keys, some 70-miles west of Key West (and 100-miles north of Havana). For us, it was a 150-mile “offshore” excursion — waaaay out of my OSHA-orientated comfort zone. Let’s see: two Minnesota-born landlubbers, one teen, one pre-teen, a water-hating cat, on a 35-foot sloop far from the sight of land, trying to find a tiny, distant target without the benefit of GPS.

What could possibly go wrong?

I realize that to big league sailors, this is nothing. Heck, we live down the road from Robin Graham, who solo circumnavigated the globe in a 23-foot sailboat when he was 16 year old (immortalized in the 1974 film, The Dove). But he grew up around sailboats and the ocean. To us “pond-canoe-paddlers,” ocean sailing was very foreign, indeed.

Yet, we were determined to imprint our feet in the sands of Dry Tortugas. So, we boldly chose to go, “not because it was easy, but because (for us) it was hard!”

Me and my mentor, Captain Ron (circa 1997)
If you miss, the next stop is Cuba or the Yucatan.