Our neighborhood made the boating news twice in 2024, stories that have fueled the offseason hot-stove league here at the Lake View Inn, where everyone is welcome to their opinion. I’m almost certain you heard about Ryan Borgwardt, the fellow who tried to stage his drowning in Big Green Lake this past August. I got calls and texts from all over the country on this one.

Borgwardt flips his kayak into the lake, leaving behind ID and a tackle box, and then paddles a little tube to shore, where he has stashed an e-bike, which he rides 60 miles to Madison, where he catches a bus to Michigan, crosses into Canada, then catches a flight to meet a woman in Georgia. The Republic of, not the state. But for a month, everyone thought the poor guy had drowned in the state’s deepest lake. Everyone, of course, except my good friend Chuck Larson, who has watched many episodes of Unsolved Mysteries, and immediately smelled a rat.

“Using my Spock logic, I deduce this is a ruse,” Chuck said after a week of high-tech searching had not located a corpse. “Nobody fishes Big Green from a kayak, especially that side of the lake. The wake reverb off the sandstone bluff makes it too rough. And the water is 260 feet deep. Was he trolling for lake trout from a kayak? I don’t think so. Finally, they found his life jacket. Have you ever seen a kayaker not wearing a life jacket? My next call would be to check his passport records.”

Borgwardt had requested a replacement passport and left one on his dresser at home, so the county sheriff didn’t check passport records for a month. Once it was revealed that he had used the replacement to cross into Canada, the jig was up. And $40,000 had been invested looking for his waterlogged body. Borgwardt voluntarily returned to Wisconsin in December. His wife is reportedly pissed.

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We are also still discussing the matter of Deep Thought (oh, the irony), a 33-foot Chris-Craft Roamer that has been beached on the Lake Michigan shore near Milwaukee since October 18. The story goes that the new owners purchased the boat in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and intended to cruise it home to Mississippi. Except they ran out of gas. The boat drifted onto the sandy shore just south of Bradford Beach, and the owner has apparently not been seen since. After determining that the boat did not pose a hazard to navigation or the environment, the Coast Guard declined to get involved. Turns out, Wisconsin does not have a formal program to address abandoned vessels, and no statute requiring removal if said vessel does not impede navigation. So, there it sits. The boat has become a tourist attraction, with a Google Maps pin. It was decorated with a pine garland for the holidays and tagged with graffiti and an “I Closed Wolski’s” sticker. A commercial towing and salvage company made two failed attempts to pull the boat off the beach, but its running gear is reportedly 4 feet deep in sand, and the engine room is filled with water. Or now, probably ice.

Chuck is working on a scheme to salvage this vessel, using a fire truck to pump high-pressure water under the hull and wash away the sand. So, let us know if you spot a pumper truck for sale. Chuck intends to rename the Roamer Finders Keepers.

The post Solving Boating Mysteries appeared first on Boating Mag.

It’s a red-letter day at the Lake View Inn when somebody shows up with a new boat. Beers go flat and pizza goes cold at the bar while everyone adjourns to the parking lot to see the new, shiny thing, to either congratulate the owner or to scratch one’s head—what were they thinking investing in any boat not equipped with rod holders?

There was both envy and head-scratching evident in the small crowd gathered around the rig hitched to the truck that my good friend Chuck Larson wheeled onto the Lake View lot this past summer.

“I went to this estate sale up near Suamico, and I got there early,” Chuck said. “You have to get to these sales early, and this time it paid off. Look at this beauty!”

What Chuck had towed home was a 1995 Sylvan 16 Super Select aluminum -fishing boat powered by a 1970 Mercury 800 outboard. The boat was resting on an EZ Loader trailer that matched the vintage of the outboard, not the boat. Why the older motor and trailer were paired with a newer boat was a mystery—the previous owner was long gone, and the last registration sticker was from 1999. The entire package appeared absolutely pristine, like it just left a dealer’s showroom. All the paint was on the outboard skeg. There was no waterline on the boat.

