Learning to Drive the Boat Take #3

I am literally laughing right now, I just read over my blog post for week #2 and in that blog I made a comment that learning to pull a water skier would be easier then a tube… Well, I stand to be corrected. Pulling a skier is a little more complicated then I would have thought. My struggles were staying at the correct speed and turning when my skier wasn’t behind the boat. Thankfully my husband was my skier so he knew when to just let go. (Apparently you pick up a lot of speed when turning if your out of the wake.. Whoops!) I learned to make sure I signal to my skier if there are waves or turns coming up. I also had to multitask as it was just my husband and I. When he went down not only did I have to turn around to get him I also had to hold up the bright orange flag to signal that my skier was in the water. (I did forget a couple times to hold the flag up.. Whoops again…) By the end of the evening my husband was exhausted and I learned how to pull a skier. I felt like it was a successful night.

Wait a minute… I started out with my skier story and forgot to mention that I was the one who backed the boat into the water. I wish I could take credit for it but I literally turned the wheel which ever way my husband told me. I didn’t do much to contribute other than that. I have had a little experience with our lawn mowing trailer and backing up but this was a whole new experience. My biggest challenge is my height and my ability to see everything while backing up, because of this I did actually got out of the truck twice to really get a good look at the unloading dock and my position. I did not want to drive off the side of the boat ramp… It took me about 20 minutes with my “coach” to get the boat backed in successfully. Thank goodness that no one was waiting to unload theirs. Once the trailer was in the water, I moved into the boat and backed it off the trailer for the first time. That was much easier than backing in with the truck. Ha!

Later that evening we returned to the cabin and picked up our kids for a family night of fishing. We loaded up our poles and headed out to our favorite fishing spot “turtle bay” (named by my kids because of all the turtles there). I drove into the bay and trolled around a bit unsuccessfully. I gladly handed over the remote to my husband. (I think he had, had enough of coaching me for one night). We got a lot a fish and added them to our freezer in hopes of a fish fry at the  end of summer.