The last two weeks are setting us for a great summer on the water. We have made two extraordinary impulse purchases. The first, last weekend when we helped friends move a boat from a moving sale and the seller decided to offer a 10′ solo Hornbeck canoe at a very good price. The boat’s hull is in great shape and it weighs only 15lbs, I can get it on and off my car easily and I can lift it with one hand.
The second boat is perhaps an even more unexpected find, and something I thought it would take us many more years to be able to afford. We’re now the very proud third owners of a 11′ 1955 Elgin runabout, a small wooden boat with all it’s original hardware, paperwork and 12hp outboard. It’s a great looking boat, will hold two comfortably and four in a pinch. We’ve got a trailer and will get a hitch put on the Bolt over the next few weeks while we’re getting paperwork sorted and the water’s warming up. The guy who sold the boat to us is a boat builder and so we know it’s been well taken care of. He also has a staggering project of building a sloop, destined for the Pacific, having scavenged the hardware and masts from a derelict boat he had next to the enclosure for the in-progress one. So here’s our exciting new boat, name TBD:
It should be a great summer on the water, hope to be out on a lake whenever the weather is good one way or the other. With the new canoe I can finally get around to leaving our small fiberglass canoe out at work. It’s been an unbelievable couple of weeks here and I’m so looking forward to summer and time outside after a long, dark winter. It’s hard to believe that I’ve got these two great new boats and I am excited about them both. Lots of good times ahead.
I’ve been reading a lot this year and the novel I’m reading ties in happily with this theme of boats:
These books are a pleasure, I read the first one a rainy vacation a couple of years ago and am glad to have found a copy of this second volume and that the public library system seems to have the whole 20+ book series across its various libraries so I can perhaps work my way through the whole series, which I probably can’t help doing, since I am a completest, though I’ll likely skip the final, incomplete volume 21. I’m glad to start a new volume in my life as a boater here in the Adirondacks.