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Waterwings

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Oct 12, 2007
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Location
Northwest KY. Fairweather angler
Last night around 8:15pm the phone rang and it was our middle daughter's boyfriend calling from Lake Pee Wee. He was out there fishing with a friend of his in a 16' jon boat, and apparently the shear pin on the trolling motor did what it was designed to do, but they don't recall hitting anything. I asked him if the guy had another tm on his rig, and he said no. I then asked him if he had paddles, and he said yes.......one ::) . They were about 500yds from the dock and it was practically dark, but no wind and smooth as glass. He asked me if I could bring my boat out there and tow them in, but I said by the time I got it hooked-up and launced they would be at the dock. The one rule (City Ordnance) at Pee Wee is that you have to be off the water before dark.

I asked him if there were any other boats out there and he said yes there was one other boat out there. I told him to get their attention to render them some assistance. He said okay. I then told my wife that I should drive down there and see how it was going and shine my trsuty old Navy battle lantern for them to see the ramp. Continuing on with the story, by the time I got there and parked my truck, I noticed a 16' canoe (rigged with a tm!) on the ramp, and they were preparing to load the canow and leave. I got out of my truck and one of the guys called me by name. It turned-out that it was two of my former students (graduated 6 yrs ago). 8) . I asked them if they'd mind going out and towing them in, and they said no problem. I then called the guys on the jon boat and told them to use their cell phones to provide a light for the "rescuers" to find them, because it was pitch dark now. That dang canoe got to them pretty quick! I spied them coming into the ramp and the canoers were paddling in conjunction with the tm. They said that dang jon boat was a little bit of work for their tm. Everyone got their rigs loaded, and I spoke with my former students for awhile before going home. I'm bettin' the boat owner buys another paddle and possibly another tm. :)
 
With water like glass they should have been able to skull back to the ramp if need be. Glad everything turned out okay! Know the feeling I got towed by a Kayak awhile back, but the wind was blowing about 25-30mph.
 
You should try sculling an 18' ski boat for 500 yards or a 14' boat with 3 men and a load of decoys for nearly 3/4 of a mile. It can be done, but it's not fun. Trust me on that one. :lol:

I hope that you chastised them thoroughly for being too much of a wuss to paddle 500 yards and attempt to get you to tow them in instead.
 
I think they had a valuable lesson, and they're past being kids. The daughter's boyfriend is 23-24 yrs old, and the owner looked to be around 30 posssibly. If I see the boat (which is not hard to miss, as it's one of the few camo painted rigs around here), the next time I'm out there, I'll see if he's added any extra gear, ie., another tm possibly. I'd have to get in the water to "swim" the boat to shore as a last resort, due to the dang water snakes and larger snappers that are in there. I think I'd break the lid off of a tackle box and use it as an additional paddle first, lol. :)
 
My 25 quit while racing a Thunder storm. I sat on the bow of my 15' Jon and sculled over a mile through the raging Thunder storm. What a trip. It rained so hard I had to run the bilge pump several times to keep the boat from wallowing.

I think you should have left those kids out there, until they learned to be self-sufficient. :evil:
 
I towed a pontoon once with my Smokercraft and a 50hp Johnson, in the middle of a friggin storm. The guy didnt even say thank you or offer to cover some of the spent fuel although I wouldnt have taken the fuel money.
 
cyberflexx said:
I towed a pontoon once with my Smokercraft and a 50hp Johnson, in the middle of a friggin storm. The guy didnt even say thank you or offer to cover some of the spent fuel although I wouldnt have taken the fuel money.

I don't get that at all.... sorry the way some people are these days. When I got towed I offered to buy the guy lunch.. he didn't accept, but he really thanked me for the offer and for setting a good example for my daughter.
 
My worst tow ever was a family on Lake Georgetown in a big ol' deck boat boat; the inboard had quit on him. I was jiggin around some boulders for crappie when I saw him trying to wave down other boats that were speeding by him. I eased over to see what was up and he told me his engine had died and needed a tow. We were about 4 miles from the ramp and I told him I could tow him. He looked at me like I had three heads, I don't think he thought my 12 foot Alumacraft could do it! But she did, @ 4 MPH, all the way back to the ramp! He gave me $30, wouldn't take no for an answer...

