Making Upgrades to the Raft

It would appear that my time on the water with my raft is over for the year so I have turned my attention towards making some upgrades to make the vessel more comfortable and efficient.  The first thing that I did was put some swivels on the front and back seats.  This was a really simple project and only required a few turns of a ratchet.  Now, anglers at the front and back of the raft will have a little more range of motion and will hopefully provide a more pleasant ride down a river.  

The second project that I took on was slightly more complicated.  I have noticed that most oars on rafts and drift boats have shafts that are wrapped in rope.  I found out that this reduces wear on the oars, reduces vibration (noise) between the oars and oarlocks, and helps keep the oars in a consistent location for the rower.  While I didn't make the wraps long enough and should have used black rope (I've never seen anyone wrap oars with white rope but that's all they had at Lowe's), I think my wraps are close and tight.  I had never attempted wrapping oars before and I'm pretty happy with how things turned out!

The oars that came with the raft will, eventually, become back-up oars.  I plan on upgrading to better oars soon but need to save some money for now.  By the way, if you have never looked up how expensive oars are for drift boats and rafts, be prepared for some sticker shock.  The ones that I want are about $300 each!  With that in mind, I'm going to take some liberties with my current oars.  I put a few sheet metal screws through the black plastic sleeve that slid around more than I preferred on the maiden voyage.  I also flipped the sleeve around because it was too thick to fit through the oarlocks and used the flare on the sleeve to act as a stopper.

The next upgrade that I might attempt would be improvements to the floor.  As it stands right now, the floor of the raft is self-bailing (it has holes in it) with an inflatable floor on top of that.  I either need to put yoga mat-type padding on the floor or engineer a drop/floating floor with marine grade plywood.  However, I need to spend more time at my fly tying desk and thus, create more stock in the online fly shop.  All these upgrades cost money and I need more of it to improve my raft.  And oh yeah, there is the matter of buying a trailer to haul the "stream machine" around.  I better start cranking out some flies and stop typing about the matter!