“Look at this,” Chuck said as he opened the hatch to the livewell in the bow deck. He pulled out plastic dividers still bound together with white strapping tape. “I don’t think there’s ever been water in the livewell.”

The boat was a real throwback, from its carpet-covered gunwales to the cassette-player stereo. The Mercury outboard almost brought tears to my eyes. Its deep Phantom Black finish, metallic red and chrome details on the cowl, and on the front of the motor, a chromed shield with the Kiekhaefer Mercury logo. No current outboard looks this glamorous. I was about to put a foot on the square steel trailer fender to step up for a better look in the cockpit when I felt Chuck’s hand on my shoulder.

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“Please, shoes off,” Chuck said. “Let’s not mar the finish.” He grabbed a red plastic milk crate from the bed of his truck and set it on the ground. “Step on the crate if you want to get a better view.”

“Bet you can’t wait to launch this baby and experience a surge of two-stroke Mercury power,” Wally said.

“Oh, no!” Chuck said. “I can’t put the boat in the water. It might get dirty, and I’d get sand on the trailer tires. The boat is like-new, and it’s only new once.”

“But, Chuck, what good is a boat that never goes in the water?” Wally asked. “Are you just going to stare at it?”

So far, that’s exactly how Chuck has enjoyed this boat. Late at night, he sneaks out to the garage just to look at it. He takes it to launch ramps and to the gas station, places where people can admire his semivintage Sylvan. Just don’t ask him how it runs. It’s still new.

The post A Vintage Boat Evokes New-Boat Memories appeared first on Boating Mag.

When my good friend Chuck Larson strode through the door of the Lake View Inn wearing a blue blazer with brass buttons and a white captain’s hat with gold braid, we all pretended not to notice his obvious ploy for attention. Chuck removed his hat and tucked it under his arm like a military officer, walked to the bar, and claimed a stool. After a few minutes, it was bartender Wally who broke the ice.

“Well, if it isn’t Thurston Howell the Third! Welcome to the Lake View,” Wally chirped. “What can I get you?”

“Very funny,” Chuck replied. “For your information, I’m prototyping an outfit for my pending appointment to the incoming administration.”

“Ok, Tommy Topsider, we’ll bite,” Wally said. “Your appointment as…”

“You are looking at the new Secretary of Boating,” Chuck said. “I’ve been in contact with the transition team, and pending an FBI background check, there will be an official announcement. It’s a new Cabinet position, so my appointment will be subject to Senate confirmation, but I don’t anticipate any opposition. The skids have been thoroughly greased.

“If any of you followed the game like I do, you’d know that cash is the Yamalube of politics, and I covered my bases by contributing to both campaigns. It’s called bundling. I rounded up cash from movers and shakers, and made generous donations. Five hundred dollars to each side, with the understanding that I’d top the list for the Secretary of Boating position.”

Wally threw down a coaster and set a Spotted Cow onto the blue Formica bar in front of Chuck.

“I do follow politics, and I happen to know that $500 is chicken scratch for a presidential campaign,” Wally said. “And I don’t think the administration can just create a new Cabinet position. Congress needs to do that.”

“That’s in the works,” Chuck said. “Both of our senators are on board. On board—get it?

“I’ll be promoting recreational boating throughout the government, acting as a liaison to other agencies that touch boating, from the US Coast Guard to the EPA to the fisheries folks. There are 14.5 million boat owners in the US who spend $49.3 billion on boats, marine products and services annually. We boat and we vote! That was my pitch to the transition team.”

If Chuck was joking about this, I thought he was keeping a remarkably straight face.

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“Let me share a few of my agenda ideas,” Chuck continued as he picked a bit of lint off his blazer sleeve. “We’ll eliminate the EPA ethanol mandate so that we boaters don’t have to deal with fuel that loves water. I’ll encourage FEMA to develop a program to fully compensate boat owners when a vessel is damaged or lost in a hurricane, just as it helps out homeowners. I’ll work with the Coast Guard on a nationwide standard for wakeboat operation, and we’ll rescind the ridiculous personal watercraft speed limit. I’m going to work with Bennington to design a presidential pontoon—Pontoon One when the boss is aboard—in the same color scheme as Air Force One. And finally, I’ll propose that the portrait of Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill is replaced by our favorite immigrant from Norway, Ole Evinrude.”