The other time I towed someone was out at Granger, when a kayaker was on the bank fishing and somehow fell and broke his arm (and fly rod). He rode in the boat with me and his 16 foot kayak was towed to primitive launch after I flooded an aft compartment to keep it tracking while empty. We loaded his 'yak and gear up and he drove himself to the hospital.

Good times...

I've only needed rescue once, but that's another story.
 
My worst tow ever... and I was the tower.

July 4, 2007.

My wife and I have just finished getting ready and are gathering a few things to load into the SUV for the annual 4th of July family cookout at my in-laws. It is approx. 4:45 pm.

The phone rings. It is my buddy "Wilbur T." (name changed to protect the guilty). He has managed to suck his outboard full of vegetation and burn it up some miles down the lake from the launch, after me warning him that very morning not to take his wife and that particular boat (16 foot jon with a 40 hp motor) too far from the launch on a holiday weekend. KY Lake turns into a madhouse on the 4th with cruiser swells approaching 4'. He is now stranded "somewhere" on the shore of LBL, with a wife going into hysterics (LBL is a big federal wilderness area with few lakeside campgrounds) with a cell phone that is going dead as we speak. He is also at least 40 minutes away from where I am standing right that moment.

To say that I was irritated, would be an understatement... especially after I warned him about this exact scenario in the first place.

I decide to keep my good clothes on, since he will be there to throw the rope to once I find them where I can haul them to the launch and be back to join my family cookout about the time they are cracking open the homemade ice cream. I uncover my ski boat as the only other boat that I had onhand at the moment was my 14' jon with an 18hp and I know that I'm going to be travelling at least 3 to 4 miles on the water to find them, and head out. I launch where they launched and run all the way across the lake to the general area that he described to look down to see the gas hand bouncing on E. Seems I had forgotten to fill the boat back up when we brought it in the last time out :oops: . No way can I continue the search and then tow a boat all the way back on what gas I have. I cut a U turn and run approx. 3 miles back to the nearest marina where I am sexually abused in the act of buying fuel at a marina on the 4th of July. I then return to the search area.. by this time the sun has started sinking in the sky.

Running the shoreline, I see the boat. Fantastic!.... er, wait a minute. Where in the heck are they? I now begin a search pattern up and down the shoreline attempting to locate the two of them because they have obviously taken off walking somewhere, for some reason. Approx. 3/4 mile to the north, there is a campground. I figure that just maybe they had hiked to this campground in search of a useable cell phone.. but I have received no more calls since I left the house. This campground has no launch.. I am wearing nice clothes, I am in a fiberglass boat. I ease the boat into 2' of water with heavy vegetation and pitch the anchor then wade to the campground. Sure enough, they had been there.. and talked the park ranger into driving them back to town! :x The ranger's wife had no clue what her husband's cell # was so that I could commence the *** chewing for the scenario that has thusfar played out. Doing the math in my head, I calculate that they could possibly be at home by now if they started walking as soon as his battery died. I call their house, sure enough.. there they are, eating a couple of Quiznos sandwiches (while my family cookout is in progress and I stand in the middle of LBL looking for them). :x :x What followed was surely against FCC regulations to be broadcast across the cellular airwaves. In not so simple terms, I told them to get their behinds back to that boat launch right then and headed back to my boat to retrieve theirs.

I run back to the site of the beaching to find that he has chosen to beach his boat on a shoreline with 20' of water on it and rocks the size of volleyballs. Did I mention that I was dressed in nice clothes and in a fiberglass boat?... and now the wind has kicked up and is blowing directly onshore? I pitch the anchor and dive in, fully clothed, as by now the sun was already past sunset. His boat doesn't have the first thought of having any sort of light on it. The first thing that I realized was that my anchor was not going to hold and the second was that those rocks were darn sharp on bare feet. I had to make 3 different swimming trips to pull my boat away from the rocks while I was trying to unbeach his and get everything hooked up. When I finally got going, it was twilight and I have a 16' boat trailing 70' back behind me in near darkness for a 4 mile run back to the launch.

