Messing About in Boats

By Michael Lampman

    Since childhood, I have been fascinated by boats; big boats, small boats, sailboats, powerboats, canoes, rafts, anything that will float with me on it. This may be due in part to the fact that I grew up in the American Southwest where water is something of a rarity. At nine or ten, I was more likely to be found on an old shipping pallet, floating in an irrigation ditch and catching frogs than playing ball with other kids. I thought Huckleberry Finn the greatest adventure story ever told. I wanted to spend a lifetime floating on a raft down an endless river encountering adventures of every kind along the way. I still do.

Most of my early boating experiences were less than successful. At twelve, I found a plan for a kayak in Mechanics Illustrated. I scrounged what materials I could and saved diligently from my newspaper route for the rest. I spent most of a summer working religiously at building this boat. It was about twelve feet long, more than a yard wide and had a big open cockpit. It was overbuilt in the extreme with thick internal framing members covered with masonite pressboard which I soon discovered is not only heavy but one of the least buoyant materials known to man. It must have weighed at least eighty pounds.

When I finally finished, I was bursting with pride. To me it looked fine and sea worthy. Typically supportive, my father agreed. In honor of this momentous achievement, we planned a family trip to El Vado reservoir on the Chama river in northern New Mexico where my grandparents had a rustic cabin. My father even brought along a bottle of champagne.

With a very ceremonious launching attended by the entire family, my father and I set out on my little Titanic for her maiden voyage optimistically armed with fishing tackle, sodas, and lunch. I realize now that it was intended to be a one-man boat because with both of us aboard, there couldn't have been as much as two inches of freeboard. We had to be careful not to shift our weight lest water slop over into the cockpit. Almost as soon as we reached the center of the lake, an unexpected breeze came up creating a nasty chop. The wind began to blow us further toward the middle of the lake and whitecaps splashed  over into the cockpit. We had no container so we frantically tried to bail using our cupped hands. We were already sinking slowly when a big wave washed over the side swamping us completely. My masterpiece sunk like a stone. There we were swimming amidst a miscellany of fishing gear, rope, clothing and floating sandwiches, fifty yards from the shore; my treasured creation lost forever more than three hundred feet below the surface. I suppose this might have been remembered as an unhappy experience but my dad, fortunately a child psychologist by profession, managed to transform it into a positive one. He started laughing. It was a deep belly laugh. He laughed loud and long. Very soon, I began to see the humor and to laugh with him. Neither of us spoke. We just howled until our sides ached and we nearly drowned ourselves. It was so outrageous, so comical and so much fun that rather than deterring me, it added fuel to my burning passion for boats and boat building.

There is an axiom: The pleasure one gets from a boat is inversely proportional to its size. After spending many years in my adult life devoting more time and money to equipping and maintaining boats than to using them, this simple truth finally became evident to me. The final straw was my twenty-five foot fiberglass sailboat. I dreamt of sailing all over the world or at least all over the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean anchoring every night in some beautiful, exotic and secluded cove eating hand caught lobster and sipping margaritas like Jimmy Buffet. The boat was in poor shape when I bought her so she sat on her trailer beside the house for about a year while I scraped and painted the bottom, remodeled the cabin and refurbished the rigging in my spare time.

In the meantime, we pondered where she might be kept once launched. We eventually bought a canal lot and built a dock. We figured this was a good plan since the mortgage payment was less than the cost of slip at the local marina.  Finally, we launched her and thereafter drove forty miles to the coast every weekend to enjoy her. It always seemed however, that there were a hundred little things to take care of so every Saturday I would spend five or six hours working on the boat for every two hours spent sailing, not to mention the steady flow of money going to this and that seemingly insignificant but essential and expensive bit of hardware or the like. We never actually went anywhere beyond the immediate coastal area. After a year to two, we finally stopped going often enough to justify owning the boat. I sold her and bought a canoe.

For several years, I experimented with a variety of canoes until I eventually discovered kayaks. Since then I have come to regard the light-weight modern touring kayak as the highest achievement of five thousand years in the evolution of boats and possibly the most versatile recreational device ever made. Kayaking is not one particular sport or outdoor activity. It can be  enjoyed in many different ways depending on one's mood, state of health, the venue or paddling companions. It can be done for thrills and adventure, for solitude, as a social activity, as a way to commune with nature, or as a form of exercise. Group/club paddling can be a wonderful way to meet new friends. Kayak camping offers access to wilderness locations at least as remote and untouched as backpacking but one can carry two or three times the weight and bulk so both creature comfort and trip duration are enhanced greatly. Best of all, anyone can do it!