Illustration by S. Kirchman
One Summer day we were sitting around at Ted’s house near the Chesapeake Bay. One of us, I forget who, had a brilliant idea. We should take Ted’s dad’s boat out on the bay. It would make for a wonderful outing!
There was a small problem though. The boat sat covered on a trailer in the driveway. We didn’t have a vehicle with a trailer hitch. In fact, I think I was the only one of us that had a vehicle at all — a 1965 VW micro bus! (think Alice’s Restaurant here).
Of course, the mighty microbus had no hitch — but we were a group of American high school students in the 1960s — we read Popular Mechanics, we shot rifles, we played in the woods. We were smart, we figured it out.
I wrapped a thick piece of cloth around the back bumper of the microbus. Ted was good with rope, so we rigged the trailer tongue to the back bumper with some knots he knew. Looked good, but would it work?
We carefully planned our route to the boat launching ramp through back streets and alleys. We crawled along at a respectable 5 miles per hour, backed the trailer down the boat ramp successfully, and launched the boat!!!
Now we were off on our adventure.
We decided to cross the bay. It was a beautiful day for boating. What could go wrong? The afternoon was warm and storm clouds started mounting up as we were well across the bay. Fine, we’d just turn for port.
The Sea of Galilee has nothing on the Chesapeake Bay when it comes to birthing sudden storms. We were still way out when it hit. Thunder, waves, rain! Believe me, none of us was asleep in the stern!
“Head it into the waves!” I remember shouting as we brought her around to face the angry waters of the bay. We rose and fell with some severity. We all realized “this thing could kill us!”
We held course into the waves. Gradually the sea calmed and we made our way home. We tied the boat at Ted’s dad’s dock and walked back to the boat launching area.
We crept back with the trailer and left it where we had found it — minus the boat. We removed our makeshift trailer connection and hid the evidence, leaving it to Ted to explain to his father how the boat got in the water.
Hopefully all statutes of limitations have passed. It is nice to be older and wiser now, and thank the Divine for preserving our skins! But we were younger then. For a while after that, we would occasionally talk about the adventure — always ending by exclaiming, “We pulled it off without a hitch!”