I think I read this story right . . . NYPD got called in for an unruly large group of champagne brunch passengers. Excessive alcohol was involved . . . BEFORE the champagne brunch. What!@#!?
On youtube, there’s a whole series of these CRAZY Boating Fails . . . .
Then there are Darwin Award winners on the water . . . .
But I’m not immune from ignorance: a personal story will demonstrate. When I was about 7 or 8, I really wanted a canoe. My father replaced the aluminum roofing sheets on a barn with asphalt shingles. Seeing the sheets on the scrap pile, I imagined reshaping one as a canoe, filing any holes with tar. I folded one over on itself lengthwise, closed up the ends. It had no sweet lines but to me it was a canoe and time had come to float-test it. I convinced my younger sister to get into it and shoved “canoe” and sister off into the farm pond. I’ll stop the narrative here so that you have time to imagine what could possibly go wrong.
So how about . . . the fishing hole showdowns . . .
Oh . . . and boat ramps can be drama settings.
Let’s reuse this photo from the East River almost a decade ago. Click on the photo to get the post. I recently passed that island . . . U Thant Island, and the fishy leftovers smell from the cormorants was quite overwhelming.
Back to my canoe story . . . The biggest thing that went wrong: I had not considered water pressure. No sooner had my sister gotten into the pond when water pressure closed the sides in on her; I’d not thought to include internal structure to counter the external pressures. My sister went for an unexpected swim and lives to this day to periodically remind me of my failure. She can tell the story to raise the drama factor each time she tells it, and I’ve never designed another boat, although I’ve built a few kayaks.
Below, that’s not me, and I’ll admit some foreshortening is present, but
not where I’d put myself.
All turned out well, but be safe and smart out there.
And to end this post on some hallelujahs, click here for a story about good eats stopping a war. Here’s to sharing our best food!
tugster: a waterblog 
4 comments
Comments feed for this article
August 5, 2019 at 1:41 pm
Anonymous
Besides playing with a frozen dead fox and playing in a “rock band” called the Electric Trees, this ranks right up there with some of my fondest childhood memories! Love you! Joni
August 5, 2019 at 2:32 pm
tugster
Thx, sister!!
August 5, 2019 at 6:04 pm
Jim Gallant
Great story about your brief foray into the world of shipwrights, Will! My own childhood nautical screw-up wasn’t nearly as constructive.
When I was about 11 years old, I’d built a plastic model of a WW2 destroyer, which I’d ballasted internally with lead fishing weights to float her down to a proper and upright displacement. One afternoon when Mom and Dad were out, my buddy Greg and I decided to light it on fire with gasoline, and sink it in my backyard. Our “Leyte Gulf” was an 18-foot above ground swimming pool that used a vinyl plastic liner to hold the water in. We knew gasoline and plastic models don’t mix, so we had to work fast! Well, with one big blurp of gas down the stack, a little more on the decks, and one lit match later, our naval reenactment was put quickly out to sea.
She remained afloat for less than seven seconds.
What had already started as a frighteningly large ball of flame when lit immediately became a rapidly spreading slick of burning gasoline the moment the destroyer sank. The flames actually looked like they would spread to cover the entire surface of the pool! Above us, a wide and quickly towering column of thick black smoke rose into the sky from my backyard, looking almost as if a small plane had crashed behind my house. In near panic, Greg and I desperately ran around the pool trying to keep the flames from catching the pool liner on fire, hoping to extinguish the flames before any of my neighbors called the Fire Department. Once the flames were out, all that was left behind was a coating of black ash on the surface, much more ash suspended beneath the water, and charred and melted plastic all over the pool bottom. Alarmingly, there was also a bright rainbow oil slick covering the entire surface of the pool. We managed to pool scoop out all of the plastic and nearly all of the ash from the pool, but that oil slick just stayed there, laughing at us….
Any ideas about laughing ended as soon as Dad got home. Marching up to me in the Living Room, he demanded: “Jimmy, what is all that oil slick doing in the pool? What the **** did you do? Do you know how it got there?” In a lightning quick flash of “younger brother sneakiness” (and self preservation,) I instantly had my alibi: I don’t know, Dad. Did Joe (my big brother,) use too much sun tan lotion again when he went in the pool?” Moments later, Dad was upstairs turning the air blue over my brother’s suntan lotion use, leaving my poor brother utterly stunned and confused…..
Nearly fifty years later, Joe STILL doesn’t know the truth about that one! Maybe I’ll tell him someday. Maybe…. 🙂
– Jim.
August 5, 2019 at 7:46 pm
tugster
Good one, and thx for the belly laugh!!! If that had turned out differently, you could have had a career in special effects working for George Lucas!!