Whether Chuck is pulling our leg, or someone is pulling his, remains to be seen. I guess we’ll find out on January 20. In his white hat, the Secretary of Boating should be easy to spot on the inaugural rostrum. The skids, after all, have been greased.

The post The First Secretary of Boating appeared first on Boating Mag.

News travels fast at the Lake View Inn. It was a rainy afternoon when Dan “Big Z” Ziolkowski—who, unlike the rest of our gang, is active on social media—interrupted a Brewers broadcast on the bar’s big screen with a breaking story.

“Whoa! Look at these photos Goofy just posted,” Big Z exclaimed from the end of the bar. “His trailer fell apart on the interstate!”

He passed his phone down the bar, and we all got a good look. There was a displaced axle, a leaf spring snapped in two, tires shredded. In other words, the trailer boater’s worst nightmare. The poster was our friend Malcolm “Goofy” Sohm, who was towing his pontoon up from North Carolina for ToonFest in Oshkosh. I called him immediately.

“Buddy, we are safe on the side of the road. The trailer went bang, and all I saw was tire smoke in the rearview,” Goofy said. “I about crapped my pants. We were going 70. I’m still shaking.”

So what happened?

“It looks like the spring hanger for the rear axle either broke or the weld to the frame failed,” Goofy said. “Then the spring dropped down and maybe snagged on the pavement and snapped in two. Next, the axle angled forward into the other tire, and it was just mayhem from there.”

The trailer, according to Goofy, is less than a year old. This reminded me of an incident at a boat test in Florida many years ago. We’d just launched a bass boat, and as I walked past the empty trailer, I looked down and noticed—just by luck—that one of the U-bolts holding an axle to the spring was missing. On the other U-bolt, the nuts were backed way off. I reached down and could turn those nuts with my fingers. The U-bolt nuts on the other spring were also loose enough to turn by hand. When I called over the rep from the boat company, he turned pale.

“I just towed this boat and trailer 80 miles per hour from South Carolina, and then through Orlando traffic,” he said. “This could have been a disaster.”

We found a wrench and started checking fasteners. Every nut on the spring-to-axle assembly had clearly not been torqued down. Someone completed the basic assembly but then forgot to come back and tighten it up. Ever since that day, I have gone around and checked every bolt on my own trailers.

“But how could you check for a weld that’s about to fail?” Big Z asked. “Are you going to Magnaflux the entire trailer and look for cracks?”

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We would like to count on the trailer manufacturer to have such fear of liability and litigation that it would make very certain every weld was done expertly and then inspected. Or make an investment in robotic welders, the kind that don’t have hangovers. In reality, it’s up to boat owners to never take anything for granted when it comes to any boat trailers.

Goofy drove two hours home and got another trailer. The recovery specialist got his broken trailer on dollies and towed it to their shop, then used a crane truck to lift the boat off that trailer and onto the replacement. Eight hours later, Goofy was back on the road to ToonFest. More good news: The Brewers beat the Cubs.

The post The Importance of Trailer Safety Checks appeared first on Boating Mag.

At the gateway to a national forest, you’ll usually be greeted by the classic brown-and-yellow sign proclaiming the slogan “Land of Many Uses.” I’m beginning to think that we need a similar sign at our launch ramps. Something like “Lake of Many Uses.”

The head honcho at a national forest has to manage the competing interests of grazing and timber and mineral extractors with those of hunters, hikers, cyclists, equestrians, rock climbers, skiers and snowmobilers. On a busy summer weekend, your lake or coastline might host anglers, cruisers, poker runners, sand bar and cove dwellers, divers, and wakesports enthusiasts on a variety of craft, from stand-up paddleboards to go-fast powerboats. In each case—the forest and the lake—there is the potential for conflict among these many users. For example, the Swanson kid recently dropped in at the Lake View Inn with this story.

