Saturday

What I’ve been doing the past couple days – My cousin and I bought a boat. We had to go up to Bushnell, about 90 miles north. The guy lived way out in the woods. I liked his goats. I had a goat when I was a kid.

And there’s the boat. It’s a 26 foot 2004 Twin Vee.

Occasionally he ought to sweep the goat poop off his sidewalk. This was Thursday. And what happened on the way home is we ran into a super bad thunder storm. It was bumper to bumper on I-75 in driving rain for an hour. And the lights on the back of the trailer didn’t work. The good ol’ boy who sold the boat and trailer to us assured us that they worked fine.

We finally made it home an hour late. While we were parking the trailer one of the wheels almost fell off. The hub was broken and the axle bent. Yesterday we decided to try to get the boat in the water to get the weight off the trailer. We made it for about twenty feet and the wheel just about disintegrated. Then we spent about four hours trying to get a towing company or an axle repair company to help us. No luck. A guy from the plumbing company nearby came with his fork lift and we were able to get the wheel off. It’s a dual axle, so all the weight was on the one remaining axle. The brake disk on the bad axle almost scraped the pavement. We had to cut the end of the axle off to remove the disk. Even so we only had about 4 inches clearance. But we were able to tow it the twelve miles at 15 mph to the Kingfish Boat Ramp on Anna Maria Island (My old home town) constantly worried that the darn thing might collapse. I dread to think what would have happened if the wheel had fallen off during the storm, us with no lights on the trailer. My cousin is a retired preacher. Either that helped or we were mighty lucky. Whew!

Five of my dogs are in that list.