Unsinkable

The story of Jeremy Lomax on June 6, 2004 is worth telling because it's classic. Have you ever gone through hell and high water to fulfill a long-time desire, but in spite of all your efforts, nothing went right?

After the long winter, including a bad case of cabin-fever, Jeremy felt he deserved a good fishing trip. Unfortunately the weather boded otherwise.

Instead of getting riled, he made a list of things he could do until Mother Nature gave him a clean window.

1. Hook boat trailer to the pick up.
Easy sounding, but he found that he'd left the parking lights on all night, which meant recharging the battery or substituting the extra one in the garage. That might have been low too, so he hooked up the eighty-foot extension cord and went to the next item.

2. Inspect tackle box.
An easy thing, but the results disturbed him. Jeremy found he was out of split-shot sinkers, leaders, he had only one Dare Devil, one Rapala, and if he planned to chunk for catfish he needed more stinky-liver bait.

3. Look at landing net.
Blast, it has rips and tears all over the place. He wondered if he should fix it or get a new one. Since he had time, he took a ball of thin nylon twine and created a mesh whose knots he hoped would not let a lunker escape.

4. Check knife, scaler, and fish scales.
He WD-40'd them all.

5. Check boat.
How foolish to think that all there'd be to spending the year's first day at the lake was tossing in his gear and heading off! Both oars were down to raw wood; they needed refinishing. The copper guard at the end of one blade was missing, and each needed dry graphite to keep the squeak down while rowing.

Also, because he'd left the boat in the back yard under the Maple tree, he had to find his rubber gloves in order to remove the soggy leaves that had congested and half-rotted under the seats. Where are the rubber gloves, Melanie? He knew he'd have to hose down his Listhutania. And the rubber washers had shrunk over the winter. Jeremy added a new drainhole plug to the expanding list.

7. Check trailer.
Light bulb out, blinkers not blinking, a frayed wire, corroded connections. And, Dear, do you know where this year's license sticker is? It seems that it was a good thing the battery was low: this preparing is taking forever.

8. Remember the boat tongue.
Last Fall when backing the boat it jack-knifed. Consequently the hitch had gone to starboard while the tongue went to port. The result was that the hitch no longer sat on an even keel, so it didn't meet the ball squarely. Jeremy knew the only thing to do short of torching off the hitch and welding on a new one was to jack-knife the trailer to port deliberately, therefore realigning it with the ever-even keel. But that would have to wait until after the battery was charged.

9. Check motor.
The would-be fisherman left the outboard until last. He hoped for the miracle all boatsmen pray for: that the motor would start first pull without getting a carburetor kit, a new gas can, starting rope, or propeller. He hoped all it would take was a couple of squirts of shaft lubrication, then filter last year's gas so the gummed liquid wouldn't clog the motor. He feared that he'd have to clean the spark plugs with his reliable Leatherman Super 200 Tool. Then he remembered he hadn't fixed the wire mesh on the old funnel.

10. Look at trailer tires.
Jeremy kicked them. Since his toes were not reliable indexes, he fished through his tool box and removed the gauge. How could both be low? The spare, rust-bolted to the trailer, wasn't flat, it was DEAD. Another thing to do before the trip, but it would have to wait until the battery was up.

Jeremy looked at the recharger and realized it would be nearly an hour before he could set out, so he decided to fill the time by removing the storm windows. Some fine summer day he would have to paint the peeling screens, just this one: not the first day of fishing!

He was pleased that last Fall he'd taken a wide, permanent, black felt marker and labeled each screen. Now he didn't have to think. He simply put NE here, EN there, ECentral and ES there, rounding the compass. His system proved infallible. It'd taken him seven years to create the perfect system and it proved worthy: the rest of the project was brain-dead mechanical, for in less than an hour the job was done. If I'd known it'd be that easy I would have done it last month!

Jeremy returned to the battery: still not up. Might as well put a load in the washing machine and catch up on the week's newspapers. Nothing caught his interest, and since he knew he had time, he gladly hung the clothes on the line.

"Oh, Dear," cooed Melanie, mistakenly assuming he was doing it all for her, "thank you for helping." Jeremy didn't mind scoring a few points though he knew he didn't deserve them. It's okay, something to do, keep me busy till I'm on the lake!

Clothes now up and gauge still down, now what? As every fisherman knows, one should not work all the time. So he leaned back in his lawn chair and watched his wife scratch the flower bed like a dog his back.

By the time he got his mind going again, it was 11:30. Close enough to dinner that he threw together a cold chicken sandwich, opened and emptied a can of V8. He'd estimated that after all the time he'd spent on preliminaries, tasks, and eating, the battery should be up. He checked the gauge.

What, no charge? The battery can't be dead.

The battery was not dead, only very low. And the reason was that during all the time he had busied himself, the grounding terminal was off. The result: the battery hadn't received a single amp. He was left with the lesson that haste makes waste.

Now ;what am I to do? Start all over? By the time the battery charged, the day will be over!

Jeremy's wife knew not to offer an answer nor even a suggestion. Quietly she hung the garden tools on their hooks and discretely disappeared.

Our unsung hero stoically reattached the cables making sure the gauge blinked. Then he strolled upstairs, sat regally in his leather-backed recliner, and opened a forty ouncer.

Absently his eyes fell on the TV Guide. Next feature, "The Titanic."

Yeah, I know what you mean.

Classical?