“The other day, we were trolling on Big Green, and a wakeboarder came so near my boat that he actually had to jump over my planer board. That’s getting way too close. Everyone on the lake is out to have fun, but you gotta be safe.”

And there was the kerfuffle in March over in Waupaca County, where a town board, at the request of lakefront-property owners, passed an ordinance to prohibit wake-enhanced boating on two lakes. According to one source, 17 other towns in Wisconsin have also restricted or prohibited wake-enhanced boating. Late last year, a bill was introduced in the state legislature that would prohibit the operation of a “motorboat causing a hazardous wake” on a lake smaller than 1,500 acres, with use limits on larger lakes. That bill did not get a hearing, but in Vermont, a new law restricts wakesports to defined zones and identifies 30 inland lakes and ponds eligible for wakesports. Clearly a backlash is building.

Opponents of wake-enhanced boating—specifically wakesurfing—usually stand behind science, citing legitimate environmental concerns regarding shore erosion, the churning of lake sediments by prop wash, and the transport of invasive species in ballast water.

“Everyone knows that the science is an excuse,” opined my good friend Chuck Larson at the Lake View. “This is really about annoying rich people. A gaggle of kids with a booming stereo in a boat that costs more than my house, throwing a wake large enough to wash over my dock, is nothing more than a big middle finger. Send in the lawyers and lobbyists.” What Chuck means is there’s science, and then there’s social science.

“The day a state senator’s granddaughter gets tossed off her paddleboard by a surf wake is the day they ban wakeboating,” bartender Wally said. 

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There’s science, and then there’s political science.

If you’ve been around the water for a while, this might seem familiar. Twenty-five years ago, the anti-PWC crowd waved the environmental flag, but it was really two-stroke noise and annoying behavior that fueled conflict, and rightly so. Ultimately it was education, a peer pressure campaign, and quiet four-stroke power that settled down PWC discord.

The consensus at the Lake View Inn is that wakesurfers are not malicious. A few can just be oblivious. If you like wakesports, stay in the middle of big lakes, turn down the audio, steer clear of anglers and rafted-up boats—in other words, stop flipping off other boaters. And we should all take a tip from those 1990s PWC riders and let fellow enthusiasts know when they are out of line.

The post Sharing the Lake With Wakeboaters appeared first on Boating Mag.

My first PWC was a 1976 Kawasaki Jet Ski 400, a stand-up with a questionable title and a hole in the bow. It was resting on a loading dock behind a sketchy-looking warehouse. The man who took my $600 cash said he was “selling it for a friend.” That thing was loud and two-stroke stinky, and I was young enough to think that those were features.

You might recall that these early Jet Ski models did not have an engine-cutoff lanyard. If you fell, which happened frequently, the Jet Ski was designed to turn full lock and idle in a circle, waiting for you to swim over and get back on board. And this worked fine until the breezy day I fell off and the Jet Ski was drifting downwind. I swam and swam before I realized that the PWC was spiraling away on the breeze faster than I could swim. This was discouraging. Luckily for me, an older gentleman fishing nearby came to my rescue. He idled up in a small aluminum boat and said, “You seem to be in a pickle.”

I grasped the gunwale, and he putt-putted me over to the Jet Ski.

When I was perched on a stool at the Lake View Inn last week, I related this story to my good friend Chuck Larson. I was trying to explain the details of some interesting patent filings that Kawasaki has made, which were recently revealed by our protégé Kevin Shaw on his website, The Watercraft Journal. A number of these patents involve a Jet Ski equipped with GPS, an electric auxiliary motor, and servos to control the steering. One idea is a man-overboard function. Before you hit the water, the engine-cutoff lanyard triggers the system to pinpoint the location. The main internal combustion engine shuts down, the small electric motor is engaged and, in conjunction with the servo steering and guided by the GPS, navigates the craft back to that digital breadcrumb where the rider should be waiting. I told Chuck that I hope the Kawasaki engineers give the motor enough power to handle a really stiff headwind.

