Motors

There is a great divide between sailors and 'the other people', or motor boat owners. Spend anytime at all on a lake in Quebec and you have to wonder what the joy is all about on the 'other' side. Don't get me wrong, I do understand a good water-ski session and how much fun it is to be pulled behind anything that moves that quickly; the fear and thrill of motor boats is not lost on me. What I don't get is the need to simply go as fast as you can from point A to point B without being able to hear anything but the drone of an obnoxious motor.

If "the other people" had a half a clue about on-water courtesy or seamanship perhaps we could get along quite nicely. And, if I had some experience with decent motors, maybe I'd feel differently about the whole thing. But to now, I don't have that.

When we first bought the Tanzer we had an old Evenrude outboard that was nothing but a constant headache. Mostly, it worked sometimes, until finally the water pump imploded. I volunteered to sink the thing but no luck. Somehow the french navy gets to burn a tank of gas every hour on that lake and sinking a motor becomes environmentally unfriendly. Go figure.

Then we got a Mercury long shaft - and let me tell you how often I heard the term 'long shaft'. There is no prouder moment for a man, I am certain, than being able to refer to his goods as 'long shaft'. Every time we got that damn thing running and propelling a 3,000 pound boat, the success was attributed to 'the long shaft'. As with most things you can call 'long shaft' the thing worked very well, I'll give it that. (You spend 3 summers on the water, 25 hours a week with 3 (dirty) men and something they can call 'long shaft' and you find out what ensues: these are scars a lifetime of therapy couldn't address.)

Onto training week. Evenrude strikes again. I get on this boat, so excited and my heart sinks as I look aft. There's that familiar beige lid. Shit. There is a hole in the gas line, or so we think. And the handy label collar on the throttle that indicates start, shift, faster and slower is no longer affixed in place; it's anyone's guess as to where to hold it. I've somehow been assigned motor duty for the week; Cathy has put her foot down and firmly announced her distaste for dealing with motors. Jenny and Holly look away hoping not to be chosen. Typical me volunteers to conquer the thing.

Conquer I did. By the weeks end my hands and elbows were all cut up and my shoes were full of gas. We'd figured out the fitting was broken beween the gas line and motor itself so it wasn't as simple as a gas line repair. Instead, I had to lean over into the tank compartment and continually prime the pump just right to get enough gas into the motor to have it work without conking out every 5 seconds. And the gas leak ran nicely right into my shoe.

Of course I learned all of this the hard way because that's just how it goes with motors. On Wednesday, I was sweating buckets before the race even started because I'd pulled the cord about 5 million times or so on the way out to the race course, which we didn't even get to on time.

Seque back to Alberta where the guy I crew for here has recently purchased a motor. After having paddled that boat a couple of kilometers (sailboats do not respond like canoes I'll tell ya), this motor was my crazy suggestion. I arrived last night to meet a beautifully restored 4 stroke even equipped with a kill cord so finely tuned one pull leaves her idling nicely.

I had no idea that was even possible. I looked down at my scraped, scratched hands. I can still smell the gas on my sailing shoes. I look forward and see pretty coloured lines running neatly on a clean deck. And I think hey, I fucking love this sport. Everything about my relationship with it is insane.