I'm fairly certain that his jon boat touched the water at least 3 times between takeoff and the launch as I watched it come down to touch the water once before resuming it's cruising altitude behind my boat at WOT.

When I got to the launch, they had just pulled up and the first firework from the state park down the lake had launched. I cut him off at the first word that came from his mouth and sternly told him to not utter another as I stood there in dripping clothes. His wife quickly agreed.

It was 9:45 when I pulled into the driveway. I am soaking wet, my little girl has already been tucked in, I have some cold leftovers waiting for me, am $50 lighter in the wallet, with a boat that now needs to be wiped down and recovered.

Happy 4th of July.

Wilbur T. has since informed his wife that she had better be prepared for a night of primitive camping should the same scenario ever repeat itself......
 
Good story, Quackr! I honestly think I might have left the other boat where it was beached and rescued it another day after discovering they were nowhere around when you got there and they had gone home. Hopefully he ofered to reimburse you for the gas. You certainly have more patience than I do.
 
He gave me $20, which is all that he had on him after going to Quiznos, I suppose.

I have since taken the rest of it out in trade by regularly raiding his beer stocks and berating him over the ordeal every chance that I get. :mrgreen:
 
LOL...think the boat touched the water 3 times:)
sexually abused getting gas???
I don't know why they would leave the spot/boat??....
anyways glad you made it back...
makes a good read:)
 
Gas at the 10 stations that I passed on the way to the lake was around $2, gas at an isolated KY Lake marina on the 4th was $5 a gallon. :shock:

A little foreplay or a kiss on the cheek after filling up would have been nice, at least.

When his phone died as we were talking, (according to him) he didn't know if he had given me enough detail to find them and had no way to communicate with me after that point. I know that lake like the back of my hand. They both just freaked out being stranded on the side of the lake in swimsuits near dark with no idea of how far away they were from another sign of life. If they had headed south, I would have found them walking the bank because the closest campground in that direction is 5+ miles down the lake. The kicker is that he ran his phone down trying to get the KDFWR or the Coast Guard to assist them. The Coast Guard (headquartered approx. 6 miles away) proved to be impossible to reach as they have no formally listed phone number and the KDFWR informed him that they did not have a unit on the water within 15 miles and they were all occupied, although I followed one of them out of the bay that I launched in. :roll:

I learned that day that you had better hope you have some means of rescuing yourself in a bad spot on KY Lake, because the people that are being paid to do it may be of very little help... if you can even reach them.
 
Quackrstackr said:
He gave me $20, which is all that he had on him after going to Quiznos, I suppose.

I have since taken the rest of it out in trade by regularly raiding his beer stocks and berating him over the ordeal every chance that I get. :mrgreen:

:)


Quackrstackr said:
...I learned that day that you had better hope you have some means of rescuing yourself in a bad spot on KY Lake, because the people that are being paid to do it may be of very little help... if you can even reach them.

That's unsatisfactory that they are unreachable, especially considering how large KY & Barkley lakes are. Makes you wonder if they monitor marine band radios?
 
Waterwings said:
That's unsatisfactory that they are unreachable, especially considering how large KY & Barkley lakes are. Makes you wonder if they monitor marine band radios?

I'm not sure about that. I am sure that probably 95% of the boats on those lakes are not equipped with a marine band radio, though.

The lakes definitely do not have enough patrol personnel for their size, especially on the KY side. I can't even remember the last time that I saw a USCG vessel off of it's moorings since the KDFWR and TWRA took up sole lake patrol duties. KDFWR lake patrol is comprised of CO's that they transfer from across the state to the lake for one to two weeks at a time. When you consider that the entire state averages less than one CO per county and how many other lakes there are in the state that also require patrol, there's not a whole lot of patrolling going on.
 
Waterwings said:
When I owned the Tracker and used to launch from Kuttawa, I considered getting a marine radio, but apparently it wouldn't have done me any good, so I guess I saved some $$.

I was moreso talking about 95%+ of the pleasure boaters don't have radios. The ranger at the campground didn't either, for that matter.
 

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