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“Of course, just because they apply for a patent doesn’t mean an idea like this will ever make it to production,” I said, “but it’s still fun to observe all the ways that boat and engine builders are -leveraging GPS.”

“I’ve been doing some imagining too,” Chuck said. “I’ve got this idea I’m calling Chuck’s Fish Drone. I equip a drone with an infrared camera or some kind of sonar. You fly the drone over likely hotspots on the lake, and if there are fish lurking, you’d see them through an app on your boat’s multifunction display. Then mark the spot through the drone GPS. Push a button and the boat navigates itself to that spot, and you are on the fish!”

“Maybe the drone lowers a line with a night crawler on a hook, catches the fish, and brings it back to you,” I said.

“Oh! That could be Chuck’s Fishing Drone 2.0,” Chuck said. “Brilliant!”

I hope someone at Garmin doesn’t read this and steal Chuck’s idea before he gets his patent.

The post The Benefits of GPS Integration appeared first on Boating Mag.

Thursday is poker night at the Lake View Inn. Other bars in the North Woods might host a private back-room card club with high stakes, but at the Lake View, the game is played for essentially pocket change around the corner table of the dining room, where the big windows overlook the lights reflecting off the inky surface of the lake.

I’m not much for cards due to a lifelong math handicap, but my good friend Chuck Larson is a regular at the game. Lately he’s been bringing along his new dog, a Lab-Chessie mix named Bo, who has a seat at the card table. Chuck pulls up a bench from under the coat rack, and Bo hops right up. He has a bowl on the bench for his beer, and he gets dealt into the game.

Last week, an out-of-towner walked into the bar, took a long look at the card game, and asked, “Is that dog there really playing poker?”

“Yeah, but he’s not too good,” bartender Wally said. “Whenever he has a good hand, his tail wags.”

Bo joined the Larson clan after the passing of their beloved Newfoundland, Tula, who longtime readers might recall was quite the water dog, a swimmer so powerful that she once towed Chuck’s Yar-Craft back to shore after it drifted away from a launch ramp. Bo has become Chuck’s constant companion, which means he gets to play cards and go fishing. Due to its breed combination, this dog loves to be in the water, so I wondered about the wisdom of putting him in the boat. He might see a turtle swim by and jump overboard. But Chuck and Bo seem to have it figured out. Bo relaxes on the aft casting deck while Chuck does his angling from the foredeck. When Chuck hooks a fish, the dog gets alert, especially if a smallmouth breaks the water, and he will come forward to sniff the boated fish and congratulate Chuck.

This has me thinking about dogs and boats. There’s an old tradition of having cats on board a ship to act as rodent predators, but dogs don’t seem to be frequently mentioned in seafaring lore. Did Odysseus have a dog to bark at the sirens? Did Columbus sail the ocean blue with a Spanish water dog? Have you ever seen a picture of Reggie Fountain running 90 miles per hour with a dog in goggles on the portside seat? I think not.

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Now, our good friends at Barletta love dogs so much that they put slide-out water bowls in their pontoons. But I still think that bringing a dog aboard is asking for trouble. What if the dog gets motion sickness, or gets anxious and pees on the deck carpet? Maybe I’ve just never enjoyed the kind of intimate human-canine relationship that Chuck and Bo have formed.

On the last poker hand of the night Bo was dealt a full house and won the pot with an excited bark.

“Hey! The dog won,” the visitor said. “He had that great hand and didn’t wag his tail. I thought that was his tell.”

“I guess he was bluffing,” Wally replied. Smart dog.

The post Considerations for Bringing Dogs On Board appeared first on Boating Mag.

The most important element of do-it-yourself boat maintenance is the “do it” part. Too often, the best DIY intentions are undone by procrastination, inattention, cheapness or just plain laziness. I’m not sure why our friend Russ failed to check the lower-unit lube on his Merc 150 this past fall, but last week, when he pulled the Russ-Craft out of its offseason storage spot in the back corner of his pole barn, he noted a puddle of gray, viscous 90-weight on the floor directly under the motor. A bad sign.

