Having failed twice at sub-marine technology Ryan and his cousin
Nathan and I decided to build a boat. Our first plan was to take an
old head board from my dad's water bed and wrap it in the water bed
bladder and we would be on our way. We were even planning on
different names for the boat before we even got it finished or in the
water it was to be called, at Ryan's insistence, 'Old Nelly'. I was
not exactly ecstatic about the name because I favored naming things
after ferocious animals or at the very least to have some sort of
ninja/military ring to it but he was significantly stronger and more violent than me so I decided he might have a winner with 'Old Nelly'. We wrapped up the head board and stapled
the membrane on in a matter of hours and carried the monstrosity the
mile up to the reservoir. It was very heavy and took us probably
longer to take to boat to the water then it took to make. We set it
in and it floated which is what boats are supposed to do but in light
of recent catastrophic and life threatening failures that was a big
deal. We had two paddles but the boat was so narrow and so heavy that
more than one boy in it at a time made it a little tippy and prone
to sinkiness. We played with the boat until dark and then took our
paddles and came home after we hid the boat in the bushes. We came back two
days later because our parents wouldn't let us boat on Sundays and
someone had broken up the boat and burned it for common fire wood.
Damn those hillbillies, damn them to hell. He decided we would exact
painful retribution on them if we ever found them and we had the same
kind of strength and fighting skill that we possessed in our
imaginations. After we swore out oaths of undying vengeance we
decided the best plan would to build a real boat and a trailer that
we could pull with a bike and get a motor so we could go fishing. We
headed home will new plans and renewed fervor for boat building high
after our success.
