I have not owned a lot of boats in my life. I have owned a kayak, a two person bass baby, and a 16 foot jon boat. Each of those purchases brought a great deal of excitement that was coupled with an equal amount of anxiety. While I was excited for the unique opportunities that each one afforded me, I also felt a healthy amount of fear in each situation as well. With each boat, I was scared that I was going to overlook something, have an operating error, or just simply sink the darn thing due to ignorance. My outlook towards my raft is no different.
While this thing is going to help me get more folks on farm ponds that I love and explore Ozark streams, I am also intimidated by so many unfamiliar nuances. My rowing skills are novice at best. I’m a little uncertain how much I am supposed to inflate the raft. I’m still working on either reinforcing the inflatable floor or replacing it with a wooden drop floor. My chief concern though, is tearing the fabric of the raft, not being able to fix the problem, and sinking the vessel and thus, being stranded in the middle of nowhere. However, I know that this is a learning curve and that experience is the best teacher. So with a racing heart due to fear and excitement, I launched my raft on a lake a couple of weeks after purchasing the craft.
After airing up the raft and attaching the frame, Wendy and I took the raft to the bottom of a boat ramp at Watkins Mill State Park. It was a little windy on that particular day but the temperature was nice. I was excited to see how my raft handled in the wind and felt good about the fact that if I was going to sink my boat on it’s maiden voyage, at least I wouldn’t get hypothermia. As I used an oar to push the raft away from land, adrenaline coursed through my veins. It felt good and I’m glad I didn’t need to harness the power to paddle back to shore because of a problem. I floated and awkwardly rowed with a smile on my face.
As the initial exhilaration wore off, I realized that I needed to start rowing with a little more purpose. The wind hand blown me away from the boat ramp and I wanted to stay close to my point of origin just in case things went south. As I pushed the oars forward, I felt them push back! It quickly dawned on me that this raft was hard to row…on still water and into the wind at least. It also eventually (and later than I would care to admit) dawned on me that I needed to turn the raft about face and pull the oars toward me rather than push them. That helped a lot but I certainly wasn’t moving fast enough to pull a tuber or skier behind me.
After I became a little more comfortable (due to not sinking) I started to settle into my setup. I was able to appreciate things like how close I was to the water and how I was situated in the middle of the boat which gave me a unique perspective. I’m used to sitting at the back of a boat and running a motor or at the front of a boat running a trolling motor. Being in the middle is something that I’m going to need to get used to. I’m also used to being perched a little higher above the water level but that is inconsequential. If I were to stand up from my seated rowing position or if a fellow angler were to stand up in the front or back of the raft, they have a good line of sight and have a good angle at which to cast.
After about 30 minutes, I decided to head back to the ramp. Wendy and Waylon were waiting for me to return. And if I’m being honest, I didn’t want to test my luck any more than I already had. Things had gone well and I wanted to call the maiden voyage a successful venture. And if I’m being brutally honest, my arms were starting to get tired…really tired. It took significantly less time to break down the raft and load it as opposed to unloading it and assembling it. For now, the raft is packed away for the winter but it every time I go into the garage, I look at my raft and think about upcoming adventures that I want to have. Carl Sagan once delivered the following thoughts and I couldn’t agree with him more. He says it more eloquently than I can so I will let him conclude this post:
“For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival.” -Carl Sagan
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