Because Russ chose not to check the lube this past fall, he did not know that a substantial amount of lake water had infiltrated the case. The 10-day stretch of below-zero overnight temps in January likely resulted in glacierlike pressure as that water expanded into ice, creating pressure sufficient to fracture die-cast aluminum. There may have even been a dramatic popping sound when the gear case cracked, probably in the middle of a frosty full-moon night as Russ slept beneath a down comforter, dreaming of a summer afternoon at the sandbar. His boat should have been as snug.

Despite the fact that the Mercury 150 was designed specifically for easy DIY maintenance by owners just like Russ, he admitted to not checking the gear-case lube for a few seasons. It always looked fine in the past, so he cut a corner.

Dan the Outboard Man was able to source Russ a good used gear case, which Dan refurbished with new seals, a water-pump kit and fresh lube. Being proud DIYers ourselves, my good friend Chuck Larson and I offered to help Russ replace the gear case this past Saturday afternoon. 

The first job was to remove the old lower unit, and as we got started, Russ said: “Dan says fishing line probably cut through the prop-shaft seal, but I stopped checking for line a few years ago when I got this Tempest prop with the line-cutter holes.”

Chuck and I looked at each other. Then we looked at the propeller. A little tail of fishing line was sticking out of one of the PVS holes in the prop hub.

“Russ, those holes are there to ventilate exhaust around the blades, to help the motor rev up for better acceleration,” I explained. “They are not line-cutting devices.”

“Really,” Russ said as he stroked his chin. “Really. I guess that might explain things.”

We pulled off the prop, and that little tail of line led to greasy bird’s nest of monofilament tangled around the prop shaft, and even more jammed up on the seal, several season’s worth of line. Humiliation can be an excellent tutor, but being good friends, Chuck and I did not rub it in too hard on Russ.

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We offered Dan the old case for parts.

“Just throw it on the recycling pile,” Dan said. “If it had that much water inside, the gears are almost certainly shot anyway. This unit would not have lasted another season. Better that it cracked over winter than failed in the middle of the lake this summer.”

Leave it to Dan to find the silver lining. And remember, Boating friends, if you’re going to do it yourself, do it all. And do it right.

The post The Key to Successful DIY Maintenance appeared first on Boating Mag.

Twenty years ago, most of the Boating staff was reluctant to consider the pontoon as a real boat. True, a pontoon is buoyant and could move under its own power, but was it really more than a floating patio? Usually propelled by a 20 hp Evinrude outboard and trailing a cloud of two-stroke smoke as it chugged around the lake on a sunset cruise, a pontoon was, in our jaded eyes, little more than an excuse to drink beer.

Well, times do change, and so have pontoons and our attitude toward these -versatile and sophisticated boats. These days you can get a pontoon built for luxury, for speed, or one built for a party. However, pontoons still leave us wondering why, for example, if you want to go 70 mph, you wouldn’t just get a nice fiberglass V-hull speedboat? The reason, I think, is that pontooners are a different breed of cat. I was reminded of this when one of our favorite pontoon boat owners wandered into the Lake View Inn the previous weekend.

Upon crossing the Lake View threshold, Malcolm Sohm was greeted with a -chorus of “Goof, Goof, Goof!” by the crowd at the bar. Known to all as Goofy since the day, on a dare, he rode his minibike for a lap around the halls of Oshkosh High School—after he crashed, the principal pronounced him goofy, and it stuck as a good nickname—the man is a full-blown pontooner. Decades ago, he commissioned a custom pontoon and, dissatisfied with its performance on the choppy waters of Lake Winnebago, he designed what I believe were the first lifting strakes for pontoons. He received a patent in 1999 for his T.A.P. Fin System and has been awarded several more patents since. His patented design has been licensed by some pontoon manufacturers and worked around by others.

Goofy slipped off to North Carolina a while back, so it was a surprise to see him in the Lake View. I guessed he was up to something.

“Buddy, this summer is the 25th -anniversary of my Lake Michigan crossing, and I’m going to do it again in July,” Goofy said. “You’ve got to join me.”

