Captain Idiot
Let me tell you about my first trip on the new boat.
So I get this boat. It actually belonged to a friend of mine, who is a terrific boater and happens to be a mechanic. He was selling it, and it made sense to buy (1) from someone I knew and trusted, (2) who was a mechanic, so he probably kept it in really good condition, and (3) from a friend who was willing to help teach me everything I needed to know about it.
And it’s a beautiful boat. At 28 feet, it’s big enough to hold all the people that will now visit me in the suburbs so they can go on my boat. It has two motors, which I figured was perfect because I would have a backup motor when I invariably busted a propeller. And it has a cabin and a real bathroom, so my wife will actually come out with me.
So far so good. Here’s the problem. The day he delivered the boat to me, docking it at the condo complex, it was raining. We were supposed to go out so he could show me the ropes on how to drive (errr– pilot) it, but because of the rain we just skipped the lesson and figured we would do it sometime soon, BEFORE I ever took the boat out.
But then a week or so passed, and we couldn’t get our schedules together. And it was an absolutely beautiful summer Saturday, and I just couldn’t wait any more. How hard could it be? You turn on the engine, you point the boat. Simple.
So here’s what happened. My wife and I packed a nice picnic lunch, grabbed the dog — because dogs love being out on the open water, right?? — and took down the cover of the boat, started undoing the ropes. Being the master boater that I am, I remembered to turn on the blower before I started the engines, because otherwise the engine blows up or something. That turns out to be the only smart thing I did all day.
The engines both start up. All the gauges and stuff by the captain’s chair seem to be working fine. It’s a beautiful day. What a great moment! Here I am, ready for my first trip out on my new boat. I take a deep breath, tell my wife she can release the last rope holding us to the dock, and push the gear shift and throttle forward.
And the boat roars to life, zooms forward, and crashes into the dock across from me.
Okay, I should stop right here and explain something. I’ve admitted before that I’m not a good boater, but I do have some experience. Unfortunately, my experience was always with boats that had a simple and intuitive engine set up. Namely, they had a “stick shift” that you basically pushed up to go forward and down to go in reverse. One stick. Push it this way, go straight. Push it that way, go back. Aim with the wheel. Just like a car. Very easy. Very intuitive.
This boat is different. Not only does it have two engines, but two DIFFERENT types of sticks. One stick is the shifter, like the transmission, that you push up to go forward and back to go in reverse. So far so good. And then there’s another stick, the throttle, which controls the power — the further you push it, the faster you go.
That’s where it gets a little tricky. Because, for example, let’s say that you just drove your new boat straight into a dock, and the boat is trying very hard to actually climb up the dock and use it as a ramp to free itself from the surly bonds of earth and fly gloriously into the air and into the waterfront condo 30 feet in front of you. And let’s also say that your limited experience in boats has taught you the basic lesson that if you want to go in reverse, you just pull back on the stick. So you do that, and it doesn’t help. In fact, what happens is that you hear the almost cartoon-like pinging sounds of little pieces of your gears flying apart.
Why? Because in YOUR boat, the gear shift and the throttle are SEPARATE. So to go in reverse, so that you’re no longer basically half out of the water and beached on this dock, you have to push BACK on the gear shift and FORWARD on the throttle. Back on one stick, forward on the other.
Instead, what you did, in a blind sphincter-clenching panic with piss dripping down your leg, is instinctively pull back on everything. Which you’re not supposed to do, because it strips the gears, just like what would happen if you decided to shift your car into reverse when you were going 55 miles an hour down the highway. And then you’re basically screwed.
Back to our story. Here I am, about four seconds into my first boat trip, and my boat has crashed into a dock, is halfway up in the air, and is aimed directly at one of my neighbor’s condo. My wife is screaming at me, the dog is barking, the engines are roaring. As far as I know, I’ve opened a gaping hole in the bottom of my boat, and we’re minutes away from sinking, all of us drowning about ten feet from shore. I pull back on the engines, stripping the gears, but at least the engine stops roaring, and basic gravity drops us back into the water.
But now I don’t really have any maneuverability, what with the whole “my gear shift is now a molten pile of metal” thing. So we start drifting around, desperately using the pilings to push ourselves around, trying to get into one of the slips so we can turn off the boat and I can commence with tying it to a dock, going home, having a drink, and never leaving my house again.
To make things even better, there’s a big crowd of people watching. My dock is right next to a public pier in Nyack, so there are like 30 people who were having a nice day hanging out on the pier and taking in the sights, now getting the treat of watching a dumbass destroy his boat. The only good thing that happened to me that day was that none of those people were quick enough to pull out their smartphones, so I didn’t end up in a viral Youtube video.
So that was my first trip on the boat. Four seconds of abject terror, followed by about five minutes of blinding humiliation, followed by an unending series of new and unprecedented bills: a bill to repair the gears, a bill to fix my neighbors dock, a bill for all the alcohol I’m going to need to forget that day.
The best day of my life can’t come soon enough. Never buy a boat.
P.S. The picture isn’t actually from that day, but it’s probably a fair representation of what I looked like. I’m wearing the hat ironically, of course, or at least that’s what I tell people….