A few years ago, I used this space to tell the story of Goofy, once again on a dare, crossing Lake Michigan in his GS26 pontoon, an 87-mile voyage from Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, to Frankfort, Michigan—a real adventure because the boat was not equipped with GPS or even a compass. There was no cellphone, and the two-stroke Mercury 200 outboard guzzled fuel. He followed another boat with a chart plotter, piloted by a hungover crew that got way off course. Goof had to burn every drop of fuel from his 43-gallon tank, plus six extra gas jugs he’d stowed on deck. The 6-foot seas made it extra exciting.

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“A lot has changed in 25 years,” Goof said. “I’ve lined up a triple-tube Godfrey Monaco 255 with a V-8 Merc 300, a 61-gallon fuel tank, and GPS. We’ll cruise like kings! Run over for breakfast, and turn around and come back.”

From behind the bar, Wally rolled his eyes and started humming “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” But I can’t turn down Goofy, and what could go wrong? In a modern pontoon, this should be a piece of cake. I might still reserve a rental car in Michigan.

The post Modern Pontoons Are Built for a Variety of Boating Styles appeared first on Boating Mag.

Well, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration nailed our long-range winter-weather forecast. Thanks to Señor El Niño, we’ve been experiencing above-average temperatures in the North Woods, which means 40s and rain instead of subzero and snow, a worst-case scenario for the sports gathering at the Lake View Inn. With no safe ice for fishing and no snow for sledding, there’s not much to do.

“This winter has been like a perpetual hangover,” said my good friend Chuck Larson as he, without irony, nursed an old fashioned at the bar. “I’m running out of things to do. Last night I went down to the basement and put new line on all my reels. I’m ready to go fishing, but opening day is still five months away.”

Then a lightbulb went off.

“Why don’t we take the girls to Minneapolis for the boat show?” I offered. “Dinner and a nice hotel, and a barn full of new boats. A little nautical daydreaming might improve our outlook.” That is how we found ourselves in the Twin Cities at the boat show, standing in a display of new Sea-Doo watercraft.

“These are so cool,” Chuck said. “Maybe Marge would go for one if I said it was for the grandkids.” Chuck straddled the seat, twisting the handlebar and making engine noises. “How fast is this sucker, anyway?”

“It can go almost 70,” I said. “I think you no longer have the reflexes for this one, Chuck.”

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“I could get a couple of grandkids on the back,” Chuck said as he twisted around to check the seat room. “Say, what does this mean? The little picture of the girl in a green bikini.” Chuck pointed to the warning label printed on the aft seat bolster depicting a cartoon bikini-clad woman with a slash, and next to it the same female form in black shorts and a PFD.

“That’s to encourage you to wear neoprene shorts, like wetsuit bottoms,” I said, “and of course your life jacket.”

“The life jacket I get,” Chuck said, “but why the rubber shorts?”

“I think the message is mostly aimed at women,” I said. “This used to be on a sticker on the boarding platform, but now it’s right on the seat so you can’t miss it.”

“And can’t peel it off,” Chuck said. “I always peel off all the safety stickers when I get something new. But I still don’t get the message.”

“Chuck, you knucklehead,” Marge said as she punched him in the arm. “Remember the time you went down that giant slide at the water park, the one the kids call ‘the enema?’ Imagine that same situation, only with a 300 hp jet pump aimed at your crotch.”

“Now imagine the girl in the green bikini reboarding, and she’s halfway up, and her boyfriend thinks it would be funny if he took off and flipped her off the back,” I said, “only his timing is off a little.”

“Do we need to get more explicit, Chuck?” Marge asked. “This is not the water jet in the hot tub, buddy.”

Chuck’s face turned bright red with embarrassment. “You mean…this has really happened?”

“Often enough to have the lawyers put this big sticker on the seat,” I said.

And that is why if they get a new Sea-Doo, Marge will do all the driving.

The post The Importance of PWC Warning Labels appeared first on Boating Mag.